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Extract: How do you Make Public Space on a River?

Posted on 16 Jan 2025

Step onto Little Island, Thomas Heatherwick’s stunning floating park on the Hudson, where bold design and lush nature redefines what public space can be.

Photograph © Hufton + Crow, Little Island

Just off the west coast of Manhattan, sits a small land mass of 2.5 acres. Rising out of the Hudson River, propped up by concrete funnel-shaped stilts and carpeted with grass, trees and weaving pathways, lies one of Thomas Heatherwick’s most recent and iconic architectural projects: Little Island.

New York City, with its iconic skyline and gridded streets, is no stranger to bold urban experiments, but even by these standards, Little Island is a park that has reimagined what public space can be. It embodies a daring vision: to transform the disused Pier 55 (the location of which survivors of the Titanic disaster docked on their arrival), into a sanctuary of nature and vision for urban dwellers.

With the pier in a state of disrepair, made worse by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hudson River Park Trust appointed the acclaimed Heatherwick Studios, responsible for many recognizable locations in the UK such as Coal Drops Yard in London, or the Olympic Cauldron, featured in the 2012 Olympics, to completely re-invent the outdoor space. Since its official launch in 2021, Little Island attracts 1.5 million people each year.

In this extract from Thomas Heatherwick: Making, we invite you to look behind the scenes at Heatherwick Studio’s design and completion of Little Island in New York City.

Photograph © Schenck, Little Island

We believed it was more appropriate to consider the whole area between the two remaining functional piers of Gansevoort and Pier 57 as a single body of water, and to place the new structure in the middle. We were also fascinated by the hundreds of wooden piles sticking out of the water now that the pier decks they had once supported were gone. These blackened pieces of maritime history formed an amazingly atmospheric reminder of the city’s economic boom in the early twentieth century.

With so many technical challenges in building new structures in a major river, the studio began by looking at how other piers in the city had been built, restored and redeveloped.

[…]

As much of the nearby water was characterized by the leftover piles, the team wondered whether, rather than denying their existence, the new pier’s identity could come from focusing on them instead.

© Heatherwick Studios, the remainder of Pier 55

The idea evolved to take the new concrete piles and to continue them out of the water, extending skyward to raise up sections of a green landscape. Fusing as they meet, these individual piles would come together to form the topography of the park.

The existing highway running along the western edge of Manhattan created a dominant sense of vast flatness in the area. We became convinced that we needed to offer a contrast to this by concentrating on the vertical three-dimensionality of the pier. Raising a new piece of undulating park up into the air would not only counteract the presence of the big road but also make the park more noticeable from a distance. A more three-dimensional park landscape would also work well with the need for outdoor theatre and performance spaces, as raked seating could be shaped into the landscape to give the audience better views.

The resulting design developed as a system of repeating piles that each form a generous planter at their top. Every planter connects in a tessellating pattern at different heights to create a single manipulated piece of landscape. More than a hundred different species of indigenous trees and plants suited to the harsh extremes of the New York climate were then planted in the thousands of tonnes of new soil within this landscape.

The result is a unique topography that can be experienced as you walk underneath to enter, as well as from above as the 280 piles rise out of the water with no horizontal cross-bracing between them.

© Heatherwick Studios, Conceptual drawing of Little Island

[…]

Also, instead of aligning the new pier with the other piers, the square plan is rotated perpendicular to New York’s grid plan. This in turn creates a dynamic rather than parallel relationship with the walkway along the river edge and aligns the new pier structure in an unusual way with surrounding cross-streets, in particular
14th Street.

Construction of the project involved many amazing collaborators. In 2021, the project officially opened under the name Little Island. Over one million people came to see it in the first year. As well as being a spectacularly landscaped public park, the completed project is a hardworking object that contains an outdoor theatre for 700 people, a smaller performance space for 200, a main space for 3,500, and many pathways and viewing platforms.

The key to the experience for visitors is the planting, led by Signe Nielsen at MNLA Landscape Architects, which moves from pastel shades in spring to more intense colours in summer before dramatic autumnal hues.

Photograph © Schenck, Little Island

The landscape also attracts a large variety of wildlife, including species of birds rarely seen before in New York. It is thrilling to see people exploring the park, watching one of the hundreds of free cultural performances and workshops, navigating the winding paths, meditating on boulder scrambles or reading books on the park benches.

This passage was extracted from Thomas Heatherwick: Making, which celebrates its fourth edition this January. Featuring sixteen new projects and fresh photography, it remains the definitive publication on the internationally acclaimed designer Thomas Heatherwick.

Thomas Heatherwick: Making is available now.

Explore the book:

Thomas Heatherwick

Making
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