Manhattan’s ‘highline’ project is a bad idea

Posted by | April 27, 2005 | architecture | No Comments

Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan’s highline, which were unveiled at Monday’s opening at MOMA.

Manhattan’s highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park.

It’s a terrible idea.

Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern.
The problem is that linear parks don