Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, for the last two weeks of this month New Yorkers will get a sneak peak at the technology that may one day make a proposed underground park - dubbed the Lowline - into a reality, reports Alex Goldmark.
A playful take on New York's wildly successful transformation of abandoned rail infrastructure into one of the city's most celebrated parks, the Lowline is an ambitious vision to do the same - yet underground. Renderings depicting the transformation of an abandoned trolley terminal from the early 1900s into a green oasis sparked the imaginations of New Yorkers upon their release last year, and inspired a successful Kickstarter campaign to test the radical technology that would allow
subterranean sunlight to shine "through the sidewalk in beams powerful
enough to grow greenery."
New Yorkers can see the results of that campaign when the "Imagining the Lowline" installation showcasing the project's proposed "solar harvesting" technology opens this Saturday. While the Lowline vision is still far from becoming a reality, according to Perrin Drumm, writing in the Architect's Newspaper, "State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, and
Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez are all already singing the Lowline's
praises, and even Turkey has expressed interest in a Lowline of their
own."
FULL STORY: Proposed Lowline Underground Park Debuts “Solar Harvesters” for Subterranean Photosynthesis (PICS)
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research