The opening of the glittering and long anticipated Hudson Yards complex, a $25bn project in New York City, the largest private real estate project in the US made its debut Friday in Manhattan’s west side.
Among the 28 acres of new construction, overall, the opinion on Diller and Scofidio's Shed project is seen as "the most novel work of architecture on site." However, some critics see little to celebrate and criticize it as a playground and work campus for the rich, a ‘mall for the wealthy.’
This area started its planning decades back, when the city hoped to host the 2012 Olympics and envisioned a new football stadium in a place people avoided for decades, one of the last large and forgotten undeveloped areas in Manhattan. The Olympic dream and the stadium plan both died, but the idea of building up the far west side lived on. A public project to extend the 7 subway line, with the city’s first new subway station in a quarter-century opening in 2015, and the developer "Related Companies" eventually taking the lead, made it possible.
Now, some of the 15 buildings slated are already open and have drawn tenants such as BlackRock, Coach, Kate Spade and Warner Media. Other buildings are still years away from being finished. Stephen Ross, the billionaire founder of Related, is the mastermind behind the project, and plans to live there.
However, Michael Kimmelman comparing the complex to Rockefeller Center, a development inseparable from the city's geography and culture, finds that Hudson Yards lacks the precedent's emphasis on human scale and engaging public art.
Among the 28 acres of new construction, overall, the opinion on Diller and Scofidio's Shed project is seen as "the most novel work of architecture on site." However, some critics see little to celebrate and criticize it as a playground and work campus for the rich, a ‘mall for the wealthy.’
This area started its planning decades back, when the city hoped to host the 2012 Olympics and envisioned a new football stadium in a place people avoided for decades, one of the last large and forgotten undeveloped areas in Manhattan. The Olympic dream and the stadium plan both died, but the idea of building up the far west side lived on. A public project to extend the 7 subway line, with the city’s first new subway station in a quarter-century opening in 2015, and the developer "Related Companies" eventually taking the lead, made it possible.
Now, some of the 15 buildings slated are already open and have drawn tenants such as BlackRock, Coach, Kate Spade and Warner Media. Other buildings are still years away from being finished. Stephen Ross, the billionaire founder of Related, is the mastermind behind the project, and plans to live there.
However, Michael Kimmelman comparing the complex to Rockefeller Center, a development inseparable from the city's geography and culture, finds that Hudson Yards lacks the precedent's emphasis on human scale and engaging public art.
Last Friday, the public was invited into public plazas surrounding the Heatherwick's Vessel, a 150ft-tall climbable thing, building or sculpture made up of interlocking flights of stairs. In this, Kimmelman writes that it is "purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it’s about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza)," and that "the object — I hesitate to call this a sculpture — is a 46-meter-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel."
In this opulent area, even the trees are air-conditioned, with a climate control system installed to “ensure that the plants and trees at Hudson Yards will be the most pampered in New York City”.
All the opulence has drawn its share of criticism as a mega-project pandering to the rich and tourists with taxpayer dollars, while ignoring the real lives of the majority of New Yorkers.
An article in New York magazine labeled the development a “billionaire’s fantasy city”.
“I can’t help feeling like an alien here, as though I’ve crossed from real New York, with all its jangling mess, into a movie studio’s back-lot version. Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed,” wrote architecture critic Justin Davidson. “This para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics – no memories at all.”
Still unfinished, the highest outdoor observation deck in the western hemisphere is expected to open on the 100th floor of 30 Hudson Yards, a skyscraper reaching almost 400m, taller than the Empire State Building. The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman ends his review with what sounds like one of its redeeming qualities, an uninterrupted view of Manhattan on the observation deck of the Hudson Yards' tallest tower. 'New York is awesome,' he thought as he recalled gazing over the city from the new vantage point. 'Then it occurred to me... from that deck you can't see Hudson Yards.'
The current development sits over the eastern part of the rail yard, which serves nearby Penn Station. There are still years of construction to come to build a platform over the western yard. Eventually, 4,000 apartments are planned for the site, with about 430 of them rented at below market rates in the city’s affordable housing program.
