Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

flights up extending for 22 city blocks from hip Gansevoort
Street in the Meat Packing District, through the Chelsea art
gallery area, to the garment district and Convention Center in
midtown. Field Operations won this commission with Diller
Scofidio + Renfro Architects whose principal, Rick Scofidio,
says: ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I see my job here as
saving the High Line from architecture.’ Corner also believes
that his job is to maintain its tough industrial character and
the stark, almost-surreal landscape of wild meadow grasses,
wildflowers, weeds and gravel, while adding cultivated
gardens with vividly coloured fields and birch trees as well as
recreational facilities, such as a swimming pool and food
halls. While some of the old railroad tracks and ties will be
removed, others will be restored to recall the High Line’s past.
A new, flexible, modular system of concrete planks will be
installed in parallel bands to create pedestrian walkways of
different widths that meander back and forth, accommodating
gardens and other things along the way and ‘peeling up’ to
form an amphitheatre in one area and seating in others. At the
southern end, a grand staircase and elevators will lead up to
the High Line and a new museum for the Whitney Museum,
which has decided to build its addition by Renzo Piano here
instead of on the Upper East Side. The $84.25 million in city
and federal funds already allocated is only the starting point,
but there is so much interest from developers who see the
High Line as a catalyst for new housing, hotels and other
commercial ventures that its raw industrial character may be
hard to maintain. Already Frank Gehry’s IAC Building straddles
the High Line at 18th Street.
Balmori is working on an even stranger site in Long Island
City, Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan – one
that is already fully developed. She is creating gardens (or at
least plantings) on top of small industrial buildings that are
still used for industry. She began her work there when Gratz
Industries, a manufacturer of metal furniture including Mies
chairs, became interested in a small experimental green roof
she had done for Earthpledge, an ecological organisation in
Manhattan, and she is continuing because the area contains
the largest collection in the city of small industrial, flat-roofed
‘pancake buildings’ – enough of them that she will be able to
Balmori Associates, Green Roofs, Long Island City, Queens, New York, 2002–25
By covering the roofs of the large plate, flat-roofed ‘pancake’ buildings in the Long Island City area across the East
River from Manhattan, Diana Balmori expects to reduce temperatures, filter the air, maximise carbon dioxide, clean rain
water, delay its entrance to sewers after storms, and absorb 90 per cent of the solar energy. The programme also calls
for ‘greening’ the acres of railyards in the area.
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