Yards On The Hudson

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

Five towers of glass and steel stand around the square like the giants from Jonathan Swift's second book on Gulliver's adventures, watching tiny men climbing up and down a basket of stairs at their feet.

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1/3 Vessel Art Object Photo: Michael Moran for Related-Oxford
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2/3 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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3/3 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova

The midtown West Midtown skyscraper complex, resulting from a $ 25 billion investment, twelve years of design and six years of construction, is recognized as the largest and most expensive development project in New York City.

There are examples of such a multi-storey paradise in the world for people who spend most of the day in the office, for those who need to get the whole range of pleasant opportunities that fit into the concept of "comfortable life" in one place - from luxury shopping and signature restaurants to entertainment under the clouds and vibrant cultural events. Take, for example, our Moscow City - offering just such a lifestyle, it is inhabited and in demand by a generation of young, ambitious people striving to minimize movement around the city.

And yet for New York, Hudson Yards is a fundamentally new project, a city-state project, a private enclave within a giant metropolis, directed by one person - Stephen Ross.

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1/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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2/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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3/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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4/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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5/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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6/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova
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7/7 Hudson Yards Photo: Marina Novikova

The story of the Penn Station section of track, enclosed in a rectangle between 10th and 12th Avenues and 30th and 34th Streets, is the story of West Mahattan along the Hudson River. In the 1970s, territory, historically inhabited by wharves, warehouses and industrial plants, under the banner of an urban trend called gentrification, began to be freed up for the construction of residential and office buildings. With Hudson Yards, the situation was more complicated - here two conflicting scenarios for the life of the urban area converged: the tracks for the trains must exist and function, and - the city must develop. The only solution could be only a gigantic platform covering the railroad tracks - an extremely large and expensive task. And such a platform over the tracks, seven meters thick, which absorbed engineering communications, was built. It houses a complex of luxury real estate - the new Hudson Yards. But that’s later. And in the early 2000s, when Michael Bloomberg was the mayor of New York, the construction of the stadium was discussed on this site - the idea was fueled by New York's ambitions to host the Olympic Games. Pretty soon the idea of the Olympic Games died, and with it the construction of a stadium on Hudson Yards was abandoned. The city, represented by the administration, did not have money and new ideas, and the site was sold to a private investor. By the way, Donald Trump also had views of the site, but he was unlucky, he was late and participated in the deal as an intermediary.

And in the spring of this year, the construction of the first stage of the new complex was basically completed. Five towers, a concert and exhibition space and a giant art object in the center of the composition appeared between 10th and 11th avenues. The individual sites were designed by five architectural teams and two consortia.

Kohn Pedersen Fox designed office towers 10 Hudson Yards, 30 Hudson Yards and a shopping center. Skyscrapers, similar to glass cliffs with sharp edges directed upwards, flank the long seven-story building of the mall. The feeling of extension is enhanced by the horizontal division of the glass facade with metal lamellas. Tower 30, the tallest of all, has an observation deck at 335 meters above ground level that protrudes 20 meters from the façade. The observation deck on a skyscraper is almost a must-see attraction for those who like to look at the surroundings from under the clouds. From Hudson Yards 30, you can see the Empire State Building, and turn to the river to see the development of New Jersey on the opposite bank.

Tower 55, designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates, is the lowest of the five, at just 244 meters, with a curved steel frame mesh façade. Next to it is Tower 35, 300 meters rectangular in plan, which houses offices, a hotel and apartments, designed by David Childs and SOM.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro partnered with the Rockwell Group to design Tower 15 - a cylindrical building with living quarters - and The Shed. It is worth mentioning separately about the "barn". A telescopic structure, enclosed in an inflated shell, is built into the base of the tower at the level of the lower floors. With the help of giant wheels on rails, it is able to transform, sometimes increasing, sometimes decreasing, depending on the scale of the event.

The sixth high-rise, designed by Foster + Partners, is under construction and will open in 2022.

Thomas Heatherwick's art object - Vessel - is set in the square between the towers. The structure, 46 meters high, resembles a giant wastepaper basket woven from stairs in its structure and shape. Its polished copper-colored steel surfaces multiply the reflections indefinitely. Two miles of Vessel stairs lead nowhere, everyone. what they serve is to climb up, look at the surroundings and take selfies against the backdrop of the urban landscape, which undoubtedly makes Heatherwick's creation akin to the floating bridge in Zaryadye Park. The criticism brings the two facilities even closer together: The $ 200 million spent on the Vessel irritates New Yorkers, who, with some reason, believe that the money could be of greater benefit to society than being spent on a giant attraction.

Can the architecture of the towers be called expressive? Perhaps not. None of the famous teams involved in the design have created an object that could be put on a par with many of their previous work. What is really expressive in this project is the composition, which cannot be denied in thoughtfulness and completeness. All Hudson Yards high-rise buildings are located along the boundaries of the site and focused on the area between them. It is on the square with a giant sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick that the main facades of the towers and the mall look. In this composition, the square is an open-air front door, a lake from which the High Line flows towards Downtown, a stage where the main action takes place - crowds of people rush to the Vessel to go up to its upper level and take a selfie. The rest of Manhattan is assigned the role of backyards, backstage, and this feeling is enhanced by the mall building stretched along 10th Avenue, which blocks 31st and 33rd streets, abutting its rear, not too expressive facade, and does not let the city through itself, violating the permeability inherent in quarterly development. And here questions arise. A private city-state within a metropolis with all the attributes of a private project - its own rules, an army of guards, branded from paving to a spire on a tower - is this an exceptional story or a new urban trend? Is it a coincidence or the future of cities?