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Stone Arch Bridge sounds awesome but really expensive.

Have you looked into pre-engineered bridges. I attached a link for a local MN company that sells about the size you are looking for.

http://www.wheeler-con.com/recreation-bridges/

I like this one.
http://www.wheeler-con.com/pdf/RTbrTrusPrat12-30-09.pdf

I have the Sustainable Sites Handbook at my desk right now. It says nothing about the Highline because it’s not a Sustainable Sites project. That’s the point. The book is not about “sustainability.” It’s about a very specific metric by which sites can be judged to be sustainable based on the SSI definitions. It’s possible that the Highline is very…[Read more]

Ailanthus, artemesia, black cherries, pokeweed, jimson weed – how’s that for a sustainable plant palette for the High Line?  And anything that falls in, like perhaps a walnut, can grow up where it has some support from the local weeds…
How about that, Jason? How would you make the High Line sustainable, if Jim Corner called you up and asked y…[Read more]

I don’t trust my own eyes or knowledge, so I will wait for an in depth study. It’s interesting that you point to these issues as it is difficult to look beneath what is being said, I’m kind of in the middle now in terms of The Highline’s sustainability. However I still love it and it’s been a while since a landscape project has received so much p…[Read more]

One project I worked on recently had a 300′ steel cable pedestrian suspension bridge as an alternative (wasn’t selected – way out of line with the site’s sense of place, plus costs, plus impacts to archeological sites).  The cable support posts were going to be around 80′ tall and the cable anchors would have had to have been set back 100′ or so…[Read more]

All you have to do is go there and see it yourself, and look beyond the plants into the planitng structure and environment. I also saw them building the second section and know whats underneath the lush plantings.There are lots of irrigation lines running in the growing media. The “friends” can claim whatever they want, but just because they say…[Read more]

Saving to bitmap is one of the first problems. .bpm files really lose a lot of clarity and resolution. They are fine for low-res stuff like web pages. Stick with large, high quality jpegs, or if you need absolute clarity, TIFs. Also, do not scale the image to export into InDesign, assign the size in InDesign and let it compress the image file on…[Read more]

Do you know of any study that looks into the sustainability of The Highline? I’d be interested to read any study that refutes Friends of The Highline’s claim that the project is sustainable. My understanding of the designers’ intent was to design for the micro-climate of the site with drought-tolerant, locally grown native plants, and that the…[Read more]

Hire an engineer…
Rope? That’s some serious rope…  
1,000 lbs of people or 800 lbs of decking and one 200 lb person?
You’re only able to gain 5′-00″ on each side with cantilevered platforms? I bet you could get 10′-00″ on each side and only need a 15′-00″ bridge but that might look goofy…
Having a drainage doesn’t prevent you from using a…[Read more]

The most likely issue is the Adobe Preset for pdf that you’re using.  In particular, the options in the Compression group.  There are two factors that affect quality for each of three types of images – downsampling, where if your original image is over a certain ppi it will reduce it to a lower ppi; and image quality, which sets the level of l…[Read more]

This is not a book that you will find at Barnes and Noble that the average consumer (public you speak of) will even attempt to look at. This is an industry-specific publication. Using a ‘flashy’ well known project for the cover is entirely irrelevant to book sales. In fact, there could have been NO cover image at all.
It is not so much the time…[Read more]

Which (once again) calls into question the buzz-word concept “sustainability.” What can an unsustainable species do that can in any way be “sustainable”?

Ed Bye talked about that years ago – he used Mondo Grass clumps as his example of humor in the landscape…

Teletubbies…now that is a landscape of good times!
🙂
Landscapes and gardens that make us smile?  How does that work?
🙂

I think we have said before, in effect, what we have read and learned makes us the individuals we are and different sources will shape different people different ways.  Listening to Kate Bush go on about Cathy and Heathcliff on the Yorkshire moors. or alternatively reading the novel Wuthering Heights, may give different people a similar…[Read more]

This is awesome – when doing my thesis (looking at collective memory, meaning, and perception) a few of my advisers had me read Faulkner and Twain (I was looking at a city on the Mississippi).  It is very informative and enriching to read literary description (as they often permeate through the public better than any academic texts); maybe we…[Read more]

Wow! I have wanted to do a course on this  topic for years – perhaps assign students to draw  literary landscapes in plan…
thanks for posting this!!!!

It might have been a marketing choice to choose the Highline as the cover to grab more attention. Sure there are a lot more sustainable projects, but what recent landscape project other than the Highline has garnered media attention and is so well known to the public?
I think if people are willing to put the time and resources to maintain a l…[Read more]