On the far west side of Manhattan—where Hudson Yards, the monumental city-within-a-city that will someday encompass 18 million square feet, is rising on a platform held aloft above a sea of railroad tracks—stands one of the most original structures in New York. Viewed head-on at a sufficient distance—looking east from the spur of the High Line, say, across acres of parked commuter trains—Vessel, the climbable sculpture designed by Thomas Heatherwick, has the calming aspect of a pagoda, its eight levels of upturned wings glowing a soft copper color in the sun. But up close, at ground level, its rigid symmetry dissolves into a jumble of stairs and platforms, mushrooming from a base of 50 feet across to 150 feet across at the top. London-based Heatherwick Studios managed to come up with a shape that defies geometric description. The elaborate website devoted to it, which features a promotional video staged by the Alvin Ailey dance company, calls it a “spiral staircase,” which it most definitely is not. The interior of the Guggenheim Museum is a spiral, one continuous ramp circling a central axis, but Vessel is a nest of steps, landings, and walkways that run in straight lines and intersect at oblique angles.
Nor is it “soaring,” as the website calls it—a curious description for a 150-foot-high object just yards from a 900-foot-tall tower, 10 Hudson Yards, and its even more gigantic neighbor, 30 Hudson Yards, both by Kohn Pedersen Fox. For that matter, it’s not a “vessel” either, a name that pretentiously eschews a definite article—just “Vessel,” like “London Bridge” or “Jupiter”—but which has nothing to do with the object itself, either in the sense of a ship or a container. Heatherwick drew inspiration from the 1,000-year-old stepwells of Rajasthan, deep cisterns reached by steep stairs chiseled into the walls. They are vessels that hold water, but Vessel encloses nothing but air.
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