A Shed for Everybody, Abitare, June 2019.
A STORM OF GRIEVANCES HAS BEEN GATHERING AROUND HUDSON YARDS, the $25 billion mega-development on the West Side of Manhattan, threatening to engulf the much-anticipated cultural facility designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group in controversy. Launched in early April on the edge of the High Line, the Shed is a metallic silvery eight-story, 18,500 square-meter, multidisciplinary arts venue sheathed in a rolling steel-and-translucent plastic shell that unfurls in five minutes to effectively double the footprint of the venue. Conceived as a center for interdisciplinary artistic collaboration, the building and its deployable shell have the capacity to host exhibitions of painting, sculpture, and digital media, large-scale multimedia performances of dance, music, and theatre, and, especially, amalgams of all of the above. If it manages to captivate a public beyond the billionaires that funded it, the Shed could be the saving grace of a massive real estate development that has been harshly criticized – perhaps exaggeratedly – as a gated community for the rich.
