AB: Do you think the High Line will be able to resist the pull of consumption?

CR: I don’t know. We’ll see. Who knows? It’s a fragile ecosystem that we’re trying to recreate. Part of our idea was to not over build – not over architecture, not over develop – so there’s no commercial stuff there: to let saplings and weeds and grass grow through the cracks like it did on the existing High Line. The reason it worked so well on the existing High Line is that it wasn’t a public space. No one could go up there and trample it down. Yeah, we have concern that the vegetation may not – it may have to transform through the life of the High Line. We really don’t know. We’re going to see how popular it is. I think we can keep the literal commercialization off of the line. That’s something we won the battle on, which is fantastic, but if it’s a very popular place, the way we’re imagining the vegetation to work may have to change over time.

AB: I guess it would be naïve to think that it wouldn’t. I have this interview you did with ArtKrush in which you sa, "Like SoHo before it, Chelsea is a neighborhood whose success will be its own demise. Its fate is now in the hands of developers." Do you feel complicit in the evolution of the neighborhood?

CR: It’s such a double-edged question. In a way you’re saying, “Architects should never build in places that haven’t been built before,” because that, by definition, is a sign of transition and change. You can almost guarantee that property values will go up if something happens in a place that hadn't happened before. I don’t know if that question is intended to admonish.

AB: I guess “complicit” may be a little harsh.

CR: I think as architects, we like to think of ourselves as very powerful players in the cultural landscape – and I think we are, but we’re also kind of victimized by the system in that we’re hired to do work. We don’t generally start work ourselves. If we were architects and developers, we might make different decisions, but it’s just impossible to stop certain things from happening. We can sit back and say, “We’re not going to work on that because that’s going to kill the neighborhood” and watch someone else do it worse. Or, we could say, “Okay, why don’t we help take this in the right direction”. The High Line is the perfect example. If any park were made there, the whole neighborhood would transform, anyway. I think the neighborhood was going to transform whether the High Line happened or not – the land values in New York have just gotten so high, every place in New York is going to be developed. So, the High Line may or may not be a major part of that, but I think that because we took that project and we were able to say, “This isn’t a commercial place, this is a well considered, rough, tumble natural environment.” I think we changed the way at least that thing works and hopefully we can steer some developers to do better work: be a leader in that process.