multi-arts center The Shed coming to Manhattan in 2019
A new nonprofit arts space, The Shed, is coming to NYC in spring 2019. It’s located at 545 W 30th St (where the High Line meets Hudson Yards), and they’re calling it “the first multi-arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture. From hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theater and dance, with collaborations across these disciplines and others.”
As for the building itself, “The Shed’s 200,000-square-foot home comprises an eight-level base structure and a telescoping outer shell. The base building holds two expansive, column-free galleries totaling 25,000 square feet of museum-quality space; a 500-seat black-box theater that can be subdivided into even more intimate spaces; event and rehearsal space; and a creative lab that will be provided free to early-career local artists.”
Read The Shed’s full mission statement and more about the building/design, below, along with a video further explaining the mission, an animated rendering, and a timelapse video of The Shed being built. Even more info at theshed.org.
Before The Shed opens in 2019, there’s a pre-opening event at an offsite location this year with live music by Arca, ABRA, Azealia Banks, and more.
What is The Shed? from The Shed on Vimeo.
The Shed Timelapse by Iwan Baan from The Shed on Vimeo.
Shed Fly Through Animation from The Shed on Vimeo.
MISSION:
For more than a century, the arts have largely been presented apart from one another: in galleries and museums, concert halls and theaters. These centers of excellence allow artists to flourish within their own worlds, but they also build barriers that separate audiences, artists, and art forms.
The Shed will be different.
Located where the High Line meets Hudson Yards in Manhattan, The Shed will be the first multi-arts center designed to commission, produce, and present all types of performing arts, visual arts, and popular culture. From hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theater and dance, with collaborations across these disciplines and others, we will bring together leading artists from all art forms under one roof.
Our unique and flexible building and organization will dramatically transform to fit the artists’ visions and the work they create. The dynamism of our commissioning model will allow us to break down walls between cultural worlds and the diverse audiences that live within them.
The Shed will be driven by experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. Our program will be international, created with co-commissioning partners around the globe—and local, with early-career New York artists taking up residency in our creative lab. Through collaborative projects with the MIT Media Lab, we will integrate science and technology in a way that no arts institution has previously attempted.
Just as the greatest cities thrive on integration and interdependence, so the greatest new art defines contemporary thought and anticipates the future. The Shed’s program will embody all these principles and possibilities, encouraging artists to create new lenses through which we can view our world today.
The Shed will be a place where the world’s leading artists and creative minds can make art that helps forge tomorrow’s world, and where audiences from all walks of life can experience this art together.
BUILDING/DESIGN:
Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group, The Shed’s 200,000-square-foot home comprises an eight-level base structure and a telescoping outer shell. The base building holds two expansive, column-free galleries totaling 25,000 square feet of museum-quality space; a 500-seat black-box theater that can be subdivided into even more intimate spaces; event and rehearsal space; and a creative lab that will be provided free to early-career local artists.
The telescoping outer shell can be deployed over the adjoining 20,000-square-foot plaza to create a 17,000-square-foot light-, sound-, and temperature-controlled hall that can serve an infinite variety of artists’ needs and uses, including as a theater seating 1,250 people or a standing audience of up to 3,000 people. Its ceiling acts as a theatrical deck, allowing for rigging across the entire volume of space above performers and audiences, as well as light and sound control. When the space is not needed, the shell can nest over the base building, freeing the plaza for outdoor use and programming.
Weighing more than eight million pounds when fully loaded with building systems and production equipment, the movable shell will travel on a double-wheel track based on gantry crane technology commonly found in shipping ports and railway systems. A rack-and-pinion drive will move the shell forward and back on four single-axle and two double-axle bogie wheels that measure six feet in diameter. It takes approximately five minutes for the shell to move from being nested over the base building to being fully deployed over the plaza, and vice versa, covering a distance of approximately 115 feet.
The exposed steel diagrid frame of the movable shell will be clad in translucent pillows of durable and lightweight Texlon-based polymer, called ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE). With the thermal properties of insulating glass at a fraction of the weight, the translucent ETFE will allow light to pass through and can withstand hurricane-force winds. Measuring almost 70 feet in length in some areas, The Shed’s ETFE panels are some of the largest ever produced.
With architectural references to the Fun Palace, Cedric Price’s unbuilt “anti-building” of the 1960s, The Shed can physically change at will and be responsive to myriad artistic ideas.
—
