Hudson Park and Boulevard | James Carpenter Sculpture 

Located in Hudson Park and Boulevard, a new park and pedestrian gateway spanning three full blocks in Manhattan’s rising Hudson Yards neighborhood, this 50-ft-tall art installation emits light from 20 separate sources, draping the surrounding area with a canvas of light at nightfall and serving as a beacon for the park. LERA provided the structural design for this and many other park structures, including the adjacent café, playgrounds, fountains, seating areas and underground mechanical vaults.

 

The free-standing steel structure, 3 ft in diameter, is composed of 52 1/8-in-thick vertical plates, equally spaced along the circumference, held together by a proprietary V-shaped steel wire that is helically wrapped around the perimeter and welded to each of the vertical plates where they cross. The wire spacing was controlled to give the desired openness in the column to allow light to shine through, but was tight enough to provide the necessary strength and stiffness to resist the shear flow between the 52 plates, allowing them to act compositely as one section. Due to the fact that the light column is exposed to the elements, all of the plates and wire were specified to be stainless steel.

Location

New York, NY 

 

Owner 

Hudson Yards Development Corporation

NYC Department of Parks & Recreation

 

Architect 

Toshiko Mori Architect 

 

Landscape Architect 

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates 

 

Art Installation 

James Carpenter Design Associates