Last edited 31 Jul 2025

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The Shed

Item 24315.gif• Animation showing how the telescoping outer shell can deploy from its position over the base building and glide along rails onto an adjoining plaza, which will double the building’s footprint for large-scale performances, installations, and events.


Contents

[edit] Introduction

Item 24313.png

• Title page from the video - click image above to view and follow along using the transcript.

This article features selected extracts from the conversation between Elizabeth Diller and Hans Ulrich Obrist. [1]


[edit] Selected extracts

[edit] • Hans Ulrich Obrist

15:04 "When Cedric Price came here, and you were in the jury at the time - it actually liked his project. He said what was initially missing was a kind of a lung - you re-inject kind of oxygen into the city." [2]

[...]

[edit] • Elizabeth Diller 1

17:06 "I very much believe in kind of a do-it-yourself architecture using working with the city and working with
you know all the resources that one could muster to make change and sometimes to preserve
and sometimes to remove. So the your reference to Cedric Price and this site which is a Hudson
Yards which is now going to be millions of square feet of built space of which were you know
we're part of it and so we can't say it's bad or good but but but Cedric Price just thought that it
should just be left to empty that that was his big contribution to suggest that not to build on it and
sometimes remove all subtraction is a very good act." [ib.]

[...]

[edit] • Elizabeth Diller 2

19:04 "The project was very much inspired by Cedric Price's Fun Palace which was an unbuilt ... also it was an entertainment complex in the 1960s. It was planned in the sixties it was it was brought very close and in the end
it didn't get the permit to be built but but it inspired many many generations of architects
afterwards and the idea was that it was a truly flexible building made of infrastructure so it's like a
plug in play and anything can happen there at any scale anytime. Entertainment and culture were
brought together so it's like pop culture and high culture there's no difference and it I think you
know it came it was a post-war idea that came out of automation and the idea that people had all
this leisure time. Now you have to occupy them with a leisure time so this was a kind of brilliant
project. It didn't you know was it was en en envision for ten year duration but but what was really
inspiring about it was that it was made out of a kit of parts and it was entirely flexible and we
interpreted that and this was very different because some of some of Cedric Price's buildings
actually do move and Potteries Thinkbelt was a university on wheels, effectively in an old defunct
factory. So he was actually, he predated The High Line and all of that - so but but the flexibility that we
sought here was that we wanted to use more of the site than initially we had access to and but
what was a great result of proposing that we occupy that site 50% of the time - sometimes The
Shed is open and closed to accommodate large scale things - when it's when it's nested it could be
an outdoor space for cultural use and for the public as well. It could also be brought into place and
be a half indoor/outdoor and all the infrastructure is there. So it's like Cedric Price and architecture
of infrastructure where the whole design is made of structure and the ability to hold things the
ability to supply power to everything and make space and make shelter is very very simple in a
way - but it's designed."

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[edit] Notes

[1] DLD Conference (2018) 'Space On Demand: Designing The Shed (Elizabeth Diller & Hans Ulrich Obrist) | DLD New York 18', YouTube.

[2] Price, C. (1999) 'IFPRI', Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.


[edit] Further information

Price, C. (1961-1974) 'Fun Palace Project', Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

The Shed (2016) 'Shed Fly Through Animation', Vimeo.

Unattributed (2023) 'The Shed (arts center)', Wikipedia.


--Archiblog 09:48, 09 Nov 2023 (BST)


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