Necro-Architecture Ground Zero
The architect acts as if they were doing the lord’s work, rendering a heaven in glass, steel and light, little realizing they are growing the limits of hell. The last thing this world needs is a fancy new building. The twenty-five-billion-dollar Hudson Yards is one such hell of elite architecture. This is architecture in its empyrean mode, totally removed from the ordinary social body even while taking advantage of affordable housing laws (the rich person as victim). It reveals everything that is terrible about architecture in NYC. As money secretes ever higher into unoccupied real-estate in the sky, the rents rise and psychosis and homelessness spill into the street. If schizophrenia is caused by a “failure of the environment,” then we know who to blame—it’s not mother. Should we wish to solve the homelessness crisis, the solution is simple: provide them with homes. And yet this can never be for our society is too highly invested in suffering. Hudson Yards—and elite New York City architecture generally—is the motor drive that powers the carceral state.
The necro in this architecture is made acute in particular by the two-hundred-million-dollar “art-object” Vessel. Described by its marketers as NYC’s Eiffel Tower—from which you might see all of Paris—Vessel lets you see nothing but the glittering hell of Hudson Yards. Widely derided upon its completion—Jerry Salts renamed it the “shit gibbon”—it is a large shawarma-shaped latticed-superstructure that charged its victims $10 to climb the stairs to nowhere. Some of these visitors took this nowhere literally by leaping from the top of it; four persons have killed themselves before Vessel was closed to the public: it has yet to re-open. These deaths in the midst of the rich person’s emerald city signal a brutal new trend in elite architecture: architecture that makes you want to die.
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