Archinect - News

Go inside The Shed’s short-lived Sonic Sphere installation with The New York Times

2023-07-06T17:26:00-04:00

“It’s about a change in consciousness that leaves a memory,” [Ed] Cooke said of the project. “Can people have an experience where they touch some new territory of consciousness, not in a way that is like an altered state, but one that actually leaves a trace?”

The 50-ton space, which is suspended some 34 feet above the ground, has a capacity of 250 people and was promoted by co-designer Merijn Royaards as a “sensory laboratory that [...] bends time, expands consciousness, and punctures our perception of reality” at the project’s announcement in early May.

Video courtesy of The Shed/YouTube

Its design was supposedly inspired by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium from 1970 and includes a JBL sound system for special 45-minute ticketed performances. The venue closes on July 30th, with a return to New York planned for next year. Speaking of their intent for the $2 million project, Royaards' colleague Ed Cooke told the Times, “We want to give [people] something magical.”

The Shed debuts Sonic Sphere suspended musical feature

2023-05-09T13:17:00-04:00

The Shed at New York City’s Hudson Yards has unveiled plans for a new, temporary 65-foot spherical concert hall feature to be placed inside the arts venue’s McCourt performance space this summer.

The space is the product of architectural designers Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, and Nicholas Christie and has previously been enacted at the 2022 Burning Man festival and ten other venues.

Lounge-type seating is combined with a listening platform that's suspended 34 feet off the ground. Standing sections and a netted center complete the spatial design, with a capacity for 250 persons, a JBL sound system, and lighting design from Polina Zakh. The space was supposedly inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1970 Kugelauditorium for the World Expo in Japan that same year.

Royaards explains: “My first experience of clubbing was during a cold winter in early ’90s Rotterdam. The interference patterns of visual, sonic, and kinetic waveform transmissions that flooded the dance floor and enveloped me we...

Sex toy architecture? "XXX-HY: A Luxury Real Estate Dildo Experience"

2019-10-04T11:45:00-04:00

Architecture practice Wolfgang & Hite has designed architectural sex toys reimagine each of the new buildings at the Hudson Yards. “There’s a lot to love in NYC’s recent building boom, but the city and developers have been jerking each other off for decades, so naturally we wanted to join in the fun… Masturbation is a great metaphor for the latest wave of development in New York City," writes the group on their website.

The collection has been named XXX-HY: A Luxury Real Estate Dildo Experience. Each piece has been scaled to 1"= 100' and includes Heatherwick Studio's Vessel as an "amateur buttplug," DSR's Shed as a clitoral stimulator, and KPF's "gargantuan roof deck tower as a magnum fisting dildo - recommended for those without a fear of heights." Also in the bunch is SOM's "super-slender" 25 Hudson Yards.

"Sex does the body good. After the fiery criticisms of Hudson Yards this year, we thought city officials might need a healthy outlet for working through some of that guilt," wr...

Cultural offerings at The Shed dry up as fashion week, artists avoid the venue due to developer's Trump donations

2019-09-05T14:30:00-04:00

Hudson Yards’ nonprofit arts center, The Shed, has been shunned by the fashion elite since developer Stephen Ross’ Trump ties were exposed in early August. Sources say that Michael Kors, Vera Wang and the Academy of Art University were all slated to show their collections at the sleek, $475 million venue but have pulled out. Rag & Bone publicly nixed the space, which opened in April, right after news broke of Ross’ Aug. 9 Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons.

Fern Mallis, the mogul who created New York Fashion Week in the 1990s, told The New York Post that The Shed is “kind of over,” adding, “If you know people showing at The Shed, please tell me because I don’t know who is."

The fallout comes after news broke in August that Stephen Ross, one of the developers behind the Hudson Yards development, was hosting a $250,000-a-seat fundraiser for President Donald Trump. The news was met with boycotts of many Ross-affiliated business enterprises.

Reflecting on Joseph Giovannini's review of "The Shed" three months after its opening

2019-07-31T10:33:00-04:00

Roughly three months after the opening of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group's cultural venue at Hudson Yards, several media publications and critics have voiced their opinions about The Shed. Having received a variety of reviews, some have shown interest and praise of the space while others have addressed the Shed's connectivity to corporate greed, false philanthropy, and inclusion. Despite it all Manhattan's newest cultural hub still stands, hosting performances and other events since its grand opening, as intended. However, a review made by famed architectural critic Joseph Giovannini back in April casts The Shed in a different light.

Image © Ajay Suresh via flickr

A prominent figure in architectural writing and criticism, Giovannini has reviewed and shared his thoughts on several projects over the years, including Zumthor's LACMA design, Zaha's Port House, and Ghery's Louis Vuitton Foundation. Pulling from his own experience in professional practice and writing, Giov...

See inside Hudson Yards arts center The Shed ahead of Friday’s opening

2019-04-03T16:16:00-04:00

A new cultural institution in New York City opens on Friday after more than a decade in the making. The Shed, which straddles the recently opened Hudson Yards neighborhood and the High Line on 30th Street, will commission and present original artwork across a variety of disciplines.

View from the High Line; Photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Shed

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group, the building features a 120-foot movable shell, allowing it to physically change on demand and adapt to different performances. Kicking things off April 5 is a five-night concert series, “Soundtrack of America,” which was directed by Steve McQueen, Quincy Jones, and Maureen Mahon, and explores the impact of African American music on modern culture.

View of The Shed from 30th Street; Photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Shed

The Shed consists of two floors of column-free galleries, 500-seat Griffin Theater (named for billionaire Ken Griffin who donated $25 million for the project), and the...

Diller Scofidio + Renfro's highly anticipated Shed announces April opening

2019-01-09T15:26:00-05:00

One of 2019's most anticipated buildings, the Shed, has announced it will launch its opening season on April 5th, 2019. The new art center—designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Rockwell Group in a collaborating role—will offer interdisciplinary programming, hosting exhibitions, lectures, and performances premiering works in the performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture.

“We have built a home where established and emerging artists working in all disciplines can create new work in ways that we cannot even imagine,” said Alex Poots, Artistic Director and CEO of The Shed. Blending genres and disciplines, the first year of programming will see lectures by Boots Riley, the filmmaker behind Sorry to Bother You; a Björk concert directed by John Tiffany of the broadway play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”; and a kung fu musical featuring songs by Sia and Arca.

In addition, the Shed will also undergo a name change. Due to a generous $75 million donation and his role in helpin...

Watch the Shed slide along the High Line

2017-08-17T13:53:00-04:00

In its scale, this faintly quaint, eloquently designed contraption aspires to conjure up the spirit of those 19th-century exemplars of elegant engineering like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower: industrial-era monuments of structural form, both necessary and sufficient, ingenious but not space age, encapsulating the aspirations of a city.

While the Shed, an art and performance space designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group will be in construction for at least another year, the structure is already capable of conducting its five minute moving act along the High Line. Weighing in at 8 million pounds, it glides on a half-dozen exposed steel “bogies,” or wheels, six-feet in diameter, 'with tapered bearings so meticulously engineered that the system requires just six 15-horsepower motors'.

When opened, the shell will drape over the Shed’s sprawling plaza at Hudson Yards, which can then be made into a movie palace or a gallery for art or a theater with bleacher seats — a flexible new 17,000 square foot public space for New York at what promises to be one of the city’s busiest pedestrian intersections after all the commercial skyscrapers around it are built.

Construction for Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group's “The Shed” pushes forward

2017-05-31T15:02:00-04:00

[W]hile only the skeleton of the six-level structure [...] has been completed so far, there are already some elements that set The Shed apart. The most obvious of these is a telescoping shell on wheels that serves as both a façade for the gallery spaces and a flexible canopy that can be extended to enclose a public plaza [...]“This project is bone and muscle and there's no fat,” said the architect Elizabeth Diller

A look at the latest construction developments of the Hudson Yards' “The Shed” arts and culture center, which began late last year and is due for a 2019 opening.

Construction begins on Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Rockwell Group's “shape-shifting“ arts center in Manhattan

2016-11-23T18:17:00-05:00

[Dubbed “The Shed”,] The 18,500 square metre venue has six storeys and can “accommodate the broadest range of performance, visual art, music, and multi-disciplinary work”. A cultural centre will be encased in a 34m-high outer shell that can slide on rails to double the ground space. The building includes two large-scale column-free galleries comprising 2,320 square metres of museum-quality space, a 500-seat theater and event and rehearsal spaces. [Completion is due] in 2019.

For more about New York's Hudson Yards:

BIG-designed "The Spiral" Hudson Yards tower is inching closer to becoming reality

Renderings of Thomas Heatherwick's "Vessel" for New York's Hudson Yard revealed

Welcome to the Hudson Yards, c. 2019: the world's most ambitious "smart city" experiment