Deconstructing The High Line

Download or read book Deconstructing the High Line written by Christoph Lindner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The High Line, an innovative promenade created on a disused elevated railway in Manhattan, is one of the world’s most iconic new urban landmarks. Since the opening of its first section in 2009, this unique greenway has exceeded all expectations in terms of attracting visitors, investment, and property development to Manhattan’s West Side. Frequently celebrated as a monument to community-led activism, adaptive re-use of urban infrastructure, and innovative ecological design, the High Line is being used as a model for numerous urban redevelopment plans proliferating worldwide. Deconstructing the High Line is the first book to analyze the High Line from multiple perspectives, critically assessing its aesthetic, economic, ecological, symbolic, and social impacts. Including several essays by planners and architects directly involved in the High Line’s design, this volume also brings together a diverse range of scholars from the fields of urban studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Together, they offer insights into the project’s remarkable success, while also giving serious consideration to the critical charge that the High Line is “Disney World on the Hudson,” a project that has merely greened, sanitized, and gentrified an urban neighborhood while displacing longstanding residents and businesses. Deconstructing the High Line is not just for New Yorkers, but for anyone interested in larger issues of public space, neoliberal redevelopment, creative design practice, and urban renewal.

Download or read book High Line written by Joshua David and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How two New Yorkers led the transformation of a derelict elevated railway into a grand--and beloved--open space The High Line, a new park atop an ele-vated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one: two young citizens with no prior experience in planning and development collaborated with their neighbors, elected officials, artists, local business owners, and leaders of burgeoning movements in horticulture and landscape architecture to create a park celebrated worldwide as a model for creatively designed, socially vibrant, ecologically sound public space. Joshua David and Robert Hammond met in 1999 at a community board meeting to consider the fate of the High Line. Built in the 1930s, it carried freight trains to the West Side when the area was defined by factories and warehouses. But when trains were replaced by truck transport, the High Line became obsolete. By century's end it was a rusty, forbidding ruin. Plants grew between the tracks, giving it a wild and striking beauty. David and Hammond loved the ruin and saw in it an opportunity to create a new way to experience their city. Over ten years, they did so. In this candid and inspiring book-- lavishly illustrated--they tell how they relied on skill, luck, and good timing: a crucial court ruling, an inspiring design contest, the enthusiasm of Mayor Bloomberg, the concern for urban planning issues following 9/11. Now the High Line--a half-mile expanse of plants, paths, staircases, and framed vistas--runs through a transformed West Side and reminds us that extraordinary things are possible when creative people work together for the common good.

Download or read book Gardens of the High Line written by Piet Oudolf and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “If you can't get to the High Line. . . this is the next best thing.” —The Washington Post Before it was restored, the High Line was an untouched, abandoned landscape overgrown with wildflowers. Today it’s a central plaza, a cultural center, a walkway, and a green retreat in a bustling city that is free for all to enjoy. This beautiful, dynamic garden was designed by Piet Oudolf, one of the world’s most extraordinary garden designers. Gardens of the High Line, by Piet Oudolf and Rick Darke, offers an in-depth view into the planting designs, plant palette, and maintenance of this landmark achievement. It reveals a four-season garden that is filled with native and exotic plants, drought-tol­erant perennials, and grasses that thrive and spread. It also offers inspiration and advice on recreating its iconic, naturalistic style. Featuring stunning photographs by Rick Darke and an introduction by Robert Hammond, the founder of the Friends of the High Line, this large-trim, photo-driven book is a must-have gem of nature of design.

Download or read book Deconstructing Dignity written by Scott Cutler Shershow and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate. Shershow examines texts from Cicero’s De Officiis to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society—one whose conditions we are far from meeting—in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.

Download or read book On the High Line written by Annik LaFarge and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive, up-to-date, and acclaimed guide to the High Line by the leading expert on the history of the park—now in a fully revised edition Built atop a former freight railroad, the “park in the sky” is regularly cited as one of the premiere examples of adaptive reuse and quickly became one of New York’s most popular destinations, attracting more than 8 million visitors a year. This updated Third Edition of On the High Line— published to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of the park’s opening—remains the definitive guide to the park that transformed an entire neighborhood and became an inspiration to cities around the globe. In short entries organized by roughly two city block sections, the guide provides rich details about everything in view on both sides of the park. Illustrated with more than 110 black & white photographs, it covers historic and modern architecture; plants and horticulture; and important industries and technological innovations that developed in the neighborhoods the park traverses, from book publishing and food distribution to the introduction of cold storage and the development of radar, the elevator, and talking movies. Updated to include newly opened sections of the park, this edition also features a new conversation pertaining to the more controversial side of the High Line’s story and how it became a poster child for the most grievous manifestations of gentrification and inequity in public spaces. Author Annik LaFarge provides a frank discussion on how the park’s leadership created a platform for discussing these issues and for advising other projects on how to work more inclusively and from a social justice and equity perspective. On the High Line serves as an educated travel companion, someone invisibly perched on a visitor’s shoulder who can answer every question, including what was here before, moving back in time through the early 20th century, the Industrial Revolution, and the colonial and pre-European times when this stretch of what we call Manhattan was home to the Lenape people and much of it was covered by the waters of the Hudson River. A companion website with more than 650 photos—historic, contemporary, rooftop and aerial—can be viewed at HighLineBook.com.

Download or read book Exquisite Materials written by Abigail Joseph and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

Download or read book Detroit Disassembled written by Philip Levine and published by Grafiche Damiani. This book was released on 2010 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visual tribute to the degradation of Detroit in the wake of the American auto industry's decline reveals regional dignity and tragedy as reflected in scenes ranging from windowless grand hotels and barren factory floors to collapsing churches and prairie-grass covered blocks.