T he High Line is an abandoned 1.5-mile stretch of
overgrownrailroad viaduct that runs from the Meatpacking district
toHell's Kitchen and straight into the imaginations of a grow-ing
number of New Yorkers who see it as proof that, even in an
urbanjungle, the forces of nature are still at work."(1)
The explicit coup by Field Operations in winning its secondmajor
urban design competition within the span of four years in NewYork
City (the firm also won the Fresh Kills Landfill to Landscape
End-Use Master Plan Competition) underscores several points all at
onceregarding the present-day prospects for new urban
landscape.
First and foremost is the paucity of uncontam-inated open space
in the contemporary city fornew parks, while at the same time urban
brown-fields continue to come up for redevelopment. Inthe case of
the High Line (an ageing elevated railbed spanning 22 blocks and
running just west ofTenth Avenue, from 34th Street, south to
Gan-sevoort Street), the coordinates for contextualiz-ing such a
project are quite literally off the map inthe sense that this
stretch of concrete and steelruns as much through irreal as well as
real terri-tory.
Passing through the heart of Chelsea's fashionable arts
district,and situated in a portion of Manhattan that still retains
an urbanindustrial edginess, the High Line is unnaturally given to
acts ofdesign provocation. The four finalist master plan teams
(selectedfrom 52 entries) represent various aspects of the
professional colo-nization of a fashionable and somewhat profitable
sub-genre withinurban design - that is, the re-appropriation of
spent infrastructure.The composition of each team, incorporating an
array of technicaland creative sub-consultants, suggests that the
significance of theHigh Line lies as much in its incommensurate,
cinematic qualities (astrip of urban "celluloid') as in its
normative iconic status as decayingurban infrastructure.
It is not surprising, then, to find in several of the schemes a
ver-sion of montage utilized (as in the films of Eisenstein (or
Greenaway)to register multiple frames of reference and multiple
narratives. The
Weak design is oftenthe result of design bycommittee, or
abdicationon the part of the partyultimately responsiblefor making
sense of theconflicting claims ofvested interests...
Holl- and Hadid-led teams, in particular, indulge in
laceratingimagery, fusing time and space through iconic intensity -
i.e.. a typeof architectural gesturalism that implies through
snapshots a criti-cally-inflected assault on present-day urbanism.
Yet the winningField Operations proposal is significantly different
than the Hadidor Holl plans, as it is miles from the TerraGRAM
plan. The Terra-GRAM plan, while citing Archigram and Robert
Smithson as spiritualforebears, makes little headway in actual
program and much noiseabout open-ended planning with unfortunate
swipes at formalism('form obsession'). It is the rhetoric of the
team that tells the greater
tale insofar as the principal excuses for temporizing(e.g.,
deferring to future processes, inclusive of publiccharrettes)
represent what is past versus what isupon us. Weak design is often
the result of design bycommittee, or abdication on the part of the
partyultimately responsible for making sense of the con-flicting
claims of vested interests ('shareholders') andthe abstract
'public'.Whereas the four High Line teams have, in
severalinstances, identical sub-consultants - part and par-cel of
the game today in assembling the large inter-disciplinary teams
required - it is the distinct
differences between the lead players that mark this competition
as asignal event on the horizon of contemporary urban design. As
aresult, the High Line represents a type of suture between the
recentpast and the near future, both in terms of design and
process. Eversince the Pare de la Villette competition (Paris,
1982-1983), the archi-tectonic 'anti-nature' of new urban parks has
generally foregroundedan anti-pastoral, anti-picturesque anima -
notwithstanding theMau/Koolhaas stab at pastoral scenography for
Pare Downsview Park,Toronto. (2)
While nature may be fashionable again, today, it
remainsnonetheless chained to the prison-house wall. Past
representations ofthis mixed legacy, this proverbial tug-of-war
between nature and cul-ture (now typically dismissed as a useless
dialectical exercise), includethe innumerable waterfront
redevelopment schemes of the 1980s and1990s, at which Hargreaves
and Van Valkenburgh Associates
-
Field Operations and DillerScofidio + Renfro withOlafur
Eliasson, PietOudolf, and Biiro Happold
OPPOSITE PAGE
tvent perspectiveABOVE
GrasslandsfIGHT AND BELOW
Partial competition boardindicating various options fordifferent
sections of theline
PIT0% : 100%
PLAINS40% : 60%
BRIDGE50% : 50%
MOUND55% : 45%
RAMP60% : 40%
FLYOVER100% : 10%
iTfffflTT
ULL MEADOW WtTLANDAlt*
WOODLAND TWCKET MIXED PERtWUL MEADOW YOUHG WOODLAND
12 COMPETITIONS Winter 2004/2005
14
excelled. Thus, even though both firms are tobe found here, we
also are fortunate to findZaha Hadid and Steven Holl in commandof
two of the four High Line competitionteams. Their presence more
than proves thepoint that multiple agendas are at stake: 1/formally
addressing the aforementioned issueof diminishing returns in public
open spaceplanning; 2/ the necessity of highly interdis-ciplinary
teams to tackle the unresolvedstandoff between so-called formal
(active)and informal (passive) urban park design; 3/countering the
lead role played by economicdeterminism in urban design; 4/
bypassingthe entirely ludicrous arguments regardingnature versus
the city; and 5/ overcoming the1990s fetishization of crumbling
infrastruc-ture as a type of sublime surplus 'after mod-ernism' and
after Robert Smithson.(3)
If proposals to bury the High Line or theBrighton West Pier in
surreal and simulatednatural systems are in fact signs of
some-thing else dawning in the imaginativelabyrinth of urban design
(perhaps a tilttoward ?purposeless beauty?), such projectsmay also
indicate that it is again acceptablefor an urban park (naturalistic
or otherwise)to do virtually nothing much at all.
The Hadid-led team is exemplary in itsapproach to re-envisioning
such 'useless'form; indeed, it might be accused of 'formobsession.'
Yet it is this very obsession thatmakes the plan compelling. It is
Hadid's openthinking (thinking the complex, versus think-ing the
reduction or the reaction) that isresponsible for her ascendancy
this pastdecade, and it accounts for the seductivefolds, twists,
and interweavings of the team'sproposal. As in most of the plans
presented,Hadid et alia envision the terminus of the lineat
Gansevoort Street as a type of elevatedPiccadilly Circus or event
space. Hadid hasretained the essence of the radical construc-tivist
and supremacist quest for evocativeform while adding the
topological inversions(twists and turns) that have recently
dis-placed purely orthogonal, architectonic sys-tems in instances
where architecturebecomes site.
The presence of Olafur Eliasson on theField Operations/Oilier
Scofido + Renfroteam is a sign that in compiling its proposalField
Operations looked straight into thelooking-glass of present-day
installation artfor inspiration and talent. Eliasson's
'WeatherProject' at the Tate Modern drew recordcrowds in 2003-2004
with its simulation of asun shining through an artificial haze
withinthe great void of the Turbine Hall.(4) What isafoot today,
inclusive of topological andmorphogenetic extravagance (as was on
dis-play in the architecture section at the 2004Venice Biennale),
is a powerful re-animationof all the forces bracketed by the
abstract
COMPETITIONS Winter 2004/2005
and functionalist bias of reductive architec-tural high
modernism. Field Operations has,therefore, 'arrived' in the sense
that theyacknowledge that the now past, 1990s neo-modernist
fantasies regarding urban land-scape as synonymous with
infrastructure (orjunkspace) are no longer quite good enough.And,
as Fresh Kills proves, urban ecology is asmuch a spectral thing as
it is a scientificundertaking.
Brownfields are by naturehorrific sites given to thespecular,
form-haunted ges-tures of art + landscape +archi tecture, a
new-foundhybrid sensibility that doesnot merely fetishize
dysfunc-tional and decaying urbansystems but also cr i t ica l
lyengages what is wrong, whathas gone wrong, and why itwent wrong
in the first place.Within the Field Operations plan, urban
sim-ulations or unnatural passages quite literallyflow through the
1.45 miles of the elevatedviaduct, each portion mutating in
relation orcontradistinction to what is above, below oralongside
the rail bed. The transformationalgrammar of the compositional
'field' em-braces a form of urban ecology that is asmuch an artform
as a science, wherein theirreal returns.
This return, presently well underway inthe fine arts as an
affective, post-metaphysi-cal Sublime, is now making inroads in
land-scape + architecture, or in the increasinglysignificant
instances where landscape and
It is Hadid's openthinking (thinkingthe complex, versusthinking
the reduc-tion or the reaction)that is responsible forher
ascendance thispast decade.
Finalist
Zaha Hadid Archi-tects with BalmoriAssociates, Skid-more, Owings
ftMerrill LLP, andstudio MDA
LEFT
Passageway to rampOPPOSITE, ABOVE
rampOPPOSITE MIDDLEperspectiveOPPOSITE, BELOW
birdseye view of ter-minal point
architecture overlap and merge. Reloadingtranscendence in
immanence is the newgame.
Steven Holl's phenomenologically-informed investigations of
architectural miseen scene (e.g., Kiasma, Helsinki, 1998, w/Juhani
Pallasmaa) and his poetic turns into'parallax' and 'intertwining'
(the topological-phenomenal intervals between things) has
led, in turn, to a rich panoplyof projects that embrace eyeand
mind, body and spirit,earth and sky. Here, where helooks out his
office windoweveryday to see an actuallyexisting metaphor for all
ofthat, he has also found anactually existing site for
hisexperiments in form to takewing. The chief concern forthe Holl
team seems to be topuncture, perforate and oth-
erwise accentuate what moves above, belowand through the High
Line corridor. Whilemany vignettes within the four proposals dojust
this, Holl's plan is essentially theatricaland closer to
Matta-Clark's legacy of slicinginto things than the TerraGRAM plan
is,despite claims otherwise, to the phantas-matic and apocalyptic
'ruins' ironicized andromanticized by Robert Smithson.
While Field Operations has managed tofold into its purview the
manifold contin-gencies that come to reside in urban
'fields'without converting such things of 'purpose-less beauty' to
mere datascapes or informa-tion flows - two slightly derelict
strategies
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