Big, bold and basket-shaped, the structure, “Vessel,” stands 15 stories, weighs 600 tons and is filled with 2,500 climbable steps. Long under wraps, it is the creation of Thomas Heatherwick, 46, an acclaimed and controversial British designer, and will rise in the mammoth Far West Side development Hudson Yards, anchoring a five-acre plaza and garden that will not open until 2018. Some may see a jungle gym, others a honeycomb. — the New York Times
But Stephen M. Ross, the billionaire founder and chairman of Related Companies, which is developing Hudson Yards with Oxford Properties Group, has his own nickname for “Vessel”: “the social climber.” And the steep price tag Mr. Ross’s privately held company is paying for Mr. Heatherwick’s installation? More than $150 million.
“My studio was commissioned to design a centerpiece for an unusual new piece of land in New York. In a city full of eye-catching structures, our first thought was that it shouldn’t just be something to look at. Instead we wanted to make something that everybody could use, touch, relate to," states Heatherwick in the press release. "Influenced by images we had seen of Indian stepwells, made from hundreds of flights of stairs going down into the ground, an idea emerged to use flights of stairs as building elements.”
Comprised of 154 interconnected stairs and 80 landings, the structure rises from a 50 ft diameter base to 150 ft at the top. A painted steel structure will be clad on the bottom with a polished, copper-colored steel skin.
For more on the Hudson Yards project, follow these links:
9 Comments
there will be no more obesity in new york city after this.
Gotta say, I've seen the stairs to nowhere idea a few times, but for NYC this is cool and well done.
Damn, no chairs? Cold.
Hudson Yards needs some visual interest but this doesn't do it for me on many levels. Reminds me how brilliant the new Holl Library in LIC is and how this .... is not that. There's just something evil about it.
Designed for Instagrams & selfies. Also not ADA-compliant.
pretty cool i guess. what's that shiny cladding that doesn't require any joints?
@thisisnotmyname how do you know it's not ada compliant from looking at a few renderings?
doesn't look like you can get up there on a wheelchair, does it?
here's the question, what are you getting to?
to a nice fee for those 150 million dollars cost, obviously
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