The Highline Competition

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The Highline Competition

Submission for Arch 384: Competitions Essay Component

Chris Hardwicke

#86054687

August 22, 2005

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Building Type: Elevated Park

Materials: Wood Deck, Earth, Gardens, Steel, Glass

Precedents:

Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama Terminal

Field Operations: Fresh Kills Lifescape

MVRDV Dutch Pavilion, Expo 2000 Hanover, Germany

Designing The Highline was a competition to design a1.5 mile

(2.41 kilometres) park on top of a disused elevated rail structure

in New York City. The High Line was built in the 1930’s in

Chelsea and the Meat Packing district on Manhattan’s West

Side as part of one of New York City's largest investments in

transportation infrastructure, called the West Side Improvement

Project. The highline went out of service over 20 years ago and

has since been overrun with nature to become a lush urban

wilderness, nearly seven acres in total. A group called the

Friends of the Highline organized the competition with the idea

of saving the elevated structure for a public park. The

competition entry entitled “Surge” was awarded a citation by the

jurors, exhibited in Grand Central Station and published in a

pamphlet entitled “Designing the High Line”.

Surge was based on the idea of saving and enhancing the

existing micro-ecosystem that had evolved on the deck of the

highline by making a second deck above the ecosystem to host

the linear park. The second deck was an undulating wooden

structure that wove along the highline connecting existing

buildings at their floor plates with new connections and Surge. Surge. Surge. Surge.

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amenities. The undulating deck was punctuated by islands of

ecosystem that were continuously connected underneath the

deck. Programming for the scheme was based on an analysis

of the existing neighbourhood based on 6 categories that were

used to create themed linkages across the highline and back

into the neighbourhood. The cultural cross-fertilization was

essential to keeping the elevated park active and urban. Finally

the proposal envisioned a typology of adjacent building

renovation and reuse to urbanize the edge of the highline at the

second level.

As the existing High Line structure is a unique place to propose

a public park direct precedents were difficult to identify.

Research discovered only a few elevated linear parks none of

which were designed in any formal way. None of those linear

parks was remotely as long or extensive as the High Line.

Another unique factor of the highline was its mid block location

which created back yard frontage along its length.

The three precedents that influenced the Surge proposal come

from different typologies. Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama

Terminal was influential in the choice of an undulating topology.

Field Operations’ Fresh Kills Lifescape influenced the

ecosystem design and MVRDV’s Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000

in Hanover was a good precedent for stacked landscape forms.

Foreign Office Architects won a design competition in 1995 for

The Yokohama International Port Terminal. Two central

concepts define the FOA scheme. The circulation was based

on a topological landscape connecting desire lines on different

levels of the terminal. Supporting this undulating topology is an Surge. Surge. Surge. Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama Terminal

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innovative structural framework that uses a series of

interlocking steel plates that are formed and joined in ways that

permit a more natural internal flow of people and freight instead

of using conventional horizontal and vertical support beams.

This non-orthogonal framing design integrates the building's

use with its structure and appearance. The appearance of the

steel plate structure is unified with hand-rail, glazing systems

and most importantly a continuous wood-deck flooring system.

The wood deck system is the principal organizing feature of this

artificial landscape and connects differentiated spaces along

the length of the terminal.1

The most striking images of the terminal are the roofscape

which is a public space that connects to the open space system

of the Yokohama waterfront and offers amenity acts as a focal

point and belvedere. The structure pulls the observer out onto

its surface more like a bridge or highway than a building. This

landscape frustrates any further architectural comparisons

because it is difficult to define a primary façade or identity

beyond the topological surface.2

Surge – a proposal for the High Line draws reference from the

Yokohama Terminal scheme. The use of an undulating

wooden deck unifies the linear park and allows for subtle level

changes between existing floorplates and connections. The

topological surface inflects the hyper-rational railway bed and

creates and artificial nature more akin to a typical park. The

structural system for the wooden deck is similar to the FOA

scheme in its modularity but is comprised of a much lighter

truss system as it relies on the heavy structure of the original

railway bed. FOA: Yokohama Terminal FOA: Yokohama Terminal FOA: Yokohama Terminal "The architecture is nothing more than a point of passage, an instrument of change of velocity between modes of transportation o r aspects of nature.& …… 此处隐藏：9559字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……