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Stephen Ross, the seventy-seven-year-old billionaire property developer and the owner of the Miami Dolphins, has a winningly informal, old-school conversational style. On a recent morning in Manhattan, he spoke of the moment, several years ago, when he decided that the plaza of one of his projects, Hudson Yards—a Doha-like cluster of towers on Manhattan’s West Side—needed a magnificent object at its center. He recalled telling himself, “It has to be big. It has to be monumental.” He went on, “Then I said, ‘O.K. Who are the great sculptors?’ ” (Ross pronounced the word “sculptures.”) Before long, he met with Thomas Heatherwick, the acclaimed British designer of ingenious, if sometimes unworkable, things. Ross told me that there was a presentation, and that he was very impressed by Heatherwick’s “what do you call it—Television? Internet?” An adviser softly said, “PowerPoint?”
Ross was in a meeting room at the Time Warner Center, which his company, Related, built and partly owns, and where he lives and works. We had a view of Columbus Circle and Central Park. The room was filled with models of Hudson Yards, which is a mile and a half southwest, between Thirtieth and Thirty-third Streets, and between Tenth Avenue and the West Side Highway. There, Related and its partner, Oxford Properties Group, are partway through erecting the complex, which includes residential space, office space, and a mall—with such stores as Neiman Marcus, Cartier, and Urban Decay, and a Thomas Keller restaurant designed to evoke “Mad Men”—most of it on a platform built over active rail lines. Ross refers to the project, which will yield eighteen million square feet in sixteen buildings on twenty-eight acres, and cost about twenty-five billion dollars, as the largest private-sector real-estate development in American history.
Ross looked down on a model of the plaza, which featured a miniature version of the structure commissioned from Heatherwick: a copper-colored, urn-shaped lattice of a hundred and fifty-four staircases and eighty landings. It looked like scaffolding that had been readied for the construction of a hundred-and-fifty-foot head of Ozymandias. Ross called it “my baby.” For the moment, it’s known as the Vessel—or, officially, as Vessel. (Ross longs for the public to give it an affectionate nickname.) One can think of it as a compressed extension of the High Line, or as the site of a perpetual evacuation drill; it’s a proposed future venue for downhill mountain-bike races. Starting sometime next year, it will be open to the public, via free, timed-entry tickets. Ross’s evident delight in the piece—even as some of his associates wonder about its size and purpose, and its cost, which exceeds a hundred and fifty million dollars—derives partly from his confidence that, in time, it will become “the icon for New York,” just as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris. The Vessel is about as wide as it is tall, and will fit nicely into an Instagram photograph.
Ross recalled a work of art that, in the late nineteen-nineties, was incorporated into the façade of a Related development on the south side of Union Square. To his regret, his company took the advice of the Public Art Fund and the Municipal Art Society. “It was a disaster,” he said. “That thing where the smoke comes out? Whatever the hell it is.” He was talking about Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel’s “The Metronome,” an unloved combination of elements: a string of L.E.D. numbers displaying both the time of day and the amount of time left in the day; puffs of steam emitted from a large hole; a protruding human hand. Ross said, sadly, “I wanted to put a Frank Stella there. He wanted to do a great thing.” (Ross regularly attends Art Basel Miami Beach, and his collection of modern painting and sculpture includes works by Fernando Botero, Jim Dine, and Niki de Saint Phalle.)
For Hudson Yards, Ross told himself, “I’m not giving this to anyone else.” He made the plaza’s centerpiece a personal project, and started with the wise observation that “every visitor, and every New Yorker, wants to go to Rockefeller Center during Christmas season, to see the tree.” He continued, “So I said, ‘I need a three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day tree, O.K.?’ ” He began to ask artists for proposals.
In the fall of 2012, on a bye week for the Dolphins, when his wife was away in Paris, Ross visited Storm King, the upstate museum of large outdoor art works. He was joined by Jay Cross, the Related executive in charge of Hudson Yards. Cross brought along a monograph that had been published in advance of a Heatherwick retrospective, “Designing the Extraordinary,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. Ross leafed through the book as they drove up the Hudson Valley. He saw a bench, made from extruded aluminum, with an alluringly rippled surface; a motorized pedestrian bridge that can curl up into a ball, like a wood louse, on one side of a waterway in London. And Cross reminded Ross of the work that Heatherwick had revealed a few months earlier, at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. Two hundred and four copper cones attached to long stalks—one for each nation—came together, in a mechanical flourish, to create a cauldron.
Ross said, “Bring him in.”
Joanna Lumley, the British actress who starred in “Absolutely Fabulous,” is a friend of Heatherwick’s, and often refers to him, fondly, as a child. She has said that, after his early successes, Londoners began asking, “What can this brilliant boy do next?” Speaking on a panel in 2014, she called him an “extraordinary and brilliant boy.” Heatherwick is forty-eight, employs nearly two hundred people, and has two children. (He is separated from their mother.) But he projects an air of otherworldliness and innocence. His hair is worn tousled—with a curl or two dangling over his forehead—and his wardrobe is oriented toward very loose pants, baggy white shirts, and vests. He gives the impression of a child apprentice in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
His firm, Heatherwick Studio, is on a busy street in King’s Cross, in a red brick Edwardian building that the company shares with a two-star chain hotel. The studio, reached through a courtyard, first presents a visitor with a view of shelves holding dozens of design oddities, such as might be displayed in a Victorian museum or a Paul Smith menswear store. These include a Japanese mechanical lucky cat, spoons with unusually long handles, an engine part, and perfume bottles designed by the studio for Christian Louboutin.
Heatherwick has an earnest, expressive way of talking: wide eyes, little shakes of the head. He seems to be forever making the discovery that he has said something delightfully apt. After the Olympics, there was a brief period of optimism in British civic life—a wave of national amazement that the event hadn’t ended in disaster and humiliation. Heatherwick helped to create that moment, and then came to represent it. In 2013, he became a Commander of the British Empire. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London between 2008 and 2016, and now the British Foreign Secretary, compared him to Michelangelo and invited him to join a trade delegation to China. British GQ included him on its annual list of the country’s best-dressed men.
He was praised for his inventiveness, across a range of scales, using a range of materials. Heatherwick has a gift for discovering, in a commission for an object, the opportunity for an event: movement, spectacle, play. Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect, who has collaborated with him, recently said that, unlike many designers, “Thomas is focussed on the jaw-dropping centerpiece—the ‘wow’ moment.” Heatherwick tends to achieve effect more through texture than through form—by, say, stitching or layering a multitude of near-identical parts to make a highly conspicuous whole. His sculpture for an atrium at the Wellcome Trust, in London, is made of a hundred and forty thousand suspended glass spheres, each the size of a plum, arranged into cloudlike forms. He has proposed building a footbridge entirely from a welded cluster of stainless-steel disks. His U.K. Pavilion for Expo 2010, in Shanghai, was a rounded cube formed from sixty thousand translucent acrylic rods that waved in the wind like bullrushes. The design was widely considered a triumph. Rowan Moore, the architecture critic of the London Observer, called it “outstandingly memorable,” noting that “we expect buildings neither to be hairy nor in motion.”
Heatherwick Studio employs architects, but Heatherwick is not an architect. His work could be described as a celebration of never having absorbed, in a formal architectural education, dogma about designing things to be flush and taut. “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work,” Ingels said. “An element of steampunk, almost.”
Heatherwick largely avoids self-deprecation. Last year, he wrote in the Evening Standard that his scheme for a tree-covered “Garden Bridge” over the Thames, in central London, was “extraordinary.” He has been known to sign his name with an exclamation point, and puts effort into couching even a passing thought as a design insight. Not long ago, he told me, with raised eyebrows and a confiding chuckle, that a fireplace “creates a heart to a room,” and that rooms lacking fireplaces “can be a bit focusless.”
His keenness never to be considered unexceptional or businesslike is surely a spur to his creativity, but it can lead to confusion in conversation. When we first met, at a Manhattan café, a little more than a year ago, Heatherwick said that cultural institutions were a “clichéd format” for a designer, and did not particularly interest him. “If everyone’s doing museums, how much differentiation are you going to be able to make if you do one, too?” He was just then completing a major art museum, with an attached luxury hotel, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Heatherwick also suggested that it would make little sense for him to design a chair, because “someone else could do just as good a job.” He added, “The most satisfying thing is to make a difference.” In 2004, Heatherwick designed a limited-edition glass chair. He has also made molded-polypropylene chairs that can be spun like a top. They sell for seven hundred dollars each. Last year, the studio designed a table. For years, Heatherwick has said that he’d like to design prisons and hospitals, but he has not done so.
When we first talked, Heatherwick was working on three major projects in New York: the Vessel; a renovation of David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center, which was expected to cost half a billion dollars; and a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar pier, on the West Side, to be paid for largely by Barry Diller and Diane von Fürstenberg. Among projects elsewhere, Heatherwick was co-designing, with the Bjarke Ingels Group, headquarters buildings for Google in Mountain View, California, and in London.
Such success depends, in part, on gaining the confidence of people with means. In an interview a few years ago, Heatherwick described himself as shy in meetings, but Ingels told me, “I’ve seen him in action—he is almost a hypnotist.” Heatherwick could be thought of as a tycoon’s idea of a creative spirit. Jay Cross, Stephen Ross’s colleague at Related, said that “Thomas sees Stephen as the ultimate patron, and I think Stephen sees Thomas as the ultimate genius.” If Heatherwick is indeed introverted, this hasn’t cut him off from the world: he once sat in the front row at a Burberry fashion show in London. Ross told me that he’d taken Heatherwick to Dolphins games, and that his guest had begun to appreciate the sport. (Asked about the relationship between Ross and Heatherwick, Cross said, “Don’t take this word out of context, but I would say it’s loving.”) Will Hurst, an editor and writer at The Architects’ Journal, in London, recently suggested that Heatherwick, more than any other British designer, knows “how to pull the levers of power.”
Heatherwick would prefer to be seen as an outsider. At our initial meeting, I asked him about the Garden Bridge. It was said that the bridge, sponsored by an unscrupulous Conservative mayor and paid for partly with public funds, was a folly for the few and a venue for corporate celebrations. It was expected to cost two hundred and sixty million dollars. Joanna Lumley, in the role of celebrity civic booster, has for years lobbied for a bridge of this sort, and has promoted Heatherwick’s design, referring to it as “a tiara on the head of our fabulous city.” James Corner, the landscape architect who co-designed the High Line with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architectural firm, is among those who have described it as a vanity project.
I asked Heatherwick about the way the planned bridge had become known, fairly or not, as a symbol of privilege. He answered by saying, “I never went to school with Boris, or anyone from power.” That is, he underlined the class distance between himself and Johnson, the former mayor, whose style—honed at Eton and Oxford—is that of amused, ruling-class insouciance. Heatherwick continued, “I went to a primary school in Wood Green”—an unglamorous North London neighborhood. “My grandmother was a servant at Windsor Castle. My other grandmother was a German Jewish refugee who fled for her life.”
Heatherwick’s background didn’t drop him at the door of the British establishment, but he was left within reach of it. He has the sensitivities of someone given not every advantage. His maternal grandfather, a Marxist poet and a virtuoso recorder player who fought in the Spanish Civil War, was the son of the owner of Jaeger, a leading London fashion firm. His uncle Nicholas Tomalin was a well-known journalist. Thomas’s mother was a jewelry designer who became an expert on beads; his father was a musician, and ran an East London charity, before coming to work part time in his son’s studio. Heatherwick grew up in a house that was big, even if it was in bohemian disarray. (He has said that he was self-conscious about packed-lunch sandwiches that weren’t as neatly made as those of his classmates.) After leaving primary school, Heatherwick attended two well-known private schools: Sevenoaks, in Kent, which was founded in the fifteenth century, and the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley, in Hertfordshire, which puts an emphasis on gardening, handiwork, and a bespoke form of performance art called eurythmy.
Heatherwick attended college in Manchester, and then pursued a graduate degree in furniture design at the Royal College of Art, in London. In the fall of 1993, at the start of his final year, Terence Conran, who founded Habitat, the British furniture chain that popularized a modernist look, and who later founded London’s Design Museum, came to speak to students. Heatherwick introduced himself. (Whenever Heatherwick describes this encounter, he emphasizes grievance over good fortune; at an event at the Parsons School of Design, he said, “My evil professor wouldn’t let me meet him. . . . I had to run down the stairs—the fire stairs—to speak to him.”) Conran, impressed by Heatherwick, invited him to build his graduate-thesis design in a workshop at his seventeenth-century manor house in Berkshire. That spring, Heatherwick lived in Conran’s home and made an eighteen-foot-high gazebo out of hundreds of strips of laminated birch. They became friends, and with Conran’s encouragement Heatherwick quickly set up a commercial studio. Conran has called Heatherwick “the Leonardo da Vinci of our times”; he introduced Heatherwick to Lumley. The birch gazebo now stands in Conran’s garden. A few years ago, James Dyson, the vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur, dislodged the top of it while landing a helicopter on the lawn; it has since been repaired.
On a morning in September, before dawn, a tugboat was pushing a loaded barge from Newark Bay to Manhattan, at the pace of a kayak. In the galley, a crew member fried onions. On the bridge, the captain, Stephen Cluett, dryly referred to the morning’s work as “a Carnival cruise without Kathie Lee and the cocktails.” As the boat went under the Bayonne Bridge, Cluett had a view of the Tribute in Light searchlights, commemorating the 9/11 attacks; as the searchlights faded into first light, the boat passed the Statue of Liberty.
On the barge lay two sculptural pieces of steel, each about the size of a school bus. Painted gray, they were held in place by their weight. Both were future Vessel landings that, at each end, had stairs going up and stairs going down. The people who had been fabricating and transporting these objects referred to them as “dog bones.”
The tugboat reached Hudson Yards. From the river, the half-built Vessel seemed a little lost—a shiny brown espresso cup—amid the clutter of cranes and unfinished high-rises. A clearer river view will emerge, but will then disappear in a few years, after a second growth of towers appears on the western half of the Yards. If the Vessel becomes a rival to the Statue of Liberty, it will be unusual, in the landmark category, for being corralled by skyscrapers. Approached from most directions, it will fully reveal itself only when it’s almost overhead, like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Heatherwick has said that, at a site where there is nothing to commemorate, the Vessel can be a monument “to us”—an opportunity to reflect on something “timeless about humans and our physicality.” On the tugboat, Cluett spoke of a “hundred-and-fifty-five-million-dollar head-scratcher.” When he was told that the cost estimate had risen to two hundred million dollars, including landscaping, he said, “I forgot the landscaping part,” adding, “That’s a lot of goddam mulch.”
The development of the West Side rail yards was initially connected to New York’s bid, thirteen years ago, to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. The city proposed building a stadium atop a platform spanning the wide trench, between Thirtieth and Thirty-third Streets, where the M.T.A. parks L.I.R.R. trains, on two dozen parallel tracks. After the Games, the stadium was to become the home of the New York Jets. In support of the bid, the city created the Special Hudson Yards District, stretching from Thirtieth to Forty-first Streets, to encourage high-density development, with the compensation of new public space and a likely extension of the 7 train.
The stadium plan fell apart, and New York subsequently lost the Olympics to London. But the rezoning and the promised public spending drew developers. As Stephen Ross recently told me, “I learned, during Watergate, ‘Follow the money.’ ” In 2008, Related, then in partnership with Goldman Sachs, made a deal with the M.T.A. to develop the space above the tracks.
Related was obliged to leave half of the platform open to the sky. A strip of new parkland, running onto the site from the north, would flow into a public space about the size of Union Square Park. To the east, there would be a shopping mall; to the south, Related was expected to accommodate, but not operate, an arts institution known as the Culture Shed. (It is now the Shed.) This building was initially oriented on a north-south axis. In 2010, a remarkable design, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, was made public: a six-floor box with two nesting translucent canopies, which could be rolled out onto an adjoining area, creating an additional covered exhibition or performance space. (These two canopies later became one.) Ross was unhappy when he realized that the canopies—expected to be deployed for at least half the year—would claim space that he considered his. “I thought, There’s no way in the world!” he told me. “I said, ‘It’s going to block my retail.’ ”
Related successfully pressed city planners. The Shed was turned ninety degrees, to become parallel with Thirtieth Street. In this orientation, it was squeezed for space, so it was partly integrated into the base of a planned seventy-floor luxury residential tower. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a firm that had never worked on a high-rise, was asked to co-design that tower. A Related spokesperson told me that there was no connection between the Shed’s repositioning and the architectural contract. Nobody at Diller Scofidio + Renfro agreed to be interviewed for this article, but last year Liz Diller, one of the firm’s partners, told a journalist that the eventual arrangement was a “deal with the Devil,” adding, “We never imagined in a million years that we would be doing a commercial tower. But we like to do everything once.” A penthouse in the tower is currently listed at thirty-two million dollars.
Related’s initial model for its plaza was Bryant Park, in midtown. The company commissioned a report from Dan Biederman, who, in the eighties and nineties, led the resuscitation of that space, which had become a derelict spot for drug dealing. He is now the president of the Bryant Park Corporation and runs a consultancy. His advice, he recently said, was to “first program the space and then design the space.” (He also calculated that, although Bryant Park can expect a hundred and ten days a year of nice sitting-outside weather, the far West Side can expect only eighty, because of wind.) Biederman told me, without complaint, that a public space dominated by one very expensive object—the Vessel will cost more than the highest price ever paid for a sculpture at auction—could be considered “the opposite of our philosophy” at Bryant Park, where the total capital spending since the eighties has been about twenty-five million dollars. “This will be a real test,” he said. “I’m absolutely undecided whether Hudson Yards will be the greatest success or a failure.”
By early 2012, the footprints of the structures on the platform’s eastern side were fixed: four towers, the Shed, shops, restaurants. Related asked for proposals from three landscape-architecture firms. The platform, only a few feet thick and heated up by idling trains below, presented a horticultural challenge. Related executives did not ask for a sculptural landmark, although they did explain the need for a few concrete vents, which could perhaps double as kiosks or cafés.
One proposal, from the firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, included a lawn, a man-made stream, and a reflecting quarter-inch skim of water that could be drained whenever the Shed’s canopy was rolled out over it. The firm also included a six-story lookout tower. This was sketched as a shaft around which two ramps spiralled in a double helix—all of it wrapped in a perforated screen of weathered steel, the rust-covered material of a Richard Serra sculpture. In its pitch, the firm referred to two rail tunnels that run beneath the site. The tunnels, dug in the early twentieth century, still transport all trains between Penn Station and New Jersey. The tower, vaguely suggesting a drill bit, would have been erected close to the point where tunnelling machinery was once lowered down a shaft.
I asked Ross about his reaction to seeing N.B.W.’s tower.
“Ugh,” he said.
Related hired the firm, but at a meeting with Thomas Woltz, the owner of N.B.W., Ross asked for a new landscape. “I said, ‘Throw those plans out!’ ” he recalled. He described Woltz’s face falling, and added, “Nice young kid.”
If Ross had ever supported the idea of another Bryant Park, he no longer did. He took Woltz to a window at the Time Warner Center, saying, “Look at Columbus Circle, how hard it is.” There would be no grass on his plaza. “I said, ‘Forget about it.’ I mean, people with their dogs?”
The final landscape will include no lawn, no stream, no skim of water. But Ross had clearly absorbed the idea of an ornament. Jay Cross acknowledged that such a structure “wasn’t a part of our thinking until Woltz brought it up.” He added, “Once the lawn was gone, Stephen was, like, ‘We’ve got to have a piece of art.’ ” It had to be a destination, Cross said. “It had to be ‘I’ll meet you at the Whatever.’ ”
Before the 2012 Summer Olympics, Heatherwick was known in Britain for three striking but impermanent designs. His Shanghai Expo pavilion had a scheduled life of only six months. In 2002, for a site in Manchester, Heatherwick Studio had created B of the Bang, a two-hundred-foot-tall cluster of metal spikes emanating from the top of a column, to suggest a midair explosion. It was finished late and was over budget. The tip of a spike fell off just before it was unveiled. Other spikes later threatened to fall and had to be removed. The Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors, and settled out of court. In 2009, the sculpture was dismantled.
The New Routemaster, a handsome double-decker bus designed for London’s transportation authority, went into service in February, 2012; it had an open platform at the back, echoing a classic, defunct design. It seems to have been commissioned, at the insistence of Boris Johnson, as much to symbolize the city as to serve it: a double-decker pavilion. It had advantages over off-the-shelf alternatives but cost nearly twice as much, was cramped and hot, and was more polluting than promised. The bus was discontinued.
Heatherwick Studio had submitted designs for two Olympic structures—a velodrome and an observation tower—but had failed to win the commissions. A participant in the tower competition has said that Boris Johnson asked for a design that would “match the Eiffel Tower.” The winning entry was co-designed by Anish Kapoor, the British artist best known for Cloud Gate, a seductive, seamless blob of polished stainless steel in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Nicknamed the Bean, it is now partway to achieving Eiffel-like status. Kapoor’s London Olympics tower, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, is not. A three-hundred-and-eighty-foot lattice of red steel loops around a red steel trunk, it has been likened to the site of a major roller-coaster accident.
The design for Heatherwick’s losing entry, which has never been published, was a staircase that split and split again—“like a growing plant,” he told me. In the course of his twenty-five-year career, Heatherwick has generated ideas that he has been loath to abandon; one was to adorn a design with large planters, each holding a single tree. One of Heatherwick’s former colleagues told me that, in brainstorming sessions, “tree bowls always came up.” Another favored conception was a connected set of staircases. His Olympic design echoed an unbuilt 2006 commission for a structure on a hilltop in Baku, Azerbaijan. This monument—an ascending curlicue—was “a heroic staircase,” Heatherwick wrote in 2012. “It would give people stories to tell, such as the first time their child had walked up by herself or the time that, having made it to the top, a young man went down on one knee and made a proposal of marriage.” (This is not the Azerbaijani way, but perhaps it would have become so. Related executives expect marriage proposals on the Vessel.)
Heatherwick did secure a more modest Olympic commission, the cauldron, and he made a sensation out of it. Discounting a recommendation from officials that it should have no moving parts, he provided the opening ceremony with a moment of high emotion. The cauldron looked like something that should malfunction, yet it worked. Today, the Museum of London has a permanent exhibition celebrating the design. “Each stem carried a fragment of the Olympic flame in a uniquely shaped copper piece, only burning as one when they finally and perfectly nestled together,” one caption reads.
“I grew up in a city where nothing happened,” Heatherwick told me, referring to his sense of London’s creative stagnation, at least in terms of civic space, in the seventies and eighties. But, after the Olympics, he said, “there was a window of opportunity to maybe not be cynical, and to maybe make something unprecedented.” A few weeks after the closing ceremony, Heatherwick and Joanna Lumley had their first meeting with Boris Johnson about the Garden Bridge. Earlier that year, Lumley—who had previously proposed such a bridge as a memorial to Princess Diana—had written to Johnson, saying that the project would bring “great loveliness” to the Thames. She had added, “Please say yes.” Covered with hundreds of trees, it would link an area of diplomatic missions and barristers’ chambers, on the north side, to a riverside walk, popular with tourists, on the south. Heatherwick says that he and Lumley first discussed the idea some fifteen years ago. She has always deferred to him on its design, except for a few suggestions: it should have a Christmas tree during the holidays; it should not provide a straight line of sight, encouraging pedestrians to meander; and, although the bridge’s platform would widen at two points, above thick supporting pillars, from the air its outline should not evoke a pair of sunglasses or a bra.
Bjarke Ingels, describing his collaborations with Heatherwick, recently said, half joking, “Whenever I wanted Heatherwick to like something, I would start by talking about nooks and crannies—he says ‘nooks and crannies’ constantly.” Heatherwick has described the Garden Bridge as “a series of intimate spaces in which to stop and linger.” Richard Rogers, the architect, has praised it as a likely “oasis of calm and beauty.” Lumley has imagined a place “where the only sounds will be birdsong and bees buzzing and the wind in the trees, and, below, the steady rush of water.” One can admire this optimism, after repressing thoughts of driving rain and dense crowds. But Heatherwick and the bridge’s supporters also have asked that it be valued as transportation infrastructure, and this is harder to accept. Heatherwick told me that the Garden Bridge would be built in “the biggest gap” that exists between any two bridges in central London, which wasn’t true. It would be closed at night, and cycling would be banned. According to projections, its entrances would be congested. Indeed, Heatherwick has said, approvingly, that the bridge “has the potential to be the slowest way to cross the river.”
A month after Heatherwick met with Johnson about the bridge, he was at the Carlyle Hotel, in Manhattan, showing a proposal to Barry Diller. Pier 54, at the end of West Thirteenth Street, was set to be demolished. Diller had offered to fund a replacement, and this had been sketched out by Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape architect. Three firms, including Heatherwick Studio, were asked to design a performance space for it. Heatherwick’s proposal went beyond this brief. He designed a new pier, in a form that suggested a half-built wooden boat, with curved ribs rising more than two hundred feet. With this, the firm secured a commission for a new pier. The ribs were later lost; Diller recently praised Heatherwick’s work but said that the initial design was “impractical” and “couldn’t be built.” The pier evolved into an undulating park standing on flared pilings—a cauldron half submerged in the Hudson.
Before the 2012 Olympics, Jay Cross, the Related executive, asked Heatherwick to “think about those vent shafts” which needed to be constructed at Hudson Yards, and propose designs that incorporated them into cafés or kiosks. Heatherwick, remembering the assignment more sweepingly, told me that “Jay commissioned us to work on the design of the square—to collaborate with Nelson Byrd Woltz.” In Woltz’s recollection, Related “asked Thomas to look at pavilions, and he came back with multiple concepts for the whole site.” One design, Woltz said, involved “giant rectangles at different elevations,” adding, “They were really—what can I say?—extraordinarily inventive for public space where you have to have disability access.” Cross described it as “the whole plaza popping up and down,” and said, “We were, like, ‘That’s complicated.’ ” Related didn’t pursue these ideas.
After Stephen Ross decided to commission a monument for Hudson Yards, he consulted with curators and art dealers—including Glenn Lowry, the director of MOMA—and began to gauge the interest of such artists as Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, Jeff Koons, Maya Lin, and Richard Serra. Serra was invited to outline a proposal, for a fee, but said no. According to Cross, Serra told Ross, “You know what I do—you know that it’s going to be structural steel, you know it’s going to be monumental. What do I need to show you?” He added, “Hire me and I’ll go to work.” (Serra, through a representative, confirmed that he declined to participate but denied that he used these words.) Ross, recalling the encounter, described Serra’s work as poorly suited for the site, because it was “very subtle” and “not iconic.”
In late 2012, Heatherwick had a preliminary meeting with Ross. Heatherwick told me that he conceived of his task to be “to play back to him what he must be thinking.” Ross was bound to have considered “the success of Chicago’s Millennium Park, and a couple of the main pieces there”—namely, Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Plensa’s Crown Fountain, in which water spouts from two walls displaying videos of people opening their mouths. Heatherwick assumed that Ross would be tempted to commission something similar but bigger—“because you’re a billionaire,” he said. At the meeting, Heatherwick acknowledged his likely rivals by suggesting the limitations of “what I think people refer to as the ‘turd-in-the-plaza syndrome.’ ” (The phrase was coined by the architect James Wines.) That is, Heatherwick told me, too many developers remain attached to a shopworn contrast between “cool, cold architecture” and “an expressive object unconnected to the normal functional requirements of humans.” He went on, “There’s an obviousness to the format, however amazing the art work is. It felt to me that something should have a use. It might be a different kind of use—but something that people touch and engage with.”
After this meeting, Related had a shortlist of three—Heatherwick, Kapoor, and Plensa—each of whom was asked to produce a proposal. (“I paid one sculptor five hundred thousand dollars,” Ross recalled. “I paid another two hundred and fifty thousand.”) I recently spoke to Plensa on the phone. “Cities are not only buildings but people,” he told me, in a soft voice. He said that, when contemplating Hudson Yards, he “felt it was important, in this huge geometry, to try to offer something more organic, to create a space to breathe.” His design took the form of giant iron leaves—“to remind us of nature”—that visitors could walk beneath, after passing through a fine curtain of water. He told me, “It was a very poetical project.”
At eight-thirty on a recent morning, Heatherwick sat with Stuart Wood, a senior colleague, at a round table in the King’s Cross studio. Heatherwick said, “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg.” His work consistently embraces the public appetite for near-art experiences: visual and experiential novelty, ideally in a noncommercial setting, delivered without the distractions of ambiguities or subtext. Other artists and designers harness the same desire: the German artist Carsten Höller recently attached a helter-skelter slide to Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit tower. But Heatherwick is unusual, and perhaps canny, for making work that’s widely understood to be sculptural, and that sells at auction as sculpture, even as he relieves those who experience his products from the burden of paying heightened attention. The Olympic cauldron was given an award as the best British work of visual art of 2012, but, Heatherwick told me, “I’m not an artist.” And he suggested that it would have been a mistake, at Hudson Yards, to cause anyone to “wonder what the artist had meant.” (Jonathan Jones, the Guardian’s art critic, has written, of Heatherwick, “If he were an artist, he would be a really bad one.” The Olympic cauldron, he said, did its symbolic work well—separate nations, together—but “it did not have any deep poetic secret.” And B of the Bang was a “monstrous and clunking expression of a slight idea.”)
In Heatherwick’s studio, Stuart Wood said that when he and his colleagues started thinking about Hudson Yards they “were looking at amphitheatres, theatre spaces, performance spaces.” He continued, “Quite pragmatically, our thinking about leading people upward, as a way to create more three-dimensional public space, led to the idea of stairs.”
But an amphitheatre “could seem to exclude,” Heatherwick explained. “If you have people all sitting facing inward, there’s a back that’s pushing people away. So—how could you be porous but also centrally focussed?”
“We started to delete the non-necessary geometry,” Wood went on. “And what remained were stairs and landings.” He added, “We wanted it to be small at the bottom, to not jam up the space, but not so small that you can’t get in it. So we found that sweet spot”—a base with a fifty-foot diameter. Each floor, or ring of landings, would be wider than the one below it. The studio at first assumed that each level would include as many landings as possible: five on the bottom floor, increasing to nine at the top. But this made symmetry difficult. The designers decided to preserve a pattern of gradually inflating hexagons, with five landings on every floor.
When I met Ross, he showed me a printed copy of Heatherwick’s PowerPoint presentation, entitled “Vessel.” There were renderings of people facing one another on bleachers. Ross, remembering Heatherwick’s commentary, which had been accompanied by music from the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, said, “What if you lifted people up, up, up, up, up?” There were images of people on floating platforms. Ross turned to an all-black page—a PowerPoint fade to black—and then to a rendering of the Vessel. Ross flicked through the remaining pages, saying, “I never got this far.”
“I fell in love instantly,” he told me. “My guys around here thought I was out of my goddam mind. It was too big, too this, too that. ‘How are we going to build it?’ ‘What’s it going to cost?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ The cost, I figured, would be seventy-five million.” (The ArcelorMittal Orbit cost thirty-six million.)
Before making a final decision, Ross weighed the Vessel against Plensa’s proposal, which Jay Cross described to me as “surprising and beautiful,” and one by Kapoor. Ross told me, without naming Kapoor, that a prominent artist had shown him something “bigger and better” than his best-known works. He then said, “Who says it’s better? But it’s bigger.” He laughed. “You know, I wasn’t happy.” (Kapoor declined to comment.)
In October, 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that Heatherwick had been given the commission. The design was not made public for another three years, and Related took efforts to keep it secret. Cimolai, the Italian company contracted to fabricate the Vessel’s parts, was asked to build a twenty-foot fence around its steelworks, near Venice. After a visiting welding inspector, not knowing what he was seeing, took a photo of a Vessel part and posted it online, Related protested to Cimolai. “Being good Italians, we killed him,” Claudia Pavan, Cimolai’s project manager for the Vessel, said recently.
Heatherwick told me that his structure was commissioned “with no obvious commercial outcome” in mind, but Ross did show the design to some would-be Hudson Yards tenants. Ross Love, a managing director of the Boston Consulting Group, recalled a meeting in which Stephen Ross brought out a model of the Vessel. “It was great theatre,” Love said. “It was ‘I really shouldn’t be showing you this.’ He was like a proud father.” Love regarded the object as “a folly,” but an optimistic one. “You have this thing that is pointless—and that is the point,” he said. The company took floors forty-two to forty-seven at 10 Hudson Yards.
According to Cross, Liz Diller was “aghast” when she first saw Heatherwick’s design, finding it “too big, and too close” to the Shed. (Diller denies this.) The Vessel was twenty-five feet taller than the Shed; it was as if the Statue of Liberty stood in front of the Metropolitan Opera. “She lobbied against it,” Cross said. “I think she’ll forever be somewhat bothered by it.” Cross was sympathetic to this concern. He recalled, “I would have conversations with Thomas: ‘Are you sure you got the scale right?’ ” Cross asked Heatherwick to consider the difference between “a beautiful ocean liner” of the mid-twentieth century and the behemoth cruise ships of today. He told Heatherwick, “In my view, it’s a wine goblet. Are you sure you don’t want it to look like a champagne flute?”
Asked about these discussions with Cross, Heatherwick told me that they were about budget, not scale. “There are people whose job it is to save money,” he said. The Vessel was the right size. “We had a sense of how many people you needed for it to be alive and thriving,” he added. “And I felt that you either properly do the project or you don’t do the project. You don’t negotiate.”
Cross spoke to Ross. “I said, ‘Stephen, I think we should build a big model, and put in the Vessel as he’s designed it, and we should put in a slightly smaller one, and let’s all sit down and look at it and whatever you decide is fine. But I think we owe it to ourselves—it’s a big decision.’ ” They set up a model of Hudson Yards in an empty storefront on Thirtieth Street. Guests included Heatherwick and the architect David Childs, who often advises Ross and is largely responsible for the designs of the Time Warner Center and One World Trade Center. Seated, they had a street-level view of the site. Cross put in one Vessel, then the other. “I couldn’t get Thomas to redesign it as smaller,” he recalled. “So, for the alternate version, I just took a ring off the top—or two rings, I can’t remember which.” He laughed. “Stephen goes, ‘O.K., so I’ve looked at them both, are we done?’ ”
“You don’t want to discuss it?” Cross asked.
“Nope,” Ross said.
As Cross recalled, Ross then asked Heatherwick, “You good?”
“Yep, bigger is better, for sure,” Heatherwick replied.
Cross told me, laughing, “That was the end of that.”
Later, on a visit to Cimolai, in Italy, Ross celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday. A pastry chef, who had signed an N.D.A., made a Vessel-shaped cake. Ross tore off the top ring and teasingly offered it to Cross, saying, “Are you happy now?”
In 2014, Google asked several architectural firms to submit eighteen-minute video proposals for the design of a new headquarters in Mountain View. Ingels and Heatherwick were then invited to separate lunches with Larry Page, Google’s co-founder. Google decided to pick both. The two firms began working on a Mountain View master plan; later, they collaborated on the design of a long, low building in King’s Cross. Both projects are under way.
Ingels recently applied to Heatherwick’s work a Danish idiom: “Crossing the river to fetch water.” Sometimes “things are done for the sake of showing that you’re putting more effort into it,” Ingels said. “That’s where we’ve had most of our clashes. What inspires me, or elevates me, is when things feel effortless.” His instinct, he said, is to say, “Let’s get rid of the fat.”
But, when Ingels has lost arguments of this sort, he has come to appreciate the result. “This obsession with making the effort evident sometimes makes him stumble onto things that are really quite brilliant,” Ingels said. Heatherwick’s curling pedestrian bridge, he noted, “is the most complicated way to make a drawbridge, and by far the most slow and expensive, but it’s also really cool.”
Ingels recently visited Heatherwick’s Cape Town project, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Its central space, carved out of an array of hundred-year-old concrete grain silos, is “jaw-droppingly beautiful,” Ingels said, but “insane” at a practical level. To afford it, “you almost have to starve the rest of the building.” To Ingels, this other space felt neglected: fire doors with push bars. “But it is also what makes it possible. It’s not a schmear of effort on everything. It’s ‘We’re going to pile up intention in this spot here.’ ” (Heatherwick’s Shanghai Expo pavilion took up a fifth of the available site; the rest was artificial turf.) Ingels added, with respect, “He is capable of putting forward bold ideas that most people would self-censor, because they want to come up with something that could actually happen.” Referring to the Vessel, he said, “It’s really wild to get away with that. That project could have died a billion times.”
One morning in late September, I walked onto the Vessel with Heatherwick. He wore a hard hat, and a reflective vest over a wool vest. The Vessel was then two-thirds built. Like the vandalized cake, it petered out in stumps of staircase. Around the base lay several of the “dog bone” landings, soon to be lifted into place by a crane that stood in the Vessel’s center. For New York steelworkers, this was an unusual project. It was closer than most to a kit assembly—all the welding had been done in Italy—and the parts required delicate handling. Pool noodles had been taped to the platforms of the boom cranes, to prevent dents. Kaniehtakeron Martin, a crane foreman, told me, “It took a little getting used to, treating this thing with kid gloves.” On another visit to the Vessel, I lowered myself into the hollow center of a landing, through a manhole, and then crawled inside the structure, uphill, to where three steelworkers were bolting on a new section. They joked about not looking sweaty enough.
Visitors will reach the new plaza from the subway, from the High Line, or through the shopping mall. Above, at the top of the tallest tower, a cantilevered observation deck will face southeast. One wonders if the plaza will feel less like a park and more like a box packed with a Vessel. When I visited with Heatherwick, we stood for a moment in what could be thought of as the Vessel’s lobby, from which four staircases lead up to the first set of landings. Above us, polished copper-colored cladding, on the undersides of staircases and landings, offered distorted reflections of people and machines out of our direct view, as in a Hyatt atrium. The lobby is twenty feet across, and the Vessel’s capacity will likely be seven hundred; one can imagine a crush of people pausing here to take upward photographs, and others in line for an elevator that will rise on a snaking track, using a rack-and-pinion mechanism, as on a funicular. “It’s definitely intimate,” Heatherwick said. But he was sanguine about congestion. “As long as no one gets hurt,” he said. In a bold invitation to New Yorkers, he added, “I would love there to be more disorder in the world. I think it would be a real shame if everyone was polite.”
He went on, “All you can try to do is design something that will be an unusual experience. I do feel that this is a different category of social device. There’s no goal of relevance, no goal of making order.”
A year earlier, I’d seen Heatherwick at an outdoor event where the Vessel’s design was made public. Mayor Bill de Blasio, Stephen Ross, and dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre appeared onstage. De Blasio told Heatherwick not to be discouraged if New Yorkers shared blunt opinions of his design. Although Heatherwick is in near-constant contact with American clients, and with America, his speech that day included a cascade of Britishisms, as if to mark his distinctiveness: “trainers” for sneakers, “skip” for dumpster, “climbing frame” for jungle gym, “Tube” for subway. He said that when he first came to New York, in the eighties, he visited his “German Jewish grandmother.” (This grandmother, who designed textiles for Marks & Spencer, did not live in New York, although a great-aunt did.)
The Vessel, he told the audience, was no more than “a platform.” But the promise of stairs, he said, is that you can “jump on them, dance on them, get tired on them, and then plonk yourself down on them.” At an event a few weeks later, he added, “Maybe it’s the best place to go and smoke.”
I subsequently saw a list of recommended rules for the Vessel—drawn up by consultants, hired by Related, who compared the attraction to the Washington Monument. “Visitors must be in good health and free from any physical limitations,” the draft dictated. “Children must meet a minimum height requirement of forty-two inches.” There was a ban on food, gum, drinks other than water, strollers, backpacks, animals, running, jumping, and throwing balls. Also: “No sitting on the stairs.” Heatherwick, shown the list for the first time, said, “What I’m sure they want is for it to be used and loved and enjoyed.”
When we climbed the Vessel, Heatherwick made a point of bounding up the first staircase, two steps at a time. “Am I running?” he asked, as if dismissing all debate about restrictions in a privately held, semi-public space. “Who’s going to stop you going up stairs fast?” The Vessel was a “brave commission,” he said. Only “a very cynical person” would disagree.
As we ascended, Heatherwick admired what he described as handwelds. (Claudia Pavan, of Cimolai, had explained that the Vessel includes both handwelds and automated welds that, at extra expense, were made to resemble handwelds.) “We wanted the structure to be skeletal, and the spine to be raw,” he said. “The world seems, to me, to have become too shiny, too polished.” I later attended a Related meeting at which managers, with a mixture of exasperation and amused indulgence, discussed trying to make signage for the landings that would look distressed enough for Heatherwick but legible enough to meet the city’s fire code.
But the primary view of the Vessel, for people not on it, is of polish. Heatherwick’s design looks like an industrial relic reborn as a motivational object—and a mirror. According to directions that Heatherwick Studio provided to Michael Loughran, the Related executive who managed the Vessel’s construction, the copper-colored soffits, or undersurfaces, should be “jewel-like.” Loughran told me, “Their first ambition was ‘We want it to be real copper.’ ” He pointed out that, thanks to “oxidization and everything else,” such a surface would soon look “like the Statue of Liberty.” Instead, Related applied a very fine copper-colored finish to aluminum, in a process that has also been used to apply color to iPhones. (Everyone I asked at Related, including Ross, recalled the studio proposing copper, but Heatherwick—perhaps protective of his reputation as a designer “immersed in materials and making,” as his Web site puts it—told me that “there wasn’t a deep love for copper particularly.”)
As we climbed the Vessel, its geometry opened up; the tread plates of the steps became longer, making it slightly easier to climb, as if delivering a lesson about the pleasantness of success. Heatherwick, however, was in a period of professional disappointment. Around this time, it was reported that the proposed renovation of David Geffen Hall had been scrapped. And Barry Diller had withdrawn financial support for a new pier, after having tired of legal objections to it. (Later, the project sputtered back to life.)
Perhaps most distressingly for Heatherwick, the Garden Bridge had been scuttled. Sadiq Khan, who succeeded Johnson as mayor of London, in 2016, had requested a review of the bridge’s procurement. The judgment, confirming reporting by The Architects’ Journal and others, had been scathing: Johnson’s administration had run a rigged competition, to deliver a commission to its preferred designer. For months before other firms were asked to make proposals, Heatherwick had been discussing his design with Johnson and his advisers, and with London’s public-transportation authority; he had even joined Johnson at a meeting at Apple, in Cupertino, California, to pitch, unsuccessfully, for corporate sponsorship. When the competition entries were scored, Heatherwick Studio was given more points in the category of “relevant design experience” than two firms that had each worked on more than a dozen bridges. Without criticizing Heatherwick, the review described the process as “not open, fair, or competitive.” Khan withdrew the city’s financial support. Fifty million dollars of public money had already been spent.
“It’s such a shame,” Heatherwick said. “I got an e-mail saying, ‘This is a vanity project blocking a view of St. Paul’s Cathedral’! And you go, ‘I wonder what the biggest vanity project in the city ever was? Probably St. Paul’s!’ ” He had previously observed that “there was a huge resistance to St. Paul’s being built.” This point—a striking one to add to a conversation about vanity—has been echoed by Joanna Lumley, who has said, “When St. Paul’s was built, London went mad with rage, and said, ‘Take this filthy building down.’ ” Adrian Tinniswood, the author of “His Invention So Fertile: A Life of Christopher Wren,” told me that this isn’t true; the most one could say is that, amid joyful appreciation of the new cathedral, some Londoners offered “quibbles.”
I asked Heatherwick if he agreed that the bridge had been poorly procured. He said that he hadn’t yet read the report, which had been published five months earlier, because it was too long. I said that it was fifty pages. He replied, “Oh,” before adding, “I still think it’s the right idea, and I’m not rushing off to build it somewhere else. I think it’s the right place. It may not have been the right time.”
In New York, Heatherwick had found a billionaire client who had seen “an opportunity to leave a legacy behind,” as Jay Cross put it, and who answered to no one. “Stephen had total control,” Cross said. “There was no real veto power anywhere else.”
Heatherwick and I stopped on the Vessel’s seventh level, by temporary signs that warned “Caution: Tripping Hazard.” Heatherwick said, “Walking up sixteen stories is a daunting thing, but I think you’ll be distracted by your experience, and not notice your legs.” A part of the Vessel’s appeal may be the work of avoiding other visitors: it may set a challenge similar to that of exiting a subway station efficiently, but lasting an hour.
To the west, over open tracks that will soon be covered by a second platform, and then by more buildings, there was a clear view of the river. Heatherwick said that he wasn’t saddened by thoughts of the eventual loss of this view. “I’m not campaigning for no buildings there,” he said. Soon afterward, I was told that Related’s residential towers on the western Yards will include work by Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, Robert A. M. Stern, and Heatherwick Studio.
The Vessel topped out in December. The last of eighty landings twisted in high winds and then dropped into place. “Three years,” Claudia Pavan, of Cimolai, said. “So much work.”
I asked Jay Cross how he thought the Vessel looked. He smiled, and said, “It’s forbidding.” He added, “That’s a little too strong a term. It really depends on where you stand.”
It had become Cross’s responsibility to program the Vessel. Stephen Ross, he noted, laughing, had “never been overly focussed on that, which surprises me.” Cross was consulting with David Saltz, the producer of Super Bowl halftime shows, about a grand opening. “Saltz and I are the only ones thinking, How are we going to use it? How are we going to ticket-time it, and have rules?” Cross talked of Easter-egg hunts. “And maybe you have Kenneth Branagh do ‘Hamlet’ down here—it’s a bit like a Shakespearean theatre.” Related also seemed likely to schedule musical events. Heatherwick had pointed out to me what he considered a happy coincidence: just as the Vessel has eighty landings, the New York Philharmonic has eighty members. (In fact, the orchestra has a hundred and six members.) “Thursday-night concerts at the Vessel?” Cross said. “If you’re looking down, on top of their heads, I don’t know how it’s going to work.”
I walked back inside with Stephen Ross. “Thomas is probably the most creative person in the world,” he said. ♦
