Who determines the future of the past? Ruins and the image of decay by gquah

who determines the future of the past? by grace quah ht10: ruins and the image of decay supervisor: paul dobraszczyk m.arch architecture yr 4 bartlett school of architecture 2015-16

word count: 4215

cover page captions from top image one: West 16th Street, 1950s, image by Ed Doyle image two: Looking North from 26th Street, November 2000, image by Joel Sternfeld ÂŠ Friends of the High Line image three: Benches, November 2015, image by Grace Quah this page image four: Looking South on a May Evening (the Starrett-Lehigh Building), May 2000, image by Joel Sternfeld ÂŠ Friends of the High Line

contents one two three four

five six seven

introduction

background

unknowable territory

curating nature

obsolescence and sustainability

conclusion

sources

introduction

May 21 2001

Tucked away, in the thick of the constant buzz of the city and mirroring the endless drone of the subway tunnels, a meadow of wild flowers - made up of onion grass, peach trees and grape hyacinths floats peacefully along an abandoned railway track elevated two stories above the city of New York.

Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus, wreckage - the ruin aesthetic has captured our imagination for centuries but the High Line in particular is an excellent example of today’s ruin - as a remnant of our recent industrial past and social history. Over a 14-month period, photographer and ‘poet keeper’1 Joel Sternfeld captured the ‘melancholy beauty’2 of the self-seeded garden that had formed over 20 years creating a derelict landscape hidden in plain sight.

The photographic documentation of the slow disintegration of this rail line through ecology has been critical in its adaptation of architectural form through and despite time. This text aims to amble through a history of the High Line from the 1840s to the present day, to explore the intersecting elements of urban nature and past and present, in preserving the qualities of this unique landscape.

image five: High Line New York by Joel Sternfeld, image © Friends of the High Line

Adam Gopnik, A Walk on the High Line / The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring pp.47-52, published

in the New Yorker May 21, 2001, p. 45 2

Alan Tate, Great City Parks, London, Spon Press: 2001 p.37

background

The High Line was originally built in the 1930s as part of a network of elevated train lines, which made up the industrial fabric of Manhattan’s West Side, transporting freight to factories and warehouses located in the city.3 Previously the lines ran at street level, where trains were notoriously well known for causing collisions with pedestrians. The result of this was the 2-storey elevation of the line from the street known as the West Side Improvement Project. This created an infrastructure that instead intersected with the upper floors of Manhattan’s West Side to deliver goods directly to factories and warehouses, leading to the expression ‘High Line’. Meat was transported to the meatpacking district and baking goods to the Nabisco biscuit factories (currently today’s Chelsea Market) amongst others.

The line was fully operational between 1934-1960 after which the track was gradually decommissioned and goods were transported into the city via the growing network of highways.4 The last freight train ran in 1980. The railroad was mostly demolished during the 1960s except the mile and a half long stretch that is today’s High Line Park.5 The High Line never carried any passengers, but it made a major architectural impact on the surrounding factories and warehouses of which it served.

The High Line lay abandoned and in ‘legal limbo’ until the year 2000 when the newly created, non- profit organisation Friends of the High Line commissioned Joel Sternfeld to take photographs of the line in its derelict and overgrown state. Sternfeld’s images were instrumental in gaining public support to retain the structure, at a time when the owners CSX Transportation and the then New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wished to tear down the structure, which they saw as obstruction to development.

Website High Line History narrated by Ethan Hawke [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1tVsezifw4]

accessed 26 December 2015

Alan Tate, Great City Parks, London, Spon Press: 2001 p.35

image six: West Side Cowboy riding north on 10th Avenue, image courtesy Kalmbach Publishing Co.

In the aftermath of the destruction caused by 9/11, a strong publicity campaign against a wholesale demolition of the High Line was spearheaded by the grassroots organisation and was supported by the incoming Mayor Bloomberg in 2002. The Bloomberg administration implemented various planning initiatives, which convinced landowners near the site of the viability of repurposing the structure. A design competition launched by the Friends of the High Line drew further attention to the campaign. It selected the team of architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and garden designer Piet Oudolf to design a conversion scheme that would reference the enigmatic beauty of the High Line in ruin. The construction of the High Line project was divided up into three separate phases, the first of which was started in 2006 and finished in 2009. The final result was the completion of part three in 2014, which integrated with the area of Hudson Yards at the north end of the line.

image seven: Looking South at 27th Street, September 2000, image by Joel Sternfeld ÂŠ Friends of the High Line

one

unknowable territory

The practice of urban exploration is extremely relevant to the analysis of Joel Sternfeld’s photographs, as it examines the aesthetics of decaying structures through photography and embodied experience. Urban exploration can be described as ‘an activity intimately connected with places that have largely reached the end of their capitalist use-life’.6 This is the exploration of usually abandoned ruins or hidden components of the man-made environment where ‘present tangibly intersects with the past’.7 Indeed, the definition of the word ruin itself suggests something that traverses the past and the present at the same time - the ruin as object and as the act of disintegration.

The practice of urban exploring can be likened to Sternfeld’s experience of the High Line in 2000. In the piece for the New York Times by American commentator Adam Gopnik, The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in

Spring, the reader learns that Sternfeld would ‘lug an immense eight by ten camera up to the tracks, pull it under fences and through sidings’8 to take photographs of the desolate rail line, much like an urban explorer might break into an abandoned building. Throughout the 26 year period of the neglected site, access to the High Line was difficult as it was located around 30 feet above street level and, as seen from Sternfeld’s photographs, was completely barren and uninhabited.

Sternfeld’s experience of the defunct landscape is also similar to urban exploration in the way that the photographs captured his personal experience of the site in time but also that his presence did not interrupt the continuing of decay on the site but welcomed it. In the following quote from Gopnik’s interview with Sternfeld, the photographer stumbles on a piece of urban debris, which he leaves untouched:

Bradley L Garrett, ‘Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration’, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space (2011), Vol 29, p. 1048 7

Bradley L Garrett, ‘Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration’, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space (2011), Vol 29, p. 1052 8

Adam Gopnik, A Walk on the High Line / The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring pp.47-52, published

in the New Yorker May 21, 2001, p. 45

image eight: Looking South from 33rd Street, Fog Lifting, November 2000, image by Joel Sternfeld ÂŠ Friends of the High Line

‘“You know what I’m seeing!” he says suddenly, excited. “It’s that beer bottle! It’s prominent in a shot I took last fall - and it hasn’t moved!” He walks over and, without picking it up or disturbing it, gently gazes down at the clear-glass bottle and shakes his head- amazed, like Proust, at the strange persistence of beauty in the face of time.’9

Furthermore, Sternfeld took photographs of the High Line over a 14 month period in which he captured the ecology of the site changing over the seasons, in the same way that an urban explorer might revisit a site multiple times. ‘This is what spring in New York actually looks like when ‘A landscape is a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of

it’s left up to Spring’.10 Urban explorer and social and cultural geographer Bradley L Garrett notes in his essay, ‘Assaying history’ that ‘exploring ruins

nature. As Eliade expresses it,

reveals a different temporal pace and scale...a meaning to be discovered and

it represents man taking upon

rediscovered’.11 This emphasises the relationship between ruination and

himself the role of time.’ JB Jackson

nostalgia, qualities that characterise both the practice of urban exploration and Sternfeld’s images of the High Line. Both show a desire for the recent past. ‘I just pray that, if they save the High Line, they’ll save some of the virgin parts, so that people can have this kind of hallucinatory experience of nature in the city.’12

Sternfeld documents the melancholic decay of the ruin by emphasising its transcendent character and the mysteriousness of exploring the unknowable. In many of the photographs, natural foliage takes up a majority of the frame, in capturing nature against its urban setting. This draws the viewer into the photograph and makes them feel as if they are there. This is intensified by the fading fog in the background of the image, suggesting the gradual uncovering of the structure. Many of the

Adam Gopnik, A Walk on the High Line / The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring pp.47-52, published

in the New Yorker May 21, 2001, p. 46 10

Adam Gopnik, A Walk on the High Line / The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring pp.47-52, published

in the New Yorker May 21, 2001, p. 45 11

Bradley L Garrett, ‘Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration’, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space (2011), Vol 29, p. 1065 12

Adam Gopnik, A Walk on the High Line / The Allure of a Derelict Railroad Track in Spring pp.47-52, published

in the New Yorker May 21, 2001, p. 45

image nine:Track Crossing/Snow, January 2001, image by Joel Sternfeld © Friends of the High Line

shots are centred, with the rail line acting as a path through the city and the photograph - an invitation to go for a walk. Plants such as Queen Anne’s Lace, ailanthus trees and irises are positioned in the foreground of the frame at different times of the year, many species of which were incorporated into the repurposed park.

Whilst Sternfeld and the practice of urban exploration focus on nostalgia through ruination and a revisiting of the past through sensory perception, John R Stilgoe writes of the High Line in a literary style that emphasises the purely imaginative, making a fine distinction between nostalgic ruination and the purely romantic.

Published alongside Sternfeld’s photographs in Walking the Highline, Stilgoe’s essay Steganography Photographed, comments on the appealing qualities of the uncultivated landscape. Stilgoe, who is Orchard professor in the history of landscape at Harvard University asks, ‘does forbidden

wilderness beckon more strongly than the local park?’13 His text centres on the theme of discovery through different periods in time but interprets Sternfeld’s images with the idealised and cryptic. Stilgoe goes onto say, ‘photographs of what shimmer here? What grimoire harbours the right word?’14 using words that purposely suggest something magical hidden in nature. This is supported in The High Line and Other Myths by writer Aleksandr Bierig who describes the ‘aura’ of its[The High Line’s] formerly vegetated condition’.15 Stilgoe’s text is imbued with the notion of fantasy, referencing the ruin as an imaginative fragment and hinting at it’s capacity to revitalise and reinvent architecture and the built environment.

American writer Susan Sontag has written extensively on the relationship between preservation and photography. She discusses the primacy of the photograph and the importance of the photographer in ‘teaching us a new visual code…altering and enlarging our notions of what is worth looking at’.16 She also emphasises the role that the photographer has to play in documenting disappearing places and most commonly, speeding up their disappearance. She cites French architect, theorist and prolific advocate for the conservation of historic buildings, Viollet-Le-Duc. ‘In as early as 1842…[Le-Duc] commissioned a series of daguerreotypes (the first publicly announced photographic process) of Notre Dame before beginning his restoration of the cathedral’.17 Hence, from the birth of the first photographic images, taking photographs has been able to act as a transformative tool for the architectural imagination as opposed to simply acting as a medium for dissemination of finished buildings that it is more commonly associated with today. Paul Virilio in his essay entitled

A Topographical Amnesia, speaks about the relationship between the structure of our memory and the structure of the world, saying that this 13

John Stilgoe, ‘Steganography Photographed’ in Joel Sternfeld, Walking the Highline with essays by Adam Gopnik

and John Stilgoe (Gottingen, Steidl, 2012) pp.31 14

John Stilgoe, ‘Steganography Photographed’ in Joel Sternfeld, Walking the Highline with essays by Adam Gopnik

and John Stilgoe (Gottingen, Steidl, 2012) pp.31

Aleksandr Bierig, “The High Line and Other Myths”, Log magazine (Winter 2010), p. 133

Sontag, Susan. On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977) p. 3

Sontag, Susan. On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977) p. 76

image ten :Looking West on 30th Street on a September evening 2000, image by Joel Sternfeld ÂŠ Friends of the High Line

has been destroyed by the proliferation of manufactured images that do not require our imaginations.18 Sternfeldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images are highly subjective, open to interpretation (and therefore imagination) as opposed to digitally rendered CGIs that would realistically visualise the future use of the High Line (although these were introduced later in the design stages). Therefore the medium of photography was not only appropriate but instrumental in conceiving a transformative architectural response to the ruined High Line.

Topographic Memory by Bruce Lindsey in Re-Envisioning Landscape Architecture, ed Catherine Spellman

(Actar, Barcelona 2003), p. 42

image eleven:Benches, November 2015, image by Grace Quah

two

curating nature

The discussion of the New York High Line throughout its history demands an exploration of the city-nature dialectic. Sternfeld’s dream-like, perspectival shots show a contrast between dereliction and ecology: the experience of treading through knee high blades of grass and foliage against the urban debris and rich urban setting of Manhattan.

Mike Davis in Dead Cities states that the ability of a city’s physical structure to organise and encode a stable social order depends on its capacity to master and manipulate nature.19 The High Line is a strong example of what Davis calls ‘underlying urban nature’ and it is plausible that if human impact on the environment was removed, this would be an example of the gradual reclamation of land to its original ecology.

The 26-year human abandonment of the interstitial site led to a period in which plants self-seeded from the coming and going of freight from outside of the city. The scattering of these seeds was controlled by the nuances of sunny, windswept or shady conditions cast by the shadows of the rail line’s rich urban surroundings. Surveying the vegetation in 2003, botanist Richard Stalter recorded 161 different species - eighty two that were native and seventy nine that were introduced, including grape hyacinths, peach trees and Queen Anne’s Lace.20 The naturally occurring ecology was described as a ‘raw beauty’ and an ‘incredible wildscape’,21 by the founders of the Friends of the High Line, a characteristic that they looked to preserve in the conversion of the structure into a landscaped public park:

‘Our job is to defend the High Line from architecture’, said Ricardo Scofidio, architect and co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. ‘A lot of people think it’s this big architectural statement. It was really pulling-back from architecture.’22

image twelve & thirteen: High Line New York, July 2015 and November 2015, images by Grace Quah

Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales, (New York Press, New York, 2002) p. 362

Alan Tate, Great City Parks, London, Spon Press: 2001 p.37

Website Friends of the High Line [http://www.thehighline.org/blog/2015/08/19/photo-of-the-week-walking-

the-high-line-with-joel-sternfeld] accessed 26 December 2015 22

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in conversation with Brett Steel http://www.aaschool.ac.uk//VIDEO/lecture.

Aleksandr Biergig in Log magazine’s article The High Line and Other Myths contrasts a building’s tendency to remain static to the nebulous landscape: ‘the possibilities of nature’s inherent recombinant and mutational largesse…shifting, slowing at points, thriving and/or drying up’.23 As a piece of landscape design, the High Line imitates nature’s ever-changing and transitional qualities. Strips of concrete paving grow out of the walkway to form park benches whilst perennials and silver birches line the edges of the oscillating walkway. Shrubs are nestled into planting bed borders Long-distance marvels hover, draw the eye, fix the attention. Close up, in the grass, under the snow, lurk the stubby solidity of permanent structure and the detritus of temporary abandonment. John Stilgoe, ‘Steganography Photographed’

made from corten steel and appear to spring from the remains of former rail tracks. Today, the park is a well-tended, curated landscape with a need for intense maintenance. The elevated public park plays on notions of the spatial intersection of the urban with the ecological, in the merging of the industrial and the wild.

The way in which the High Line public park plays on the memory of the authentic ruin is deeply nostalgic and can be likened to the ‘mock ruins’ of the eighteenth century English Landscape garden. A style of landscape garden that emerged in England during the early 1700s, usually included lakes and rolling lawns but particularly included recreations of classical temples and gothic ruins, designed to simulate an idyllic rural landscape. English landscape gardens during the Gothic Revival period often contained follies, or mock ruins,24 artificially recreating the memory of the ‘authentic’ dissolved monasteries of the 16th century, which were ‘spatially and temporally removed places’.25 These acted as a kind of romanticism that tied the structures politically or historically to the past but did not fulfil any functional requirements. Instead, today’s High Line public park is an example of where the modern day ruin has become a tool for landscape

php?ID=3270 [accessed 28 December 2015] 23

Aleksandr Bierig, ‘The High Line and Other Myths’, Log magazine (Winter 2010), p. 131

The folly and the temple: Nostalgia practices in the eighteenth century English landscape garden by Elise Nuding

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/undergrad/prizes/Nuding2009.pdf [accessed 28 December 2015] pp.3 25

The folly and the temple: Nostalgia practices in the eighteenth century English landscape garden by Elise Nuding

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/undergrad/prizes/Nuding2009.pdf [accessed 28 December 2015] pp.3

image fourteen: View looking South of the High Line with Whitney Museum in background, November 2015 images by Grace Quah

design, characterised by nostalgia, sentimental recollection and recreation of past landscapes. The park was one of the top 10 instagrammed places in the world in 2013,26 making it a 21st century example of ruins entering popular taste.

Friends of the High Line http://www.thehighline.org/blog/2015/08/19/photo-of-the-week-walking-the-high-

line-with-joel-sternfeld [accessed 28 December 2015]

three

obsolescence and sustainability

Contemporary architectural journalist Owen Hatherly considers the elevated linear park as a recent paradigm for urban-rural infrastructure.27 Elevated redundant railways such as these have a unique character, detached but urban and historic preservation amid constant flux. This newly invented linear landscape seems to make the street and the skyline new again and given that these structures were not ever used by people, have created a new way of experiencing the city, free from the worry of passing vehicles and traffic. The successful conversion of New York’s High Line has influenced many other cities across the world to attempt to imitate its financial success by converting their defunct elevated train lines into urban public spaces, leading to the term ‘Highline Effect’.28 However, Architect Liz Diller remarks that the High Line cannot truly be reproduced.29 Indeed the project’s uniqueness lies in its approach to maintain elements that make the city unique rather than a tabula rasa strategy.

One US city that has adopted the High Line model is Chicago. The city’s elevated Bloomingdale trail or 606 (the first three digits of a Chicago post code begin with 606) came about by the ‘formation of a Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail organisation prompted by the City of Chicago’30 and owned and maintained by the City Chicago Park District, The Trust for Public Land and local residents. In contrast, born out of a resident-driven, bottom-up approach New York’s High Line park is one example of the increasing trend of privatised (Friends of the High Line raises 98% of the High Line’s annual budget31) public spaces within the city.

Owen Hatherly AJ, dec 2014 http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/opinion/theres-no-wonder-every-city-wants-a-

high-line/8673546.fullarticle 28

Owen Hatherly AJ, dec 2014 http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/opinion/theres-no-wonder-every-city-wants-a-

high-line/8673546.fullarticle 29

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in conversation with Brett Steele, AA Lecture, 27.11.2015 http://www.aaschool.

ac.uk//VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3270

Chicago 606 http://www.the606.org/about/the-story/ [accessed 1 January 2015]

Friends of the High Line, [http://www.thehighline.org,] accessed 19 December 2015

image fifteen: View looking West of the 606, Chicago, November 2015, image by Grace Quah

Led by well-known American landscape architecture firm Michael de Valkenburg Associates (recognised for their work on the Teardrop Park and Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City), the 606 is embedded in a residential community and is functionally committed to cyclists, runners and dog-walkers. However the 606 does not seem to reference the existing cultural identities of the area or the memory of its previous industrial inhabitation. Instead, attempts to ground the repurposed project in its context manifest in the form of branding (the blue stripes along the trail reference the colours of Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s municipal flag). Apart from the fact that the activities that one can partake in are centred on local needs, the 606 in its recent rebirth, is a sterile and alien urban landscape and a poor imitation of New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High Line, which has the advantage of playing off of the unceasing everyday and juxtaposed urban context of Manhattan.

image sixteen: Cyclist on the 606, Chicago, November 2015 image by Grace Quah

conclusion

The High Line New York is a palimpsest of its two former lives and therefore is prime example of how ruins are valuable in assessing the culture of the built environment. Acting as a catalyst for revitalising architectural imagination, the ‘death’ of the High Line - the ruin - has demonstrated a unique and adaptive capacity to revitalise and reinvent architecture for contemporary use.

In a bid to give a new use-life to abandoned sites such as the High Line, we must consider the difficulties that arise in our mediation between preservation and development - the dichotomy between ‘radical change and radical stasis that is our future’.32 Documenting decay within the urban environment is crucial in reassessing the cultural value of land within the city. It can, if developed sensitively and with a strong awareness of context and identity, build physically and metaphorically on the richness of the site’s history in its future occupation.

Rem Koolhaas of OMA tackles the subject of preservation through an exhibition entitled Cronocaos, first shown at the 2010 architecture biennale in Venice, as a diatribe against ‘aged cities that are repackaged for tourists’.33 Where the typical method of preservation centres on pure simulation or the entire rebuilding of ancient structures, absolved of its historic distinctions, Koolhaas states that the practice’s core aim of preserving should be to negotiate between both the old and the new in an active and engaging manner, siding with neither ‘ruin’ nor ‘restoration’ but establishing a new architectural configuration altogether.’34

Rem Koolhaas, “Cronocaos”, Log magazine, No. 21 (Winter 2011), p. 119

Nicolai Ouroussoff, An Architect’s Fear that Preservation Distorts, online article for the New York times http://

www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/arts/design/cronocaos-by-rem-koolhaas-at-the-new-museum.html?_r=0 [accessed 2 January 2016] 34

“Rem Koolhaas / OMA: CRONOCAOS preservation tour, part four” published on Designboom http://www.

designboom.com/architecture/rem-koolhaas-oma-cronocaos-preservation-tour-part-four/ [accessed 2 January 2016]

image seventeen: View looking North from Chelsea market, New York, November 2015 images by Grace Quah

The High Line has indeed created a new hybrid configuration of urban ecology. It was not a restored ruin, fiercely protected by preservationists but instead was ‘saved’ through an active campaign and a desire to maintain the unregulated decay in its future use. It can be argued that we need a more culturally aware approach to preserving the everyday, particularly in preserving post-industrial sites within the built environment. We must be more sensitive to the recent working man’s history so as to avoid sterile contemporary insertions - cleansed of their historical meaning. In the space of 35 years, the High Line has experienced an extended period of urban neglect to becoming the ‘most expensive park to maintain in the city of New York’.35 The High Line must now consider how to keep the preserved sustainable until in time, we decide again on what to give up, what to erase and what to abandon.

Alan Tate, Great City Parks, London, Spon Press: 2001 p.45

sources images

•

image one: West 16th Street, 1950s, image by Ed Doyle

•

image six: West Side Cowboy riding north on 10th Avenue, image courtesy Kalmbach Publishing Co.

images by Joel Sternfeld •

image two: Looking North from 26th Street, November 2000 image © Friends of the High Line

•

images by Grace Quah •

image three/eleven:Benches, November 2015

•

image twelve: High Line New York, July 2015

•

image thirteen: High Line New York, November 2015

•

image fourteen: View looking South of the High Line with Whitney Museum in background, November 2015

•

image fifteen: View looking West of the 606, Chicago, November 2015

•

image sixteen: Cyclist on the 606, Chicago, November 2015

•

image seventeen: View looking North from Chelsea market, New York, November 2015

•

Bierig, Aleksandr, ‘The High Line and Other Myths’, Log magazine (Winter 2010), pp.129-134

•

Broder, Jonathan M, ‘Descontructing New York City’s High Line Park: The How, Why and

books

Wherefore’Journal of Transportation Law, Logistics and Policy, Vol 79, issue 3, (2012) pp.245-252 •

Garrett, Bradley L, ‘Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2011), Vol 29, pp.1048-1067

•

Koolhaas, Rem, ‘Cronocaos’, Log magazine, No. 21 (Winter 2011), pp. 119-123

•

Nuding, Elise, ‘The folly and the temple: Nostalgia practices in the eighteenth century English landscape garden’, [https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/undergrad/ prizes/Nuding2009.pdf] accessed 28 December 2015

•

Ouroussoff, Nicolai, ‘An Architect’s Fear that Preservation Distorts’, online article for the New York times, 24 May 2011, [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/arts/design/cronocaos-byrem-koolhaas-at-the-new-museum.html?_r=0] accessed 2 January 2016

journals •

Bierig, Aleksandr, ‘The High Line and Other Myths’, Log magazine (Winter 2010), pp.129-134

•

Broder, Jonathan M, ‘Descontructing New York City’s High Line Park: The How, Why and Wherefore’Journal of Transportation Law, Logistics and Policy, Vol 79, issue 3, (2012) pp.245-252

•

Garrett, Bradley L, ‘Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2011), Vol 29, pp.1048-1067

•

Koolhaas, Rem, ‘Cronocaos’, Log magazine, No. 21 (Winter 2011), pp. 119-123

•

websites •

Friends of the High Line, [http://www.thehighline.org,] accessed 19 December 2015

•

High Line History documentary narrated by Ethan Hawke, YouTube, uploaded 30 May 2008 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1tVsezifw4] accessed 26 December 2015

•

Definition of Urban Exploration, Wikipedia, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_ exploration] accessed 26 December 2015

•

Hatherly, Owen, ‘There’s no wonder every city wants a High Line’, published in the Architects Journal online, 8 December 2014 [http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/opinion/theres-nowonder-every-city-wants-a-high-line/8673546.fullarticle] accessed 3 January 2016

•

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in conversation with Brett Steele, Lecture at the Architectural Association, 27 November 2015 http://www.aaschool.ac.uk//VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3270

•

Erika Naginski, Harvard Graduate Design School Lecture: The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea /Spring 2016, [http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/ academics/courses/his-04420-00-spring-2016.html] accessed 28 December 2015

•

Rem Koolhaas / OMA: CRONOCAOS preservation tour, part four, published 8 September 2010, Designboom [http://www.designboom.com/architecture/rem-koolhaas-omacronocaos-preservation-tour-part-four/] accessed 2 January 2016