The High Line is one of today’s hottest topics in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning, and beyond. Formerly an abandoned raised rail line running through Manhattan, it was recently converted into a public park. It is described as “a mile-and-a-half-long recycling project” on the www.thehighline.org (Friends of the High Line).
Personally, the High Line has been important for me this semester, being not only the topic of this research project, but also the site of my current architecture studio’s design project, as well as the subject of the work I have been doing for my CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design) class. As such, I will be employing the CAAD model of the Gansevoort Street entrance of the High Line (the southernmost portion of the project) that I created in MicroStation as the base for various graphic diagrams I have created to supplement this project. (*Note: though the base diagram is of a specific part of the High Line park, stairs included, it is meant to generally represent the High Line structure past and present.)
What interests me about the High Line in relation to what we have been discussing all semester in Systems, Sites and Building is the unique plant growth on its upper surface, which has come to define the structure in the popular imagination as a sort of wild oasis in the city. The history of this landscape is described in the book High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky:
“The last train ran on the High Line in 1980… With the end of train traffic, a self-seeded landscape began to grow among the gravel ballast and steel rails atop the out-of-use structure. Grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs took root and slowly took over the High Line.” (David 147)
Just to clarify, by “self-seeded,” what is meant is seeded without the intervention of humankind: “The last train ran in 1980, and the High Line, less than 50 years old, went silent. Seeds, dropped by trains, birds, and breezes, grew in the gravel ballast” (Field Operations 26). This discovered landscape was a completely self-regulating and sustainable ecosystem.
SELF SEEDED LANDSCAPE DIAGRAM (my own diagram: image of train from http://www.thehighline.org; High Line rendering from my CAAD project)
(On a side note, here is the digital model of the High Line in PDF format – you can move it around and explore the structure a bit! Just make sure to change it from “Solid” model render mode to “Solid Outline” or another mode that actually allows you to see the model! The High Line – MicroStation Model)
Today, through the design and creation of the public park, a very different sort of plant growth exists atop the structure. Designed by the team of James Corner Field Operations (Project Lead), Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and planting designer Piet Oudolf, (Friends of the High Line) the landscape is now highly-regulated and no longer self-sustaining.
The High Line as a public park is widely praised for its landscape design and reuse of the existing structure, but I would argue that this praise comes from an implicit comparison between the park that has been created, and the demolition of the entire structure. I would argue that a more critical evaluation of the High Line is important and even necessary for the progress of sustainable design. A comparison between the current design, and the proposed High Line design by the runner-up team TerraGRAM: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates with D.I.R.T. Studio and Beyer Blinder Belle (Friends of the High Line) will be made as part of my more critical evaluation. I feel quite lucky to have Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio as a direct resources for this research project: she is an Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture department of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture.
I posit that despite the best intentions and claims of sustainable design, the ecosystem of the High Line today is no longer a sustainable system as seen through the lens of the principles of our Systems class.
As we learned from our class reading “Chapter 5: Modeling Cities on Ecosystems,” from Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings’s Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems: Principles and Practices, “Bossel (1998) puts forward a definition of sustainability based on systems thinking. He defines any self-organizing system as sustainable or viable if all the system characteristics… are in a satisfactory state… Drawing on Bossel’s work, sustainable ecosystems can be characterized as ecosystems that are:
- Healthy (effective) [“Ecosystems sustain themselves effectively and remain healthy by capturing and storing sufficient energy and matter to fulfill the needs of all the biotic participants.”]
- Zero waste
- Self-regulating
- Resilient and self-renewing
- Flexible” (Newman 95)
The winning design team did, indeed, put a great deal of emphasis on flexibility, which can be seen in their statement: “Providing flexibility and responsiveness to the changing needs, opportunities and desires of the dynamic context, our proposal is designed to remain perpetually unfinished, sustaining emergent growth and change over time” (Friends of the High line). However, this is just one component that goes into a sustainable system.
Although the design plans for the landscape to become somewhat more self-regulating over time (Field Operations 34-35), it is now very high-maintenance:
“The maintenance staff… is based on the spur, but the crew spends the day going back and forth to various parts of the park, adding up to as much as five miles of walking per day… Each staff member has an assigned area of the park, but the duties for each section are similar. The High Line curates its plant choices carefully, but weeds still find their way in – from birds, the wind, or even neighboring rooftops and gardens – so much of the staff’s work involves weeding. Then there’s monitoring the park’s irrigation system, which is centrally controlled but dispenses water to different parts of the park…” (Polsky)
A plant list for Section 1 of the High Line (courtesy of http://www.thehighline.org)
There is great irony and perhaps tragedy in the fact that those “weeds,” the removal of which depletes so much energy and resources, are likely the plants that had originally self-seeded the landscape via birds and wind.
The energy that went into replanting the High Line was enormous: the removal of “rails, ties, and gravel ballast,” (Field Operations, 146), then “the park environment, including… planting-bed infrastructure, and plants, was put into place” (David 192), as well as the reinstallation of many original railroad tracks, and tapered concrete planks (David 196). The planting-bed infrastructure is actually rather elaborate: on top of the base prep (which is, from bottom to top layer, existing concrete tub, primer, hot rubberized asphalt, polyester fabric, hot rubberized asphalt, again, and asphalt protect board) is additional prep for planting: (from bottom to top) root blocker, drainage mat, filter fabric, growing medium and, finally, vegetation (Field Operations 126).
HIGH LINE ENERGY CONSUMPTION (my own diagram)
WHAT WAS REMOVED (my own diagram: image of tracks from Designing the High Line; my own CAAD rendering)
(Image from Designing the High Line)
There is a great deal of energy embodied in this removal/installation process, and the claim is made that it was necessary:
“Retaining the existing, self-sown landscape was considered, but after much investigation, the design team, the City of New York, and Friends of the High Line concluded that it had to be removed – to properly assess the High Line’s structural and maintenance needs, and to responsibly prepare the underlying structure for the creation of a park that will last decades into the future.” (Field Operations 146)
However, one wonders if the elaborate planting-bed infrastructure is actually necessary, or just necessary for the intended design plan: after all, the original plants of the High Line landscape did not need anything but the existing rail structure.
This leads me to the vital difference between Field Operations and TerraGRAM: the latter’s desire to stay as close as possible to the wild, self-seeded, self-regulating and ultimately sustainable landscape that was already existing on the High Line. When I spoke to Bargmann, she told me about two specific issues that found the Field Operations design overlooked. One was genotype: the idea that the plants that grew on top of the High Line were unique, and specially adapted to survival in that landscape; this might imply that replacing those plants with different plants, even of the same species, will not be able to replicate the landscape. The other issue concerns the ballast that was removed: the original ballast came from foreign countries, and some plants that grew many have come from seeds mixed in with that ballast; thus, this urban landscape may not have relied so heavily on exclusively native plant species.
(Image from D.I.R.T. Studio website)
Bargmann also gave me a quote by ecologist Steven Handel: “The High Line is a garden, not an ecology.” This bespeaks what seems to be the underlying mentality of the Field Operations, et al., design, and that which prevents it from being a fully-sustainable ecosystem: its attempt to produce a great deal of specific effects, whether or not the pre-existing landscape called for them, much like a garden. This is also a fundamental different between the winning design and the TerraGRAM design: the former’s attempt to design natural process, as opposed to the latter’s intention to work with those processes.
The following quote by Joshua David, a cofounder of Friends of the High Line, suggests an alarmingly unsustainable way of thinking about the current “manicured garden” landscape of the High Line:
“…the idealized vision had been achieved. Our crew had been over every inch of the High Line with tweezers and polish. The glass and steel sparkled, and the planted beds were fluffed to look impeccably wild… I found it hard to imagine that anything could be more beautiful than then empty, pristine High Line that night before we opened – it was a perfect thing.” (David 122)
The team took something that was wild, and put a great deal of energy and resources into making it “look impeccably wild.”
In conclusion, I want to qualify my tone throughout this research project by a couple of statements:
- I fully support the preservation and repurposing of the High Line; I just believe that it is necessary to look at everything critically, and I feel that there has been an overwhelming lack of mainstream criticism of the design.
- I admit to perhaps being biased towards the TerraGRAM design because of my affiliation with UVa and Julie Bargmann. However, I strongly believe in their sustainable approach to the design of the High Line.
The results of my research into the ecology and ecosystem of the current High Line design tells me that it is not as sustainable as the design team’s marketing statements make it sound, while the unrealized TerraGRAM design proposal may have better addressed issues of sustainability. It is my hope that the findings of my research may have a positive impact on the sustainability of future projects that have been directly influenced by the High Line, and that perhaps the High Line might evolve, as the winning design team gave it room to do, into something closer to the way it was, to the way that influential High Line photographer Joel Sternfeld saw it:
“He would not just like the High Line to be saved and made into a promenade; he would like the promenade as it exists now to be perpetuated, a piece of New York as it really is. Where many of the High Line’s supporters see it as potential… he sees it as a thing already accomplished, and wants to keep it more or less as it is… “Central Park,” he [said…], “is really cosmetic in many ways. This is a true time landscape, a railroad ruin. The abandoned place where seasonality resides. These little shoots – see this! This is the real look of spring. Central Park is a construct in so many ways. A beautiful construct, but made for an effect. This” – he gestured around the old track bed – “is what spring in New York actually looks like when it’s left up to Spring.” Spring in New York looks like this: low grasses and weeds abound at shoe-top level and tawny grasses are folded over on each other, like winter wheat. The onion grass gives an acid smell if you get down close, and clover lends a sweetness. Knee-high plants that look like tarragon grow in neat rows…” (Sternfeld 48-49)
(Image: Joel Sternfeld, May 2000)
BIBLIOGRAPHY/RESOURCES
David, Joshua and Robert Hammond. High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print.
Design Trust for Public Space, with Friends of the High Line. Reclaiming the High Line. New York: Design Trust for Public Space, Inc., 2002. Print.
D.I.R.T. Studio. Web. 8 November 2011.
Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Friends of the High Line, and the City of New York. Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street. New York: Friends of the High Line, 2008. Print.
Friends of the High Line. The High Line: The official Web site of the High Line and Friends of the High Line. City of New York under the Department of Parks & Recreation, in partnership with Friends of the High Line, 2000-2010. Web. 8 November 2011.
Bargmann, Julie. Personal interview.
Newman, Peter and Isabella Jennings. Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems: Principles and Practices. Island Press, 2008. Print.
Polsky, Sara. “Behind the Scenes: The Secret Paths of the High Line.” Curbed NY, 23 June 2011. Web. 8 November 2011.
Sternfeld, Joel with essays by Adam Gopnik and John Stilgoe. Walking the High Line. New York: Steidl, Pace/MacGill Gallery, 2001. Print.
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