In my sophomore year of college, I started to be afraid of balconies. I don’t know where it came from—perhaps it stemmed from a broader fear of heights—but it was and remains an intense phobia. Every time I get up high in an atrium or on a balcony or some other place with little in between my body and the dizzying, distant ground, I panic—I think to myself, I could die here. I back away, because, factually speaking, I could. It would take so little. This is a terrible phobia for an architecture critic to have, seeing as so much of architecture these days is, well, tall, but I manage alright so long as I don’t lean on any railings.
The Vessel in New York City’s Hudson Yards is all balconies, which explains why I’ve only visited it once, and why I will never, ever visit it again. The same fact also explains why the sixteen-story Vessel has been the site of three suicides. The latest, occurring on January 11, prompted the structure’s temporary closure and has led many to question how it might be adapted to prevent jumping.
I visited the Vessel in the spring of 2019, admittedly after I first wrote about it. I told no one I was going. I took a train up to New York, walked from Penn Station, got my timed ticket, ticked the little box signing away all my privacy rights, and entered, staring upward. I asked myself if it were possible to be anonymous in a place designed for performance, and, as a social experiment, I turned my phone off, put it in my jacket pocket, and dodged the photo takers. It was a particularly unpleasant day, not quite springtime, not quite winter—cloudy and morose. To experience the Vessel alone was miserable and alienating. The structure was still new, getting a ticket took some trial and error, and even on a day with terrible lighting, there were people taking pictures everywhere, be them selfies with friends or influencers getting snapped by their attendant boyfriends. Everyone was beautiful, everyone was performing. Looking with their phones out onto the various views of the city, instagramming, smiling, they had come to consume the architecture and take a piece of it home with them, pretending that their lives were made more glamorous by being there.
Architecturally, the Vessel is barren; it’s steel and copper and stone. It looks like shearing metal sounds, and there was plenty of shearing metal roaring in the background for reference because Hudson Yards was, at that point, terminally incomplete. I resisted the urge to take the elevators. I entered the staircase, frowned at how the detailing was already coming apart, the banisters grubby with fingerprints, metal seams enclosing those banisters turning up at their lips. I gazed out onto New York, glittering and littered with cranes, and I felt empty, drained—too poor and ugly to live there, a perpetual interloper. By the time I reached the third story, I could go no further. I was afraid. I was surrounded on both sides by balconies, unprotected, my anxious reflection staring back at me on every slick surface, and the only thing I could do was nervously walk back down, white knuckling the railing.
I lasted less than ten minutes in the Vessel, an architectural bauble that serves to remind us that we are surveilled objects of consumption, driven by technology to put on a happy face and pretend that our lives are more interesting than we are, in a city that is becoming increasingly inaccessible to residents both new and old, in a world that is quite frankly cruel and difficult to live in. When I heard that people were killing themselves by jumping off the Vessel, I thought about my own fear and how being in the Vessel concentrated that fear and scattered it everywhere like a prism. There was no escaping the ground below or my own image. As an armature for looking out, the Vessel induced the opposite response.
The Vessel is an architectural bauble that serves to remind us that we are surveilled objects of consumption, driven by technology to put on a happy face and pretend that our lives are more interesting than we are.
When we look at buildings where multiple suicides have occurred (Bobst Library at NYU is another New York example that comes to mind), they are often spaces that reflect our own powerlessness or amplify the cruelties of the world, cruelties that are viscerally real and often feel inescapable. And yet, it would be unfair to lay the responsibility for these suicides on architecture. Suicide is a complicated social issue, intersecting society, mental health, and infrastructures of care (or, in the case of the United States, the lack of them). To blame a structure, even one as horrific as the Vessel, misses the point. To talk about architecture’s duty to prevent suicide isn’t to talk about raising the height of banisters or adding protective glass, or any other fix to keep people from jumping, though that does help.
This is a matter of both having empathy when in the design process—and I emphasize empathy rather than the legal obligation of liability—while also doing things to advocate for a better world, a more just world, a less cruel world. The most heartbreaking thing is, even in such a world, people will still choose to take their own life for reasons we will never understand.
I confess that this is a difficult essay to write. It’s so easy to indict the Vessel’s designer Thomas Heatherwick for prioritizing views over people’s safety, and, make no mistake, that’s why people killed themselves on the Vessel—simply because they could. But the Vessel, like all up-to-code balconies, is not inherently unsafe. I am unsure how to communicate in words that some places are difficult to be alive in, architecturally oppressive beyond mere aesthetics—that they heighten feelings of helplessness and aloneness. All I can do, as the critic, is to speak of my own experience in these spaces, to incite architecture as a field to agitate for more empathetic practices both in its projects and in the comings and goings of its own offices, ask architects to consider how their own practices make life unbearable for others, ask difficult questions about how buildings make us feel, and interrogate what it means to build in a world as difficult and cruel as this one. I admit that these are questions I do not have the answers to. Because architecture professes to be a field that betters everyday life, it thus falls to practitioners and critics to go beyond world-building rhetoric to get at the heart of this issue, which is that everyday life straddles boundaries architecture cannot break down.
The Vessel is a terrible structure reflective of an equally terrible society, and it’s difficult to say whether we should design better buildings or fight collectively for a better, more compassionate world where people don’t feel so alone. Both seem inadequate, if not empty goals. Perhaps, as a starting point, architects should use these tragic events to take a second look at their designs and ask themselves a very simple question: what would they do if they received the most devastating news of their life there? I am unsure whether or not this is a productive exercise, but it is at least an interesting one. The thing about buildings is that they are the backdrops for everyday life—at its highs and its lows, at its worst and its best. The thing about architecture is we often only design for the best.