(The other will showcase work by the great Trisha Donnelly but, regrettably, it was not yet on view.)Įscalators along one side of the Shed provide views of nearby towers as they lead up to the Tisch Skylights-an open space on the top floor, where, during my visit, some pretty awesome sword-fighting practice was underway for Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, a “futuristic kung fu musical” by director Chen Shi-Zheng and screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger (the latter two of Kung Fu Panda fame) that will be staged at the Shed in June. Then there are two column-free gallery spaces (without donor names, as of yet), one of them a home for an ambitious-looking production involving Gerhard Richter, Arvo Pärt, and Steve Reich. That space will first be used to present Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a theatrical work by poet Anne Carson with Renée Fleming and Ben Whishaw in starring roles.
Griffin Theater (named for the hedge-funder who recently snapped up a $238 million penthouse in Midtown and gave $25 million to the project). Besides the McCourt, which can house 2,000 standing people and will debut with performances of African-American music organized by artist and director Steve McQueen, there’s the 11,700-square-foot Kenneth C. That future involves presenting new commissions in a number of quite-impressive spaces. “The Shed is about, once again, the future.” “There are many cultural institutions that are truly world-class in our town, but some of them tend to be about the past,” he said. Poots, for his part, called the Shed “a place for invention, for curiosity, for risk-taking.” He spoke of wanting it to be “decentered” and able to go “beyond binaries, of art and the sacred, East and West, public and private.”īusinessman Jonathan Tisch, the Shed’s vice chair, offered the most piquant remarks. Architect Liz Diller has also cited the Fun Palace as an inspiration, and thinking back a decade, to when she and her team were working on a design for a building without a clear mandate, this morning said she and her collaborators conceived of the Shed as “an anti-institutional institution that would house all the arts under one roof in a building responsive to the ever-changing needs of artists in all media, at all scales, indoors and out, into a future we could not predict.” She also termed it “a perpetual work in progress.” In town from London, where he directs the Serpentine Galleries, Shed artistic adviser Hans Ulrich Obrist likened the enterprise to visionary architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, a never-built multiuse building aimed at providing entertainment and education to large numbers of people. Inside “Reich Richter Pärt,” the Choir of Trinity Wall Street rehearses. The Shed is also, per Doctoroff, a “dynamic, one-of-a-kind structure” and “an accessible and adaptable arts organization with global reach,” and the McCourt “is a spectacular space that can do almost anything artists can imagine.” McCourt, the man, described the Shed as “a bold, daring, and now-living example of what I mean by civic imagination: an idea that has been put into action for the greater good.” “That’s what the Shed is designed to be-a platform, a uniquely adaptable building, able to liberate artists to fulfill their dreams.” (Bloomberg himself gave $75 million to the project and the building bears his name.) “A shed is defined as an open-ended structure with tools,” he said. What, precisely, is the Shed? Its chair, Dan Doctoroff, who came to the initiative as an investor and then became a deputy mayor under Bloomberg, delivered a straightforward answer.
McCourt Jr., the businessman who put $45 million toward the project.) Sadly, the rolling roof was not activated today. Hans Ulrich Obrist inside the McCourt, a cavernous hall with a retractable roof, ready for any occasion.Īt a press conference on Wednesday morning, a few of the big movers behind the initiative assembled to explain it all in the McCourt, the Shed’s hallmark space-a cavernous 17,000-square-foot hall covered by a soaring, retractable roof resembling bubble wrap or a rippled garbage bag that moves on wheels that are six feet in diameter.
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