Thomas Heatherwick designed the Vessel to "bring people together"

[Music] the brief for the vessel came about from a new space being created above railway lines with an area equivalent to Trafalgar Square and a sense from the people making this new quarter of New York that there should be some focal point could you make something amazing that people touch and use instead of things that they just look at and clap their hand and admire our ambition from very early on was about intensity and socialization and making a heart to Hudson Yards but not in a passive way not in an object that people would look at and take a photograph of and move on but something that genuinely would bring people together a real point of excitement for us was transitioning from thinking about public space as a flat narrative landscape into something with shape and three-dimensional izing what in a typical urban city context would be space in between buildings into an active proposition this idea emerged influenced in part by some stunning images we found of these stepwells that exist in India in Rajasthan which were a way that people could get down to water and we wondered whether you could create in a sense an amphitheater for people that brought people together we have to work very closely with the engine is this thing the structure of it is closer to a bridge that is above them and the engineering would ideally have columns and straight lines but we actually have no elements of those and that's what meant that we had developed this into air which was despite element that runs up between the soffit and we found Chima like her base in northern Italy so rather than handing over a bunch of documents and saying can you build this we brought them on board and they work with us closely on developing the details we asked him where to then do their own mock-ups and build their own versions which we could then go visit and test out they came up as a system which had to be had to break up the vessel into multiple pieces so they could put them into into boats take those so sort of New Jersey put those onto barges lieutenant in New York there's a duality with the pallet of materials used in the projects when you look up highly reflective wall materials that allow you to perceive and see the movement of people on the project even though you can't see them directly and then when you're on the project looking downwards you see an almost urban pallet of concrete of gray of very familiar materials what you see reflected in all of the soffit panels will be everyone that's walking around standing enjoying it meeting up the friends doing whatever they may be doing reflected within this soffit [Music] for us it's interesting that there was this level of serious interest by the people making this new quarter in New York to try to make something that would not be a duplication of somewhere else and would offer something that was hopefully unique to people so I hope this will be a fresh moment so in many ways its its openness its lack of usage specificity is we think to its great advantage and we hope that over the decades to come people will really embrace the project and it will become part of the fabric of New York

Channel: Dezeen

Views: 111,634

Keywords: Dezeen, Architecture, Thomas Heatherwick, Heatherwick Studio, Hudson Yards, Vessel

Id: FYfRqBUA2_g

Length: 4min 12sec (252 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2019