The Vessel — that deluxe gift basket of nothing at Hudson Yards, designed for visitors to climb and descend until their knees groan in order to attain less-than-stunning views — has at long last reopened, now with more impeded vistas and less potential for suicide. Thomas Heatherwick’s Instagram-happy sculpture, a triumph of high-design pointlessness, opened in 2019 and closed in 2021 after four people had jumped to their deaths. It has remained off-limits ever since as the designers studied how to retrofit the thing. Voilà: They’ve wrapped it in high-grade chicken wire! Or, to be precise, they’ve installed tensile steel mesh on one portion and blocked off the rest, presumably as they test public reaction.
The result is fine from a distance, where the mesh recedes into invisibility, but it’s a sad compromise up close, where the carefully engineered stretching and minimal hardware can’t disguise the awkwardness. If the unadulterated Vessel offered the public anything for the $10 admission, it was the sensation of rising serenely above the city and getting a chance to commune directly with the river and the sky. Now that corporate suggestion of freedom comes with an implicit warning: If you’re looking for somewhere to act on your despair, go elsewhere.
Wrapping the big bauble in mesh is a sane and necessary move if the Vessel is going to remain open. (My preference would be for dismantling and reerecting it in the Nevada desert.) But the gambit does accentuate the structure’s inherent silliness, even its menace. On reopening morning, only some sections were open, the elevator was temporarily offline, and visitors kept running into gated-off staircases that closed off the possibility of a quick exit. In those circumstances, Heatherwick’s high-gloss curiosity had a whiff of the penitentiary. On closer inspection, the whiff turned into a reek. You peer through the mesh right in front of your nose to another layer on the far side. Gaze up at a skyscraper and you behold architecture and sky chopped into diamond shapes. Look down and the points where various segments come together form a cobwebbed tangle. Glance at the copper-colored undersides of each staircase, and reflected in each burnished panel is another stretch of fencing. Wherever you turn, there’s another barrier to be reckoned with.
Photo: Justin Davidson
This form of jury-rigged expediency was an inevitable fix for a public building-that’s-not-a-building, a design that ignored inherent problems of accessibility, and a structure that functioned as a predictable — and predicted — focal point for the desire to end it all. I hope the change solves the immediate problem of preventing suicide; it can’t do anything to address the more fundamental question of why anyone thought this attempt at architectural spectacle was a worthwhile urban adornment.
The Vessel on September 18 as the steel netting was being installed.
Photo: Christopher Bonanos
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