James Corner Field Operations

Contents

1. The firm and its founder
2. The variable
3. The High Line: the structure is the park
4. How the High Line opened
5. Domino Park: the fragments are the park
6. The comparison scored
7. What the firm carries forward

James Corner Field Operations is the landscape architect of Mercedes-Benz Places Miami, which Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group is developing with SHoP Architects in collaboration with ODP as architect, and Field Operations is one of the designers JDS has worked with over the years. The firm is best known for two parks in New York built on the bones of industry: the High Line in Chelsea and Domino Park in Williamsburg. This entry compares them on a single variable, the one that most shapes each place: how much of the old industrial fabric the design chose to keep, and what it did with it.

The firm and its founder

James Corner runs the practice as chief executive. In an interview with Attractions Management, he argued that a landscape means far more than gardens and hedges; it is how a society gives form to land and cities and how people come to identify with places. He called landscape architects the unsung heroes of the public realm. The same piece lists work from Navy Pier in Chicago to South Park at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, the central waterfront in Seattle, and The Underline, a ten mile linear park beneath the elevated Metrorail tracks in Miami.²

The variable

Every reuse of an industrial site has to decide what stays. A designer can clear the ground and plant it, keep a few objects as souvenirs, or treat the old structure as the park itself. The High Line and Domino Park sit at two different points on that scale, and comparing them shows the range of the firm’s thinking.

The High Line: the structure is the park

The High Line began in 1934 as a freight viaduct that carried meat and milk to warehouses on the West Side, according to Architectural Record’s walk along it with its designers. Joshua David and Robert Hammond, two neighbors of the line, founded Friends of the High Line to save it, and in 2004 Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro were chosen to turn it into an elevated park.¹ NPR covered the groundbreaking in 2006, describing a line running 22 blocks and hovering about three stories over the sidewalk, its rails overgrown with wild grasses.³

The designers’ instinct was restraint. Ricardo Scofidio told Record they kept protecting the High Line from architecture, and Corner spoke of keeping the singular, postindustrial character of the place. Corner described the park as a continuous carpet in which hard and soft surfaces run into each other, with plantings chosen by Piet Oudolf to echo the wild growth captured in Joel Sternfeld’s photographs of the derelict line.¹

Figure

Paving, planting and phased openings on the High Line

1. 01
   FoundAn abandoned elevated rail line where wild plants had taken root.
2. 02
   PavePrecast concrete planks with open joints so grasses can come up between them.
3. 03
   PlantPaving and planting blended in gradients from all hard to all soft.
4. 04
   OpenThe first section opened in 2009.
5. 05
   ExtendFurther phases followed in 2011, 2014 and 2019.

How the High Line opened

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s project page describes the paving: precast concrete planks with open joints, their tapered ends combing into planting beds so that a visitor can wander without a fixed path. The park opened in sections, in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2019.⁷ When the second section opened, The Guardian reported the park’s first lawn, a raised walkway called the Falcone flyover above landscaped hillocks, and some 210 species of trees, shrubs and grasses chosen for hardiness and local relevance.⁸

On the variable, the High Line keeps nearly everything. The viaduct, its steel and its route are the park; the design adds a surface and a planting plan.

Domino Park: the fragments are the park

Domino Park takes the other path. The sugar refinery on the Williamsburg shore dated to 1856 and closed in 2004, and ArchDaily’s project record calls it the last major industrial operation on that stretch of the East River.⁵ The five acre park, opened in 2018, was the first phase of redeveloping the eleven acre site, and AIA New York names SHoP Architects with Vishaan Chakrabarti for the master plan.⁶

Here the factory buildings were not the park. Instead, the ASLA New York award citation explains, the design gathered more than 30 large salvaged pieces into an Artifact Walk: 21 original columns from the Raw Sugar Warehouse holding up an elevated walkway, gantry cranes 80 feet tall, screw conveyors, mooring bollards and syrup tanks.⁴ The materials follow the same logic, with weathered, galvanized and stainless steel, concrete and wood reclaimed from the factory. River Street was extended through the site so the park reads as part of the city grid rather than a private lawn, and the ground was raised above federal flood elevations, with native plants and nearly 175 trees to absorb storm water.⁴

Figure

Domino Park by the numbers

of park along the East River

5 acres

salvaged pieces of refinery machinery and structure

30+

columns kept from the Raw Sugar Warehouse

21

programmable jets in the central fountain.

88

The comparison scored

On the single variable, the two parks mark opposite ends. The High Line keeps the whole structure and asks visitors to walk on it; the old railway is the experience. Domino Park keeps pieces and sets them among new lawns, fountains and play areas; the old refinery is present as a set of objects to walk past. Both are acts of keeping, at different scales.

The difference follows the sites. A viaduct 30 feet in the air cannot be cleared without losing the reason anyone goes there. A waterfront lot that neighbors had been cut off from for generations needed open ground, and the award citation says the park reconnected Williamsburg to the river for the first time in 160 years.⁴

What the firm carries forward

Corner’s own account of the discipline helps explain both results. Landscape, he told Attractions Management, is where city and nature, the small and the large, and imagination and fact meet.² Seen that way, the question of what to keep is never only about history. It is about what a public space needs in order to feel like it belongs to the place it sits in.