32 VESSEL, NEW YORK CITY
© Michael Moran for Related-Oxford
© Michael Moran for Related-Oxford
“It’s a phenomenal achievement. It’s so New York” Laurence Dudeney, Heatherwick Studio
proportion to the heights of the surrounding buildings. “It needed to have a decent scale in order to do it justice,” says Dudeney. The site itself, and specifically the High Line – a 1.45 mile- long raised park, ‘greenway’ and rail line on New York’s west side – also influenced their thinking. “It’s really energised people and made them think about New York in a different way by making it accessible.” The piece of “heavy infrastructure” inspired them to “think about infrastructure as a way of expression”.
The entire development has been constructed on a platform over working train lines, with trains constantly running underneath, explains Dudeney. “It’s a phenomenal achievement. It’s so New York, it’s just another layer,” he says. “That kind of American ‘look forward’ mentality, we were excited by how infrastructure could play a part in this.”
Coming up with the unusual shape
wasn’t something that took the team too long. “This was an almost immediate understanding,” explains Dudeney. They had spent time researching public spaces
© Getty Images
around the world, particularly in Europe, and realised that areas with a change in level – such as the Spanish Steps in Rome – were a “phenomenal magnet for people to come and hang out.”
They began exploring the idea of using steps and “went on this exploration of stairs and historic infrastructural uses of them”. At this point they came across the Indian Stepwells, the geometry of which became the direct inspiration for Vessel’s design. “We were thinking about how the geometry would play and fit,” says Dudeney. “But the idea always remained the same.” The resulting self-supporting structure, which has no columns or beams, is a series of pairs of staircases (154 flights in total), between each of which is inserted a steel spine. The building’s porous structure was designed as such so people could look out of it, as well as in. “We never saw this as an indoor experience, it felt wrong to enclose it,” Dudeney explains. “It was something that generated purely from thinking of the experience of how people would navigate it and what do they see.”
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