Arts
The $500 Million Arts Institution New York Didn’t Know It Needed
How the Shed plans to compete in a city already packed with cultural icons.
The Shed as seen from the High Line in February 2018.
Photographer: Ed Lederman
In 2014, Alex Poots was asked to interview to be the director of the Shed. “Many of us were asked to apply,” he says. “I kept saying, ‘I can’t apply for this, because I don’t know what it is.’ ”
In Poots’s telling, the board of the Shed wasn’t quite sure either. They knew where the cultural organization would live (Hudson Yards, on the far west side of Manhattan), and they knew who would design the building (Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group). They also knew it would be massive—with eight levels and almost 200,000 square feet.