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Old Posted Mar 15, 2019, 2:54 PM
Bill Ditnow Bill Ditnow is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2003
Posts: 270
Heh, love that risque painting/sculpture

The NY Times architecture critic today, in a long piece, really slammed Hudson Yards, on financial, architectural and aesthetic grounds. He particularly hates the Vessel: “stairway to nowhere …” “preens” … “casts egregious shadows…” “…ruinously manspreading…” etc.

On the whole, the project is “socialism for billionaires,” he writes, and is “nearly devoid or urban design.” He scoffs at buildings that look like “glass shards on top of a wall” and “shiny envelopes” without any “semblance of human scale.”

For me, the “glass shards” and angularity of a couple of the buildings are the best part. It reminds me very much, in spirit, of Libeskind’s original conception of the World Trade Center site, all lost with the abandonment of the off-center spire at One World Trade and the decision to drop Foster’s slanting diamond roof for Two World Trade. In the end we’ll get four boring flat-topped buildings, even assuming 2 World Trade is ever built.

He concludes with one of the cheapest and oldest shots in the architecture critics’ book — reveling in the view from the observation deck, and then cracking that from it, he doesn’t have to see Hudson Yards. Of course, people said the same thing about the Eiffel Tower observation deck.