The Shed. A New Hub for the Arts
Opening this April, The Shed is a brandnew cultural center commissioning original works of art across all disciplines. Located on the Far West Side of Manhattan, this new hub for the arts is hosted inside a 200,000-square-foot structure that can be physically transformed to adapt to projects on various scales. Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Galleries and Senior program advisor of The Shed, asked Elizabeth Diller – co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and lead architect of The Shed – the behind-thescenes story of the project.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: The Shed is your latest creation, designed by the studio you founded in 1981, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and developed initially with the Rockwell Group. This building is located on the far West Side of Manhattan. It is a multi-arts center created to design and produce all types of performing arts, visual arts and popular culture. It is a very large building that seems to defy gravity, because it can be moved very easily. A building on wheels, very much in the legacy of the great English architect and teacher Cedric Price, who always said that art institutions should be infrastructural, to adapt to many different functions.
ELIZABETH DILLER: Architecture is geo-fixed, it’s heavy, it’s cumbersome and there for good. And it’s expensive. It’s everything that’s contrary to contemporary art, which by definition is constantly in flux. The challenge is, how do you build a permanent building for a discipline that is constantly evolving? The Shed is a response to that question. The City issued a request for proposals in 2008 when the economy was tanking, looking for ideas for a new cultural facility for Hudson Yards. There are over 1200 cultural institutions in New York. Why make one more? But the irony is that the arts are housed in cultural silos all over New York. You have museums and galleries for the visual arts and theaters for performance. But there is no purpose-built cultural entity that houses the visual arts and performing arts under one roof. The Shed is responsive to the needs of artists in all creative disciplines.
So there was an urgent need for such a place…
We saw a need for a cross-disciplinary platform with built-in flexibility. Often, flexible buildings are generic in form. We wanted to make a flexible building that can have a strong architectural character. The building would be flexible into a future it does not know. It would be so flexible, it could even change its footprint. As art comes in all sizes – big, medium and small – why do we have to commit to a building of a fixed size? New York doesn’t have a cultural entity that’s large and small, indoor and outdoor. Cedric Price was the one architect that actually dealt with these problems throughout his career, and we felt his Fun Palace project [1964] was the most relevant precedent. His was a plug-in architecture intended to last for only ten years. It used cybernetics to learn and respond and evolve. Even though the Fun Palace was never executed, it has had a great impact on generations of architects.
How did the idea of The Shed begin to take shape?
The question we posed was: what will art look like ten, twenty, even thirty years from now? The answer was that the future is unknowable. We don’t know what media artists will be working in or at what scale. So the most important thing to do in a real estate oriented city is to preserve space for artists and to provide for certain needs that will never go away. Gravity will never change – so structural loading capacity would be critical as would be electrical loading capacity. The building had to be climate controlled, as well as light and sound controlled. That’s it. Ultimately, like the Fun Palace, it’s an architecture of infrastructure.
What does the building look like?
There’s an eight-story fixed building encased by a telescoping outer steel shell, which can be deployed to double the footprint of the fixed building. The fixed building has two large floor plates dedicated to exhibition, a third to a versatile theater and another floor that houses a rehearsal space, a creative lab and an event space. Then, we have the telescoping shell that can be deployed on demand. Its structural roof provides a technical deck that spans the entire footprint of the building. It’s like having a fly space of an opera house over the stage and audience combined. Stage personnel can fly anything down from above. When deployed, the shell creates light-, sound- and temperature-controlled space for theatrical productions, concerts, large installations or events. It has a new approach to sustainable structures. You don’t have to heat or cool the large space if you’re not using it. You can simply nest it. You could drive a truck right onto the space and use the shell as a gantry crane to bring anything into the building and distribute it to all floors.
The building has no fat, only muscle. It’s made of structurally welded steel. Instead of glass we used ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) pillows, a Teflon-based material that is filled with low-pressure air and provides the thermal properties of glass at 1/100 of the weight. The space can be entirely blacked out. Guillotine doors on three sides can open up to create a seamlessly indoor/outdoor space. Or the Shed can be entirely nested and thus create an outdoor programmable space. It only takes five minutes to deploy, at the click of a button. The shell weighs 8 million pounds, and sits on eight wheels; the total surface contact for each wheel carrying 1 million pounds is the size of the palm of your hand. It uses the horsepower of one Prius engine. The movement is absolutely silent. Though exuberant, The Shed is also humble in a way. It’s just hardware to support the software that will be brought by the artists and curators. It reasserts the city as a place of art production rather than a place of art consumption, which it has become.
The idea of a building that is able to move and adapt is very interesting… Because of course it is a paradox to build an art institution for the future, since we never know what’s going to happen there. How is this way of thinking being shifted into the project you are working on at the moment, the London Centre for Music? In this case, you are operating in the city where Price’s ideas had their origin, designing a very large complex.
It really is a paradox. When you design a building, you’re always up against obsolescence. It takes at least five years to develop a concept through execution. More often, it takes ten years. So any idea inevitably gets out of sync with the time of its realization. An idea has to be pretty damn good to transcend our fast paced culture. When you’re dealing with expensive pieces of real estate, expensive labor and materials, human safety and well-being, there’s a lot at stake. Our studio takes that responsibility very seriously. In an effort to future-proof new buildings, it’s important to not over-determine everything. Especially in cultural buildings, it’s critical to leave room for curators and artists to re-script all the spaces.
The case of the London Centre for Music is slightly different. Here one has to balance specificity with flexibility. It’s important to have both great orchestral sound and the flexibility to reimagine the conventions of the stage and the house. Today’s composers are not necessarily writing music for traditional orchestral performance. It’s important to integrate media, explode the stage, and radically rethink scale. Like The Shed, I see the
building as open infrastructure with the ability to tear out its nervous system and equipment at any time. But this type of flexibility can produce a building with distinct character each time. In the Centre for Music, the interface with the public is paramount. The building is very urban and public and welcomes everyone with or without a ticket to a concert.
Getting back to The Shed, you have developed this facility as an extraordinary tool to make unrealized curatorial projects possible. So many things can happen there between composers and visual artists, art and science, technology. Interestingly enough, when we first met, you were still not really sure if the project would ever be built. Please tell us something about that aspect, because I think it’s interesting how such an unrealized project becomes concrete reality.
From 2008 to 2011 we worked with almost no funding or institutional support and simply propelled the project because we were passionate about the idea. It was post 9/11 and Michael Bloomberg had just been elected as Mayor of New York City. My studio’s three major architecture and planning initiatives – Lincoln Center, the High Line and now The Shed – all came after 9/11, while Bloomberg held office. There was a renewed sense of citizenship. He was a unique mayor. His administration was not made up of typical bureaucrats, but leaders in their fields. It was socially progressive and entrepreneurial and there was a great cultural commissioner, Kate Levin. She was behind the scenes all the time while the Shed was being conceived. But we were working rather autonomously, with advice from many cultural leaders around New York.
At one point, three years into our work, we were asked to make a presentation to the Mayor. We were told that he had a short attention span so to make the presentation no more then ten minutes long. An hour and a half later, the Mayor was still asking questions. I knew then that the project could become real.
He asked for a business plan and it took us ¾ of a year to put it together. It was a bit optimistic but had a strong ethos. So now, eleven years later, The Shed is an independent non-profit organization on sovereign land at Hudson Yards. It has a board led by Dan Doctoroff, who has been its pioneering leader for many years, and we worked as a temporary client with him until Alex Poots, our great artistic director and CEO, came in 2014. Alex immediately decided that the Shed would only commission new work, defining its identity as a true a place of production.
To end our conversation, I’d like to quote what you said in an interview: “We do independent projects like art installations, curatorial projects, theater works, and dance productions. We’re working on two operas right now. We just finished a book and we’re starting a new one. We collaborate with an array of experts in different disciplines: from robotics engineers to composers and choreographers, to climatologists and material scientists. We follow a vision and do all the research necessary to get there. We did not know how to make a cloud before we started Blur. Much of our work shares one thing in common: we jump of a cliff without a parachute and we hope that we make a soft landing.” I think that is a good way of summing up your practice.
Thank you, Hans. I said that? Well, it is appropriate. But my mother used to tell me that it’s a crime to be indoors in a dark room on a sunny day, so let’s go out.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director at The Serpentine Galleries, London and senior program advisor at The Shed, New York.
*The interview took place during the Engadin Art Talks, “Grace & Gravity”, Zuoz, Switzerland, 26 & 27 January 2019.