At age 89, Ricardo Scofidio, the designer of the High Line park in New York City, passes away.

An architect who was one of the first in his field to get a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Ricardo Scofidio, died. Scofidio turned an abandoned railroad into the well-known High Line park in New York City. He had worked on projects all throughout the world, including museums and college buildings, and he was eighty-nine.

The architecture company Diller Scofidio + Renfro reported that Scofidio passed away in New York on Thursday, accompanied by his wife and partner, Elizabeth Diller.

Acknowledged as one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” in 2009 with Diller, Scofidio worked “to make space on his own terms,” according to the firm.

Renowned for infusing architecture with an avant-garde art sensibility, the firm has produced daring designs for notable locations, such as a huge artificial cloud over a Swiss lake for an art exhibition in 2002 and The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles.

According to Scofidio’s 2009 interview with Charlie Rose, “Believing in yourself that you will succeed is one of the things that is important to us.”

A park in Moscow, a film and movie museum in Rio de Janeiro, a health-sciences building at the University of Sydney, a subsidized apartment complex close to Nagoya, Japan, an oceanfront mansion on Long Island, New York, and a redesign of the Lincoln Center performing arts complex in New York City are among the other projects that have been completed or are in progress.

The High Line, a park located in a disused elevated cargo rail track on Manhattan’s far West Side, is arguably Scofidio’s most well-known design.

It was an eyesore in a dilapidated warehouse sector for decades, a rusting, off-limits curiosity. Few New Yorkers were able to view the tracks because they were covered in a ribbon of wildflowers and weeds, but those who could found them to be captivating.

After the city decided to turn the old railway into a park, Scofidio and his partners made a point of preserving a sense of surprise and naturalness, crafting walkways interspersed with greenery rather than a simpler, manicured path.

The Associated Press quoted Scofidio as saying, “We wanted to hold on to the magic of this landscape,” in 2008. “There is that edge of vulnerability between this society that we have perfected and these small blades of grass that are able to split open sidewalks and grow in the cracks.”

When the first segment of the High Line opened in 2009, it contributed to the neighborhood’s growth and tourism boom.

Born in New York to a jazz musician father and a mother who also played music, Scofidio initially gravitated toward music but later turned to art and then architecture, he told The New Yorker in 2007.

In 1979, he became a personal and professional partner with Diller, who had been one of his students at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A quarter of a century later, Charles Renfro was made a third partner in their studio.

In 1999, Diller and Scofidio—who went by Ric—were awarded a “genius grant” by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Although Ada Louise Huxtable, an architecture critic for the New York Times, had previously received the prize, they were the first architects to receive this recognition.

Scofidio was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a distinguished honor organization for notable figures in literature, music, art, and architecture, just last month.