On Friday, the City announced the four finalist teams for the High Line, the rail-line cum elevated-park-to-be in Chelsea. The serious wattage of the names involved?each team includes an architect, a landscape architect, and other related firms?gives a hint that this won't be your everyday urban redesign:
1) Field Operations, landscape architects (folks with the crazy landscape schematic); Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, architects (team behind the new Lincoln Center and the fanciful East River waterfront); Olafur Eliasson, artist ("The Weather Project"); Piet Oudolf, horticulture (founder of "new wave planting"); Halie Light & L?Observatoire International, lighting.
2) Zaha Hadid Architects, architects (2004 Pritzker Prize winners); Balmori Associates, landscape architects ("Long Island Green City"); Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Marilyn Jordan Taylor), architects; studio MDA (Markus Dochantschi), architects.
3) Steven Holl Architects, architects; Hargreaves Associates, landscape design (Candlestick Point Cultural Park); HNTB, technical design (Boston's Zakim Bridge).
4) TerraGRAM: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, landscape architects; D.I.R.T. Studio (Julie Bargmann), industrial site design; Beyer Blinder Belle (Neil Kittredge), urban design.
The teams' schemes won't be revealed until July. (Meantime, check out the winners from the Friends of the High Line's "Designing the High Line" competition.) And, like Liebskind's World Trade Center plan, they represent only a master plan, not a final design. Still, very exciting developments.
· Four Finalist Teams Selected for Master Plan [Friends of High Line]
· Designing the High Line Competition [Friends of High Line]