Conceived with the theater director Joan Littlewood, it was intended to be a “ university in the streets” where working-class East Londoners could engage with new technology in a fusion of entertainment and education.īut there’s no parallel found in the Shed’s design. The Fun Palace was more than spectacle it had an important social agenda. Created as a multidisciplinary venue, the Fun Palace was an ambitiously flexible structure that could house everything from an inflatable conference hall to a moving catwalk, sewage purification, and ventilation tracks. According to Liz Diller, the firm’s main inspiration was Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, a building designed in the mid-1960s but never built. However, architects from Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group have designed the Shed with a view toward the past. During Wednesday’s press preview, artistic director Alex Poots described his 200,000-square-foot behemoth as “a place for invention, for curiosity, for risk-taking.” He claimed his complex would create “parity among art forms” by going “beyond binaries, of art and the sacred, East and West, public and private, man and woman.” Perelman Center for the Performing Arts that’s slated to open near the World Trade Center in 2021.)Īs critic Claire Bishop recently wrote for Artforum, the Shed’s benefactors have poured “a fraction of their profits into a cultural project that enhances their social status.” Indeed, the new arts palace will more likely perpetuate the hypocrisies of urban planning that have buoyed wealthy real estate developers in New York for years.īut listen to the Shed’s leadership and you’ll hear an entirely different story. (And that’s not even to mention the multidisciplinary Ronald O. The cultural keystone of the Far West Side development is a haughty hybrid-performance venue in a city already overflowing with them at places like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Performance Space New York, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1. McCourt Hall (still under construction) can seat approximately 1,250 and accommodate 2,000 standing visitors adjoining gallery spaces can expand the audience to 3,000 And after more than a decade of planning that began as a failed attempt by the Bloomberg administration to lure the Olympics, the Shed will officially open to visitors on Friday. ![]() Versailles has more humility than the Vessel (a $200 million wastebasket of shiny bronze designed by Thomas Heatherwick) and the Shops (a nearby luxury mall complex where cooks served caviar on oysters during its VIP-night opening). ![]() The stakes could not be higher for the Hudson Yards complex the $20 billion development has been universally panned by architecture critics who characterize it as a one percenter’s playground of expensive baubles. ![]() There is a frantic pace to preparations, and I can’t tell if it’s because the organizers are excited for their grand opening or terrified by the impending backlash. The distant sound of buzzing and the thwacking of sledgehammers bores into the building’s two theaters, two galleries, and its skylit multipurpose room. Electricians are scouring the building for defects, installing elevator buttons and tweaking escalators. It’s two days before the Shed’s grand opening on April 5 and plywood floorboards still carpet some areas of the $500 million complex. The Shed’s movable shell sits on six large bogie wheels it was inspired by industrial crane technology (all photos by author)
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