New Culture Shed for Manhattan's West Side

This story has been around for a while with recent note in the Wall Street Journal.  But if you didn't catch it and if you don't while away the hours at local Community Board 4 meetings or routinely beat a path between the ends of The Highline, you may not have heard that the folks who just finished renovating Lincoln Center have been working on a design for a Culture Shed on the West Side of Manhattan as part of the Hudson Yards Development Project. 

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the renovation architects for Lincoln Center, have for quite some time been knocking around the concept of the Culture Shed which would be at the base of one of the design firm's residential towers to be erected around 30th Street by The Highline, a public park built on an old elevated rail line along the West Side.

The idea of the Culture Shed came about because so many of New York's culture groups don't have access to proper venues.  One example promoted is that the poor New York Fashion Week has to present itself under pop-up tents each year.  Tents, really, we're all victims, aren't we?  There are performance groups who need big spaces but can't afford them.  Apparently, there are touring entertainment and exhibition groups who skip New York because of the inability to fit into an affordable venue. 

The Culture Shed would have three galleries, an open rooftop cafe and exhibit space, and a 125-140 foot tall retractable canopy that could be wheeled out over top the public plaza space to create a partially enclosed major space for entertainment and public events.  When the space is not in use, the canopy would be wheeled back and the plaza would return to being public space.  We're talking about more than 80,000 square feet of gallery/exhibit/event space with the ability to increase it by 30,000 when the canopy is deployed over the public plaza space.  From a distance, this looks like it could also be a venue for innovative dance groups.

The private use of that big public plaza space is a thorny issue with the West Side's Community Board 4 which wields the thumbs up/thumbs down on the project.  If public access to the public plaza can be frequently blocked from the public for private events, then the Board wants somebody to come up with another 20,000 square feet of public space for the West Side community. 

Then there is that additional thorny issue of what constitutes "culture" for purposes of the Culture Shed.  The artsy characters of Community Board 4, who are known for their caustic charisma and preservationist policies for the West Side neighborhoods, want "culture" defined more narrowly so that the space won't be used like the Javits Convention Center.  To loosely paraphrase an unimpressed CB4 member, "We don't want no stinkin' trade shows near our Highline" – that's right, you tell 'em.

Here are some designer-provided pictures that have appeared on NYCurbed, ArchDaily, and the Wall Street Journal this past week.  Note that they've left off all the inevitable advertising and name branding on the top of the canopy and around the plaza that would needle the CB4ers.  It all looks pretty on paper, so to speak, but no one knows what it will cost or from whose pockets the money will come.  And no one has explained why groups who can't afford any of New York's other venues could afford this new one.  Nevertheless, the idea of a Culture Shed on the West Side is a promising one – as many new ideas tend to be.

Comments

[Erica]

Now this is a beautiful complex and quite imaginative on the part of the architects. By extreme contrast "Mariinsky II," which is set to open on May 2 looks like a three way hybrid of Costco on the canal, Home Depot, and a warehouse on a waterfront. I kid you not. MO.

[Haglund]

lol, Erica. This shed could turn out to be one big Budweiser, Verizon, Taco Bell moving billboard.

Mariinsky II looks a little out of place for the neighborhood, but if it were situated uptown next to our new Time Warner Towers, it might not look so bad.

[Fred]

Holy Shit what an eyesore. I almost want to move just to vote thumbs down. On the other hand, anything to get the fashionista out of Lincoln Center. On the third hand, thumbs down to ANY private usage. That's BS. You want to build your ugly ass towers you need to provide exclusively public space.

[Haglund]

Hi Fred. We shouldn't underestimate that shrewd political animal – Community Board 4. They skillfully engineered the failure of the new Giants stadium on the West Side a few years back. I never want to know the details of what they did behind closed doors to persuade Albany to quash it, but I'm grateful.