15

HUDSON

YARDS

The tower at 15 Hudson Yards is an eighty-eight-story residential high-rise containing a mix of rental apartments and condominiums; a third of the units are designated as affordable housing. The building anchors the southeast corner of Hudson Yards, a twenty-eight-acre mixed-use development between Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. Following decades of failed proposals to develop the air rights above the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s train maintenance and storage yard—including a stadium for New York’s unsuccessful 2012 Olympic Games bid—Related Companies devised a plan that would address the challenges of the site. First, to allow the train yard and its thirty active tracks to stay operational throughout construction, the buildings and its elevated deck are supported on caissons that opportunistically slip between the tracks where possible and are drilled down to bedrock. In addition, because the area had to be accessible to its future mixed-use tenants, the number 7 subway line was extended and the new Hudson Yards station was built.

The tower’s form is a smooth morph from the rectangular Man­hattan grid at its base to a contoured cloverleaf at its apex—the quadrants are oriented to maximize panoramic skyline views in all directions. Each floor has a slightly different footprint from the next. The building’s insulated glass enclosure is shaped through precision cold-forming techniques, enabling curvature without sacrificing any thermal efficiency. The tower taps in to the Hudson Yards microgrid, a local infrastructural network with two cogeneration plants that produce electricity for the neighborhood. Each building’s central plant is connected in a thermal loop, enabling the exchange of heat and chilled water. Energy-management systems calibrate use across the grid, and household meters provide real-time energy-use readings to individual units. The microgrid achieves more than double the efficiency of conventional systems.

Together, 15 Hudson Yards and the Shed, which adjoins it to the east, share 450 feet of frontage along the High Line. Even though they were designed for three different clients—the High Line for the City of New York, the residential tower for a private developer, and the Shed for a new nonprofit entity—the three structures form a unified urban ensemble. The tower went into design while the Shed was already underway. To benefit both the developer and the nonprofit cultural organization, a deal was struck to cede the tower’s base to the Shed, which would use the expanded footprint for its back-of-house operations, offices, and mechanical areas. In exchange, the developer was given special dispensation from the city to build the tower taller, thus trading seven lower floors for seven higher, more valuable ones.

Rockwell Group served as lead interior architect for 15 Hudson Yards.