8 Influential Buildings Along the High Line New York City

New York High Line architecture has two parts: the park itself, a 1.45-mile (2.3 km) elevated park built on a disused freight viaduct on Manhattan’s West Side, and the buildings that have grown up beside it since it opened in 2009. The park was designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the planting designer Piet Oudolf; the buildings include work by BIG, Zaha Hadid Architects, Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Neil Denari and Ennead. This guide is for students and visitors. It explains how the park was made, profiles the eight most influential buildings along it with their architects and dates, and shows how to walk the route to see them.

Why the High Line matters

The High Line matters for three reasons. It rescued a piece of industrial infrastructure that was expected to be demolished, which made it a reference case for adaptive reuse worldwide, followed by proposals such as the Camden High Line in London. Its design kept the character of the ruin, with rails, wild-looking planting and a raised viewpoint, rather than replacing it with a conventional park. And it reshaped the property market of West Chelsea in Manhattan, drawing internationally known architects into a few blocks.

Who designed the High Line

The structure is the elevated section of the West Side Line, built in the early 1930s to lift freight trains off the streets; the last train ran in 1980. The community group Friends of the High Line campaigned to save the viaduct, and in 2004 a team led by the landscape architects James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro as architects and Piet Oudolf as planting designer, was selected to design the park. Friends of the High Line still maintains and operates it in partnership with NYC Parks.

The park opened in phases: Gansevoort Street to 20th Street in June 2009, up to 30th Street in 2011, and the Rail Yards section towards 34th Street in 2014. The Spur over 30th Street and Tenth Avenue followed in 2019, and the High Line–Moynihan Connector, a pair of bridges by SOM and James Corner Field Operations linking the park to Moynihan Train Hall, opened in 2023. The design’s key move was restraint: the team kept the rails, used planting inspired by the plants that had seeded themselves on the abandoned tracks, and laid tapered concrete planks that let the paving dissolve into the planting.

This contrast is the essence of New York High Line architecture: because the park is quiet and low, the buildings around it read strongly: the walk became a moving gallery of new architecture.

©Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The 8 most influential buildings along the High Line

1. One High Line: Bjarke Ingels Group

©dbox

Two towers of 26 and 36 storeys lean away from each other and twist as they rise, joined by a raised bridge. Bjarke Ingels Group designed the complex for HFZ Capital as The Eleventh, later branded The XI. Construction stalled in 2019 and the site was sold through foreclosure; Witkoff and Access Industries completed it in 2023–2024 as One High Line, with 236 condominiums and a 137-room Faena hotel (BD+C report). Older coverage, including earlier versions of this article, uses the old names and the hotel brand planned before the sale.

The twist opens river and skyline views from both towers, and the gap between them at ground level makes room for a public plaza with access to the park. Travertine and bronze-toned cladding gives the pair a heavier presence than the glass towers around them. BIG’s habit of pulling public space through a private site also appears in Google Bay View.

2. 520 West 28th Street: Zaha Hadid Architects

©Hufton+Crow

Zaha Hadid Architects’ 11-storey condominium building of 39 residences, completed in 2017–2018, was the practice’s first project in New York and one of the last Hadid worked on before her death in 2016. Its split-level section is wrapped in a hand-crafted steel facade of interlocking chevrons that, in the architects’ words, echoes Chelsea’s industrial past, as Dezeen reported on completion. Seen from the park, the curves wrap the corners and the floors read as one continuous surface rather than a flat curtain wall. Arch2O reported on the design when it was first announced; for a later, civic-scale version of the same fluid language, see the Zhuhai Jinwan Civic Art Centre.

3. HL23: Neil M. Denari Architects

©Neil M. Denari Architects

Los Angeles architect Neil Denari completed HL23 in 2011, his first free-standing building. The site at 23rd Street is so narrow, and partly overlapped by the viaduct, that Denari inverted the usual tower profile: the building is narrowest at the bottom and widens as it rises, so the upper floors recover space lost to the High Line below. The facades are treated differently according to view and privacy, with glass and exposed bracing on the long sides and embossed metal panels facing the park. It was one of the first buildings to treat the High Line as an asset rather than an obstacle.

4. Whitney Museum of American Art: Renzo Piano

©Nic Lehoux

The Whitney opened in May 2015 at the southern end of the park in the Meatpacking District. Renzo Piano Building Workshop gave it about 50,000 sq ft (4,600 m²) of indoor galleries and about 13,000 sq ft (1,200 m²) of outdoor terraces and stairs that step down towards the High Line and are used for exhibitions. Piano cantilevered the entrance, lifting the building to create a covered public space at street level from which you can see through the lobby to the Hudson River.

©Nic Lehoux

The stepped terraces on the east side face the park and the city, turning the roofs into outdoor galleries.

5. Chelsea Market: Irwin Cohen and Vandenberg Architects

©Chelsea Market

The High Line runs through the Chelsea Market block, where freight trains once delivered directly into the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) factory, built between the 1890s and the 1930s; the Oreo biscuit was first produced there in 1912. The developer Irwin Cohen and Vandenberg Architects converted the complex in the 1990s and the market opened in 1997. The conversion left exposed brick, riveted steel, old pipework and factory floor levels visible, an approach that has since become standard for industrial adaptive reuse. Google bought the building in 2018.

©Chelsea Market

Inside, the long ground-floor concourse keeps the factory’s industrial fabric, now lined with food stalls and shops.

6. The Shed: Diller Scofidio + Renfro

The Shed opened in April 2019 at the northern end of the park as a centre for performing arts, visual art and popular culture. Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed it as lead architect with Rockwell Group as collaborating architect. Its outer shell rolls on rails over the adjoining plaza: deployed, it creates a large column-free hall; retracted, it nests over the fixed base and returns the plaza to the public. The shell is clad in translucent cushions of ETFE, a plastic film far lighter than glass, which helps make such a large enclosure movable.

7. IAC Building: Frank Gehry

©Flickr

Completed in 2007 as the headquarters of the internet company IAC, the building was Frank Gehry‘s first in New York City and predates the park’s opening. Its billowing white volumes, often compared to sails, are wrapped in a curtain wall of curved, fritted glass panels, with the frit becoming denser towards the top so that the building turns from clear at street level to white above. It signalled that the area was ready for serious architecture before the High Line opened. Gehry’s wider influence is covered in our guide to the most influential architects in history.

8. The Standard, High Line: Ennead Architects

©Jeff Goldberg/Esto

The Standard is the only building in this list that straddles the park. Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects raised the hotel on sculptural concrete piers so that it steps over the viaduct near West 13th Street; it opened in 2009 alongside the park’s first section. The tower is split into two hinged slabs set at an angle to the Manhattan grid, built of board-formed concrete with glass walls, so that every room looks over the Hudson, the High Line or the New York City skyline.

©Jeff Goldberg/Esto

More buildings worth seeing along the High Line

Eight is a shortlist. Four more are worth the detour:

• Lantern House, Heatherwick Studio (2021): two towers straddling the park, with bulging bay windows.
• 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel (2010): a curtain wall of individually sized and angled panes of glass.
• Solar Carve Tower, Studio Gang (2019): a faceted form cut back to keep sunlight and air on the park below.
• The Hudson Yards end: the park’s northern end meets the Hudson Yards development, including 15 Hudson Yards (Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Rockwell Group) and Heatherwick Studio’s Vessel (both 2019).

How the High Line changed West Chelsea

West Chelsea changed from low-rise warehouses, galleries and light industry to one of the most expensive residential districts in Manhattan, and the buildings in this list are the visible record of that change. The High Line is also the standard example in debates about “green gentrification”: the park raised land values around it, and the development that followed priced out many of the residents and businesses of the neighbourhood that had campaigned to save it. Both readings explain why the project is still studied and argued about.

Visiting: length, cost and entrances

The park is about 1.45 miles long; walking it without stopping takes roughly 30 minutes, but allow 90 minutes to two hours to look at the architecture. Entry is free and no ticket is needed; opening hours are seasonal and shorter in winter, and guided tours and some events are ticketed separately. For a tour of New York High Line architecture, start at Gansevoort Street, the southern end by the Whitney, and walk north: the sequence passes The Standard, Chelsea Market and the IAC Building, HL23 at 23rd Street, 520 West 28th and Solar Carve, and ends at The Shed and Hudson Yards. Street-level stairs are roughly every two blocks, with lifts at several entrances, and early morning is the best time to photograph the buildings without crowds.