Jaume Plensa, Echo in New York's Madison Square Park

Well, I'm in NY visiting my mom, trying to reconnect with the art world and generally enjoying the city--which is easy to do without a car here.

One thing NYC really lacks is a formal public sculpture garden of any size. (sorry Socrates Sculpture Park doesn't really qualify)

In recent years the city has really made up for this through a range of permanent and temporary site specific public art projects spread throughout the city.

This is the giant ethereal head, Jaume Plensa placed in Madison Square Park, creating an unreal dreamlike peaceful experience in the heart of the city.

"Clearly, though, more than poetry has gone into “Echo,” his 44-foot-high sculpture of a girl’s head, which was raised in Madison Square Park last week. (With a budget of $620,000, it is the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s costliest project to date.) The work is made from an amalgam of polyester resin, white pigment and marble dust, and its glittering neck rises straight from the grass, creating an otherworldly beacon amid the furor of the Flatiron district."

NY Times article

A Look @ NY's High Line

One of the highlights of my NY trip was seeing the High Line close up.

While I'm a big fan of the so called "new urbanism" and it's interest in defending the age old interface of street design that has worked for thousands of years; I also always thought that new innovative design concepts and interfaces in cities did not always have to mean the destruction of the city's history, street life or human scale.

The High Line shows how coincidence and sensitivity can lead people to see a new use for something considered worthless. A lot of New Yorker's favored the creation of a large waterfront NY park, while other's including myself saw the value of weaving the area back into the fabric of the city, through more residential and mixed use development. Few realised that an awesome interesting natural park had been forming for years on an abandoned stretch of rail that threaded through the neighborhood which might offer the best of both worlds.



Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Some more videos on the High Line's history which shows the natural state only a brave few broke in to see.







Obviously, Pittsburgh is not New York and the perfect storm of pent up real estate market, prime location and all star support that made what one sees here happen isn't here.

However--- stunning spaces and good designs can create big support quickly. I'm sure most of the High Line's original big supporters thought the idea was crazy-- until they saw and experienced the space themselves.

Some more photos. The project is being done in stages with only the section fron 13th to 19th St open.

Just to set the scene here-- You are in a [park which is above the streets and walking through and under buildings. Pretty amazing.