Money enables a lot, but it apparently can’t buy love – and it can’t buy resonance. Big budgets don’t necessarily buy resonance in experience. Capital enables scale, and freedom to express. In this particular example we learn that perhaps designing from a human standpoint has led to a much more satisfying outcome.
There has been a lot of opinion about the Hudson Yards development, and it’s incredible structures.
Installations like Vessel and The Shed are certainly marvels of engineering, and subjectively, of style. The retail core of Hudson Yards has the world’s most exclusive brands as inhabitants. Every LEED box was assiduously pursued and checked off. Yet in it’s striving to achieve the status of iconic, Hudson Yards has maybe lost sight of it’s most important inhabitants.
It’s a problematic punctuation at the end of a triumph of human scale experience – the Highline. The Highline transformed metropolitan space into a nexus of nature, interaction, and sense stimulation. It did this in the heart of a dense urban environment, yet evoked an atmosphere that is pastoral.
While Hudson Yards boggles the mind in terms of scale and capital, Industry City in Brooklyn appeals to the senses at a human scale, and is being rewarded with the creation of a vibrant community and culture around it.
It is demonstrating how authentic humanly themed environments can make brick and mortar relevant and desirable.
This astute article in The Robin Report shed’s some light on how approachable and resonant perhaps supersede flash and size.
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