Walking in the City: Highline Park and the Empire State Building

I approached my first destination, Highline Park, with a bias realized from Rem Koolhaas’ novel, Delirious New York. Throughout this book, Koolhaas provides examples exhaustively, trying to document “the symbolic relationship between its [Manhattan] mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise”. Koolhaas gives the example of among others, Coney Island; an amusement park born of the culture and attitude of its neighborhood. The fate of the architecture of the park equally interlocked with its neighborhood: “the need for pleasure dominates…step up production of pleasure generates its own instruments.”

Because of this plethora of evidence for Koolhaas’ argument that individual architectural objects were permutations of their surrounding neighborhood, I did not even pause to consider anything to the contrary. However, as I traversed Highline Park, I found that this park was independent and even contradictory of its surrounding. The first contradiction I found was number of people on the Highline versus the lack of people on the streets of Manhattan.

At face value, this fact seems inconsequential, but it led me to realize that Koolhaas’ argument had some rather fundamental flaws. He did not realize that each structure, whether it was the Highline Park or Carnegie Hall, had its own individuality that represented itself in its architecture and attraction to people.

Armed with this realization, I began to look for contradictions between the architecture of Highline and that of the surrounding buildings. It did not take long to realize many of the distinct features of Highline, one of the only green patches left at this time of the year, were straight-edged and rectangular in its shape. However, the apartment buildings in the vicinity of Highline, all were irregular and weirdly shaped.

The most striking of examples I found was when I realized that it was far easier trying to flanuer along the tracks of Highline park than it was walking down Ninth Avenue.

I felt Quinn hit the nail when he described his goal of flanarie: “each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within…By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere.”

There were several factors that allowed me to get as close as possible to the feeling of being nowhere. The continuous stream of new and unique images like rail tracks covered with plants, a wall covered with aluminum foil, and weirdly shaped benches, all which prevented me from doling on one point for too long. Furthermore, these images were so far removed from what I normally experience, I felt as if I was not myself. As I walked along the tracks I felt that I was “nowhere”.

My second destination served to reinforce the fact that all architectural structures are individualistic and are not permutations of their surroundings.

If one were to apply Koolhaas’ idea to the Empire State Building, it would stand to reason that the architecture of the ESB and its surrounding buildings should be significantly alike. However, I found a similar disillusionment as I had at Highline Park; the buildings in the vicinity lacked several features that the Empire State Building had. The most prominent was the desire to reach the sky that manifested itself in the pointed peak atop the building. None of the surrounding buildings had this desire.

As I reached the end of my meditation, I realized that each structure, be it a park or building, was almost human in its individualistic nature and ambition to be unique.