From the October issue: Our cultural centers, which began as palaces, have been reduced to sheds. Specifically, the Shed, an artistic zone now rising in Hudson Yards, near the northern edge of the High Line park at West 30th Street.
An entire cultural and political revolution is implicit in that shift — in aspiration if not in reality.
Consider palaces of a century past like the Paris Opera House, designed by Charles Garnier, or the Metropolitan Museum, which was largely the work of Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead & White. In both cases, an essentially middle-class, newly bourgeois society created, for its own use, a structure that took on the airs of ancient aristocracy. The Shed in Hudson Yards, by contrast, though conceptualized during the administration of a billionaire mayor, has proudly adopted a proletarian bearing. [more]