In early 2003 Christoper Bribach and Carolyn F. Strauss set to design a 3km stretch of public space in New York City, sited on a defunct elevated railway structure along Manhattan's west side. The Highline ideas competition, sponsored by Friends of the Highline, was an urban revitalization project requiring that the space be redesigned for mixed programmatic uses, with a particular focus on serving local neighborhoods adjacent to the structure.

Bribach and Strauss proposed what they called a participatory ecology of nature, local community and built form. The architecture was be a living, organic organism that was grown and maintained by its inhabitants, and that furthermore could change over time and in concert with the needs and desires of the local community. The project was designed be low-impact in terms of construction costs and materials, with positive environmental effects and strong community-building potential.

To achieve this, they envisioned a flexible framework of giant timber bamboo sheathed with a thin yet durable biopolymer membrane with intelligent, self-regenerating properties. The idea was that this flexible architectural interface combined with a possibility for 'plantings' of new architectural constructs would enable the community to collaboratively determine the shape, scale and number of public spaces based on their programmatic use, and offered myriad opportunities for further design innovation.

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view the winning design by Field Operations and architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro >