High Line Blog

This remains my favorite proposal for the reuse of the High Line - a mile long lap pool. Nathalie Rinne, an architecture student in Vienna submitted the plan and as part of our 2003 Ideas Competition.

Yesterday, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussof used Tishman Speyer's winning rail yards bid as an example of a problematic trend in urban development. He explains that misleading renderings are designed (or censored) to prevent public objection, so projects can slip easily through the public review process. Tishman Speyer, or course, is only one example of this, but when the MTA's announcement was made, Ouroussoff noticed,

This afternoon, sixty 8th-grade art students from the Lab School for Collaborative Studies donned tall, blocky shoes made of green chalk and scuffed West along the streets of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, drawing chalk lines with their feet that ended at three future access points to the High Line.

The choreographed performance was Chalk Shoes to the High Line, a project we created with performance artist Julia Mandle, as part of our ongoing education program with the Lab School. (Today's walk was the culmination of a unit on performance art, which we certainly never learned about in middle school!)

Hopefully you caught the performance on the street today or saw the bold green chalk lines it left behind.  If not, you can check out an exhibition of the chalk shoes, as well as photos and video of the performance, at the Leo Kesting Gallery starting May 15.

More photos after the jump.