"Did you go see the High Line?" Liz and I, wide-eyed, chorused - demanded - Ming, fellow architect and urban design enthusiast. Our faces fell when Ming indicated the negative.
I'm dreaming of my next trip to New York. I dreamily let jagged and dead-straight lines take me up and down Manhattan's brand new floating linear park, the High Line. If it can be called a park. It's a disused elevated rail line. It's a runway. It's a tourist destination. It's a vista point. It's an incubator for creative energies and kick-ass high-profile youth art classes. It's some sort of symbol of grassroots idealism materialized decades - and tons of argumentative breath - later.
Every time I visit, the city's grime, blare, and in-your-face energy scrape me raw, then wrap me up in a coat of adrenaline. I get high. The mad rush of train-takers and taxi-wavers push me through the day no matter my literal and figurative baggage. Granted, I don't have to live it 365 days a year and this is probably a romanticized, visitor's view of New York. The visitor's privileged view.
The visitor's privilege will also have me wander the halls of the natural history museum and space center. I really wanted to go but did not get to the last time, Sep 2007.
This month's Landscape Architecture magazine then served on a silver platter another reason to go, the new West Harlem riverfront park, 2.4 acres of green along the Hudson River, where "geometric shapes and tilted lawns are in dynamic tension with one another."
I'm inspired by this urban participatory policy project with street vendors. I think I've just found my new hero, Candy Chang. What awesome projects!
And I will leave you with this lovely installment of Maira Kalman's NY Times "And the Pursuit of Happiness.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment