Artsy: Walking west from Penn Station, dodging potholes on the bumpy streets of Hell’s Kitchen, the glassy high-rise buildings of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards appear like a hallucination over low-hanging storefronts and crumbling brick buildings. The freshly minted neighborhood’s sleek new arts nonprofit, The Shed, fits in well with its dazzling surroundings: luxury condos and high-end retail stores.
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There is a hazard with multipurpose spaces: although they are very flexible and can handle a wide variety of demands, they are not particularly good at any one of them. Perhaps arenas are great at four wall shows, but there is a fairly high minimum to put on a show in an arena. Even the most thoughtfully designed black boxes are never quite as flexible as they are needed to be. Spaces that are somewhere in the middle in terms of size often have hard stops in what their capabilities are. Sometimes, those hard stops are things that only stagehands know about and would never occur to a theater designer. In any case, it seems all well and good for the developer to try to use art to bridge the gap described in the article, but I am doubtful that this building will achieve this goal. First of all, it is not terribly inviting--it looks like a cross between a bus station, a power plant, and an inflatable sports arena. Second of all, most of the ticketed shows mentioned in the article seem, in a sense, self-indulgent and elitist.
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