Maintaining wilderness
Hilary Sample
Joel Sternfeld’s melancholy photographs of the abandoned High Line, the disused elevated railway track that runs for 20 blocks along the West Side, from the meatpacking district up through Chelsea, capture the irony of a wilderness blooming in New York City. The calm collision of nature and culture is reminiscent of Agnes Denes’s 1982 project in Battery Park City, Wheatfield — A Confrontation, where she planted a two-acre empty lot with wheat.
In an exhibition at MoMA on the history and imminent redevelopment of the High Line, the site emerges as one of the most provocative spaces in the city, on the brink of shedding its elusiveness. It’s the tension between preserving the ruggedness and opening it up that the winning entry, a collaboration between Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Olafur Eliasson, Piet Oudolf, and Buro Happold, deals with so sensitively and intelligently.
The High Line will be a new urban typology. Unlike the oft-compared Paris Plantee, complete with picturesque trellises and gazebos, the High Line will retain its original derelict charm: the original tracks, and much of the wild overgrown vegetation around them will be integrated with user-friendly access points, rest areas, and various safety measures. The interplay between the already-there and the architectural interventions has been categorized as program, access, plantings and planks. The architecture consists of moving glass platforms and slow stairs to transport pedestrians from the street below to the fluid environment above. Concrete planks, like sleepers, define a series of paths through the wild areas. The High Line’s thriving eco-system is not lost but exploited through the addition of marshy wetlands, lawns, meadows, lily pad ponds and flowering fields. The paths embedded between the natural growths oscillate from narrow to wide and open up to seating areas and balconies for gazing at the city, and for glimpses of the river. The project’s restraint and its limited components leaves any complexity to the growth of its eco-system. Its elegance comes from being attuned to environmental affects rather than promulgating architectural ones.
The exhibition features an architectural model that nearly fills the length of the space and enables viewers to grasp the relationship between the landscape and the old railway. Large digital perspective collages along with descriptive drawings map each construction area. A looping video animates the experience, leaving little to the imagination. It’s clear that this will be a space unlike any other in any city. The first phase of construction begins early next year.
