Thursday 23 Jan 2014 12:01 A new project by designer James Ramsey of Raad Studio is looking beneath the streets of New York for an answer to the city’s limited green public spaces.
Designed in collaboration with executive director Dan Barasch, Lowline hopes to turn the site of an abandoned trolley terminal into the world’s first underground park.
Like its elevated predecessor High Line – a public park built on a freight rail line above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side – the project is successfully encouraging New Yorkers to think more creatively about urban green spaces.
It has already created a record for the largest number of supporters for an urban design project on funding platform Kickstarter – through which it raised more than £100,000 from 3,300 worldwide supporters.
‘The response from the local community and the city as a whole has been overwhelmingly positive,’ said Ramsey.
‘The Lowline idea comes from the intersection of my work with sunlight and optics and my love of urban archeology. I’d love to see a space that is a union of the two; something that reveres the history of our city while embracing the future.
‘I hope we don’t end up living underground, but I think we can use design and technology to exploit some of the amazing spaces beneath us in the right circumstances.’
The project’s proposed location is the one-acre former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, just below Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Despite sitting unused since 1948 when the trolley service was discontinued, the space still retains its original 20ft vaulted ceilings, criss-crossing rail tracks and remnant cobblestones. More importantly, it is also located in one of the least green areas of New York City. To encourage the growth of plants and trees below street level, as well as tackle the problem of lighting, Ramsey has developed ‘remote skylight’ technology, which would transmit the necessary wavelengths of light to support photosynthesis.
‘Underground infrastructure can help the pedestrian experience at the street level, and underground spaces have a controllable temperature and environment,’ said Ramsey.
Ramsey is not alone in seeing opportunity in digging deep, with underground structures deemed as both energy efficient and a great way to preserve the appearance of green field and historic sites.
Pop Down by Fletcher Priest Architects is another such idea. The winner of the High Line for London competition to find new ideas for green space in the capital, the project proposes the transformation of the disused ‘Mail Rail’ tunnel under Oxford Street into an urban mushroom garden.
In addition to enabling visitors to explore subterranean London, the tunnels would create the ideal environment for an urban mushroom farm with the introduction of daylight through a series of sculptural glass-fibre ‘mushrooms’. The produce could also be used in pop-up concept restaurants and cafés at street level entrances.
‘There is a lot of hype around Lowline, but as things stand it is little more than a small patch of indoor greenery and a tree, neither of which are hardly new,’ said Matthew Carmona, professor of planning and urban design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.
‘Cities in countries such as Canada, Japan and China, with severe winters or hot and humid summers, have long had extensive networks of underground walkways, often lined with shops and other facilities, as an alternate way of moving around the city; and in these, it is not uncommon to see plants, and even trees.’
He added: ‘To my mind, the Pop Down project is a more interesting idea. Mushrooms underground seems more fitting somehow than trying to make greenery blossom beneath our streets.’
With high building costs, an absence of natural lighting and sunlight penetration and the need for artificial ventilation all potential problems for underground construction, Prof Carmona believes we should continue to build cities in the traditional way.
‘This has served us well for thousands of years and shows no prospect of not doing so equally well in the future. There is plenty of room and potential to meet our needs above ground,’ said Prof Carmona.
As land prices in London continue to rise however, Prof Carmona suggested that more residents might choose to excavate under their homes to gain extra space.
Developers may dig a little deeper (as well as going ever higher) too, in order to maximise the accommodation they can provide on sites.
‘In some circumstances where the landscape is particularly precious, building underground can also allow the landscape above to remain untouched, for example the building of underground houses in the green belt,’ said Prof Carmona.
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