This is a love story. And, like every love story, it’s also a death story.
Almost two years ago, I went to Hudson Yards for the first time. It was a number of firsts: my first press preview since moving back to New York after spending nine years on the West Coast; my first time in a long time feeling the pull of architecture in a way I’d almost trained myself not to; my first time stepping out into the world since leaving a four-year marriage whose contours, at the time, I could barely see.
I wrote a piece for this magazine—we called it “Hudson Yards Broke My Heart”—and it was about how the striving that I saw in the architecture mirrored the striving I felt I had done in my marriage. At the time, I was telling myself that I had deeply loved someone who had been constitutionally unable to love me; that I had tried, over and over, to make something work with someone who could not make it work with me, because he actually, I guess, did not want to make it work with me. In the scratched ETFE panels on the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed Shed, I saw a reflection of the times I’d tried to get my then-husband’s attention, the ways I’d begged him to throw me a single scrap of love. Vessel gave me a vertiginous feeling, the same one I’d had when, in a therapist’s office, I’d finally told him I was leaving, and he’d turned to me and said, with a click in his throat, “you mean … divorce?” In the wide and empty hallways with absolutely nowhere to sit, I felt what my friend had described as the emotional sterility of my crumbling relationship. I realized that Hudson Yards, with its luxurious emptiness and deep striving to be a better, brighter, glitzier, bigger image that could be sold and bought, was revealing me to myself.
This, of course, wasn’t the way I’d learned to practice architectural criticism. I was taught by mentors and teachers and editors who gently—and sometimes less gently—shaped a story for me, told me to take more of myself out and put more of someone else in. I was taught to describe, to focus on materials and form and brief, to let the designers speak, to recede into the background. An early piece of advice was to let the building say what it wanted to say; to pull some quotes from an interview subject. Maybe I was given that advice because I was young and didn’t have anything yet to say. Maybe it’s because that’s just how we train each other. But none of it prepared me for my realization that architecture can be a mirror, that you can see emotion in it, can weave a personal narrative out of built structure and material and proportion. This is why I’d wanted to write about architecture in the first place, because I wanted to figure out why it made me feel so much. Why had I cried at the light well at Ronchamp? Why did I delight at Roy McMakin’s houses? Why did I feel scratchy, on the inside, when I looked at anything by Eisenman? Some of that is material and form and brief, and the designers themselves speaking. But some of it is about allowing my own narrative in; about allowing yours.
Hope in the Heartbreak
A few weeks back, I returned to Hudson Yards. I’d been asked to consider how architecture might change in a post-pandemic world; what a glitzy series of office towers might look and feel like now that we have no idea whether we’re ever going back to normal. I tried to stay on task, but the architecture wouldn’t let me. Things were different this time. This time I brought a person and a cattle dog named Boo, who we left in the car but whose presence, of course, is always with us. We’d woken up together in this person’s Bed-Stuy loft, and I’d said I had to go to Hudson Yards for an assignment, and did he want to come, and of course he did. I’d traded the sterility of my first marriage for a relationship with someone who wanted to be around me, who wanted to talk to me and hear what I had to say, someone whose hope and faith in our future and our present I draw from, just as I hope he draws from mine. I asked if he wanted to take pictures, or maybe he offered, and I understood once again how not-alone I am now. We decided that he would capture what he saw; that I would feel what I felt, and then write what I wanted to write. We wondered how our respective visions would entwine.
Last time I came in through the back, from the side of Vessel. This time, we came in through 10th Avenue. I looked at the textures of three buildings—two KPF towers and the mall—meeting near 10th and West 30th Street, and I thought that maybe the combinations weren’t so bad after all, that there was something in the way in which one tower leaned towards another, in how the edges were articulated and articulatable, that I didn’t hate. He took a picture of a man with a dog, and I looked, later, at the inverted and upright trapezoids in the background, the clarity of the relationship between the stone and glass. The plaza felt open and textured; the paving stones rich. Was it possible that Hudson Yards wasn’t actually as heartbreaking as I’d initially thought? "It's just a shopping mall," my person said. "Like the eighties, but without the trauma." The first time I visited, I’d seen heartbreak in the hope. This time, I saw hope in the heartbreak.
Even in the middle of the pandemic, the mall was full, the escalator draped in Christmas lights. People took pictures of each other against the backdrop of that Cartesian grid, making sure to get Vessel in the background; they smiled when the camera was on and stopped smiling when it was off. We got chicken fingers and waffle fries at Fuku, because the night before I’d turned to him mid-Bachelorette and said, “My god, I need some chicken fingers.” We stood in line for the bathroom near the Herman Miller showroom and saw two kids on their phones, sitting on the floor, because almost two years after opening, for some reason, there still aren't enough seats. From the second floor we stared down on the first and people-watched; or maybe it was the third floor looking down on the second (the maps are disorienting and infrequent). Maybe the point of Hudson Yards isn’t to understand it, it’s to feel it. We went to Theory, where I tried on and bought two dresses and a pair of boots, and then to Kenzo, where I did the same, while pretending not to overhear my person talking, proudly, about how I was writing an article about Hudson Yards, how I’d written one before. We found a cordoned-off section and inside it a plush banquette next to a marble wall, and I don’t know exactly where it was or why it was there, but it was empty and isolating and also at the same time pregnant with possibility. Soon large groups of people will sit there again, I thought. Soon this will be different.
It Will Be Otherwise
Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) wrote a poem called "Otherwise." It begins:
I got out of bed on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
Donald Hall, Jane’s husband and himself a poet and essayist, in his memoir of their life together, recounted that she’d originally ended the poem in a refrain of that same phrase: “It might be otherwise.” Hall, her most trusted editor, had crossed out that “might” and replaced it with “will.” The poem now ends:
But one day, I know
it will be otherwise.
Every love story is also a death story. At the exact moment I realized I loved my person, I also realized he would die. I tell my therapist, “If he dies,” and she jumps in: “When he dies.” To love someone, if you’re wired like I am, is to think about their death. I know I love this person because I want to be there when he dies. I want him to be there when I do.
The Vessel Suicides
The day before I started writing this story, The New York Times reported the third suicide from Vessel, which remained closed in the aftermath. I thought about the security guard who, remarkably, had seen not one but two of the deaths and wondered about how he felt, how he feels now. I wondered about the two men and one woman who had decided to walk up Vessel and jump off, and I remembered how the Times article made clear that if you build high, people will jump. I think about the people I know who’ve died by suicide. I think about the people I know and love who live, every day, with the specter of that kind of death.
What should we do with Vessel? Keep it closed? Build barriers, like at New York University’s Bobst Library, also the site of multiple suicides? Can architecture, can physical barriers, really stop someone intent on dying? Only my closest friends know this, until now, but during my divorce, at times, I was close. I’d never been suicidal before, but the obliteration—how I felt trapped in a legal contract I could not seem to buy my way out of, how the only emotional exit was through trapdoors that fell into the traumas of my childhood, how over the last two years I’ve begun to disentangle the ways I was just as responsible for my marriage not working as my ex-husband was—it nearly became too much.
Something had to die, then, for me to live. To be able to love again. I wonder what it is sometimes. Maybe it’s my connection to pain, my seemingly infinite capacity for grief, which explains the difficulty I encounter when I try to reorient myself towards joy. But then again, without that capacity for grief, would I have this capacity for constant hope?
Big Enough to Contain It All
At the end of our visit to Hudson Yards we went to Little Spain. I ordered us the same sandwich I’d ordered the first time, hoping it would still taste like the best sandwich I’d ever had (it did). “What do you think you’ll write?” he asked, and I told him I had no idea, though in truth I had some.
I stepped outside and left myself a voice note: “The first time I went to Hudson Yards, what I perceived was longing, but all I could see was failure. The next time that I went, 10 months into the pandemic and with someone that I loved, all I could see was the same longing, the same trying, but this time there was a hopefulness to it.”
I thought about how I’d learned to be a critic. When I had first written about Hudson Yards, I had tried to follow what I’d been taught: go to the press briefing, see your friends, download the pictures, get 10 minutes on the phone with the architect, hope for a blurb that’ll be different than your friend’s blurb, say something about materials, or the design brief, or a thing that went horribly wrong and another thing that went horribly right. This time I had wanted to write a piece about Hudson Yards that corrected what I’d done before, that formally analyzed the cantilever and the glass and maybe the shape of one tower and another, and the plaza and Vessel, and the grid and how the siting also destroyed the grid. Most critics have made careers of this kind of analysis, in which their reasons for writing about buildings feel pure—or at least purer than mine. I have often longed for the ability to offer a similar approach. And maybe I could, if I really tried. I could probably write something closer to a Jules Prown analysis, in which I describe what I see, and help you to see it, too. So many people have done that with Hudson Yards. Some will probably do it again. But then again, doesn’t that miss something—something huge?
Hudson Yards is objectively the same now as it was when I first visited. It has the same material and architectural compositions. It has the same baffling lack of relationship between its towers and its assorted other parts. It continues to be a playground for the rich who, frankly, don’t need any more playgrounds. It is glittering and it is gold. It is the site of three deaths by suicide. It is also the site of love. What’s changed is that I am now projecting onto it everything that I thought during my first visit and everything that I feel now. Hudson Yards is big enough to contain it all: the hope, the loss, the grief, the redemption. It’s big enough to change with me. Or maybe it’s my capacity for life that has changed. Now that I look back on it, I think about how some part of me trusted that I would be made whole. By love. By friendship. By companionship. By a cattle dog named Boo.
I like to believe that everyone who encounters architecture responds to it in some way. I like to believe that we can be taught to see why we respond the way we do. Because all the formal stuff—the materials, the axes, the way in which buildings are produced—that’s all part of this story. But what if critics brought more of themselves into their work, if we began to unwind the belief that to be a good critic we need to pretend that we’re not bringing our own experience and history to a building? Traditional criticism, by relying on this fiction, misses the mark in so many ways. It valorizes an idea of neutrality, when the only thing that’s truly neutral is, as a friend of mine likes to say, the universe.
Hudson Yards is a microcosm of life, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand it before and now I can. It’s too intense. It’s almost nothing. It’s too much. It’s barely visible. It’s unmanageable.
It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.
