The Dryline - BIG Teams Vision for Rebuild by Design

In the city that transformed a rusting railway track into the elysian High Line, and which is planning to turn an underground trolley-bus terminal into the atmospheric Lowline, now comes the latest snappily named linear park: meet the Dryline.

It is a vision as ingenious as it is elementary, a why-didn’t-they-do-it-already no-brainer of a plan. An animation produced by London studio Squint Opera shows the 10-mile long strategy being unrolled like a magic carpet along the waterfront, leaving safe leisure-loving citizens in its wake. With a sprinkling of fairy-dust, the shoreline becomes furnished with undulating berms and protective planting, flip-down baffles and defensive kiosks, promenades and bike paths, bringing pedestrian life worthy of Lisbon or Barcelona to the gritty banks of Manhattan.

“We like to think of it as the love-child of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,” says Ingels. It is a project that is at once tyrannical and touchy-feely, as if the bullish highway builder and the people’s urban activist had sat down to draw up a plan over tea: an uncompromising seawall that also wants to give you a hug. “I think they would have agreed on a lot of things if only they had worked together,” Ingels adds cheerfully. “Our project must have Moses’ scale of ambition, but be able to work at the fine-grain scale of the neighbourhoods. It shouldn’t be about the city turning its back on the water, but embracing it and encouraging access. By taking it one conversation at a time, with the principle that everyone can get their fantasy realised, you end up getting there.”

It is the most ambitious product of Rebuild by Design, a $1bn federally-funded programme to restore the northeastern seaboard following the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, introducing new infrastructure to guard against future inundations. Ten schemes were selected to be taken forward from an international competition, addressing everything from new breakwaters along Staten Island’s South Shore, to flood prevention and drainage in Hoboken, New Jersey. BIG was the only team to look at Manhattan itself. “It was a bit like going to a big dance,” says Ingels. “No one picks the prettiest girl because they’re too shy.” His office evidently suffers from no such impediment. Its website is named big.dk after all.

Others fear the Dryline will give New Yorkers a false sense of protection, leading the city to become blasé behind its new defences. “The city should be proud of the project,” says Klaus Jacob, an esteemed climate scientist at Columbia University, who predicted the impact of a major storm just a year before Sandy arrived. “Except it has a fixed height. As the sea level rises, you need ever smaller storms to overcome it. It’s exactly New Orleans’ problem during Katrina. People think, ‘We have this Big U, we’re safe.’ But you’re building up risk behind the U until it becomes dysfunctional.”

“I’m not saying it will leak during the first 10 years,” he adds, “but the sea-level rise calculated is out to the 2050s. What about the 2080s? 2100? You just postpone the problem for future generations.”

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But for now, all efforts are focused on making the first publicly funded stretch as good as possible to set the bar high. “We’re trying to make the initial phase as adventurous a manifestation of the fundamental idea,” says Ingels. “We will have failed if, in the end, it’s just a good-looking green slope.”