A sort of Jacob's Ladder and Labyrinth that only accentuates the empty longing of alienation and unfulfilled needs.
Is this thing still open? When I was in NYC a few years back, it was still closed after a bunch of people had jumped off of it.
The Vessel remains closed. The latent dark psychic energy of the dismal monument is too much for the mortal mind, and it offers an easy means of permanent escape. It has been "temporarily closed" for almost two years now, with no reopening set. It merely waits, its presence warns.
In hindsight it was a bad idea to build a suicide booth in the middle of a financial district just before a major recession
I just looked this thing up and it was estimated to cost between $75M and $200M, that's pretty impressive for something made entirely of stairs.
It's the dollar store version of the Polyhedron, since it has to obey the laws of physics
The central point of architecture and design is that the constructed environment influences how we feel and act. And the Vessel – surrounded on all sides by concrete, glass skyscrapers and crass commercialism – has a more fundamental issue, according to Jacob Alspector, a distinguished lecturer at the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York.
“The Vessel is like some MC Escher nightmare,” he said, referring to the famed graphic artist known for his staircases to nowhere. “It’s kind of relentless. It’s very gaudy, it’s very cold. It’s thrilling … It’s not the most friendly and life-affirming and inclusive kind of space or structure. It’s kind of empty. What’s the point of it? Just to walk up and walk down?”
He added: “People who feel alienated with the world may not be supported very well by an experience like that.”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/07/us/vessel-hudson-yards-suicide-wellness/index.html
Oh cool I think that place was in VTM: Coteries of New York being roasted exactly the same way
It looks like an Unreal Tournament map, like the kind you'd design for 1v1 instagib
Brutalism IRL minecraft landscape would be so cool for a public space, folks climbing and picnicking in all sorts of spots would be beautiful
It's like someone copied a stepwell, but didn't understand the purpose of any part of its design.
‘in a city full of eye-catching structures, our first thought was that it shouldn’t just be something to look at,’ explains heatherwick. ‘instead we wanted to make something that everybody could use, touch, relate to. 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.’
https://www.designboom.com/architecture/thomas-heatherwick-vessel-hudson-yards-new-york-09-14-2016/
if you look up other works by this designer/studio, there sure seems to be a theme of pretty bazinga ted talk stuff
and they seem to be a bit of a nepo baby too
