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

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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%

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WOODLAND TWCKET MIXED PERtWUL MEADOW YOUHG WOODLAND

12 COMPETITIONS Winter 2004/2005

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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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