Pier 55 is an island park located in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, initiated by billionaire Barry Diller and fashion mogul Diane von Furstenburg as a “gist to the city of New York”…In addition to scheduling delays due to environmental lawsuits filed by the City Club of New York (quietly supported by not-quite billionaire developer Douglas Durst), the project–designed by Heatherwick Studio and Matthews Nielsen Landscape Architects–has ballooned in cost sevenfold since its inception seven years ago, from a paltry $35 million to $250 million, causing the philanthropists to seek political intervention and taxpayer funding. So, as New York City’s vital infrastructure slowly crumbles, Andrew Cuomo has seen it fit to provide a $50 million cash infusion to the project (nicknamed “Diller Island”), to end the legal disputes and seek a matching commitment of $50 million from the de Blasio administration.
Thomas Heatherwick gets involved in work with funny-smelling and seemingly limitless budgets so often the New York Times dubbed him “The Billionaire Whisperer.” He is often scrutinized for his ignorance of cost and disregard for the context, but some have even gone so far as to describe his work as Orwellian. That is, as 1984-style landscapes of surveillance and enforced consumption. When applied to the recently opened “Vessel” (commissioned by the billionaire developer Stephen Ross), the description seems spot-on considering the ticketed entry, armed guards, surveillance kiosks and de facto ownership that Ross’s Related Company tried to exert over visitors’ photographs of it.
It appears that the bizarre social contract of the experience economy is that we understand all of this to be true and yet still want our selfie there. As dystopias go, this phenomenon points more towards Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984. As Niel Postman writes, “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.”
In the case of Pier 55, Barry Diller remarked that, “People may say, ‘We don’t like it,’ but at least it is a project that people’s eyes focus on and they say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’”
Diller’s oddly candid assessment of the project suggests that our attention has been misdirected by those unscrupulous politicians and cunning businesspeople who brand urban developments in such a way as to prevent us, “the public,” from scrutinizing the kind of urbanism that results from pure profit motive. So, instead of recognizing that these new “public spaces” function less like what they purport to be and more like “real-estate amenities,” we are stuck gawking at the starry-eyed Heatherwick’s incongruous forms. It seems likely that what Diller really meant was, “Wow, that’s distracting!”
The question of whether Pier 55 is good or bad design–the question I set out to answer in this review–is just another form of passivity writ large. In fact, the answer depends so much on one’s socioeconomic class that it amounts to a false dilemma masking a potentially cynical trend in New York City’s urban planning regimes, which seem to follow the tautological mantra, “if we make things seem better than they are, then things need not be better than they are.”
Examples of Potemkin village urbanism are collecting in Chelsea: the High Line park where you can’t have a picnic, the Vessel’s redundant stairs you need a ticket to climb, and–based on preliminary evidence–Diller’s island will be for corporate events and private concerts.
What I can say by way of design criticism is that Pier 55 shares certain traits with its aforementioned neighbors. They are all removed from the urban fabric by stairs, ramps, or bridges. They all have a bottom and a top designed to be looked up at or out from and therefore lack the characteristics of being space at all. No space at all makes for lousy urban public space.
So, is Pier 55 a good design for the public who paid for it? My hunch is probably not, but we’ll wait and see when it opens in the Spring of 2021. You might just catch me there taking a selfie.