What can be done publicly with limited funding of $550 million? The Shed gives one answer: it mobilizes a huge amount of resources–$550 million with maintenance fee every year and 11 years of development. The Shed is full of wheels, which makes it move but also means additional cost. Architects and the developers of the Shed argue that the movements bring flexibility as a way to brand, architecturally and culturally, the Shed to raise the price of properties in Hudson Yard. Politically, the Shed moves as a strategy to privatize public resources. Its real attitude toward the public contradicts its concept of flexibility and bringing diversity to the city. This project counteracts and constructs alternatives to the Shed with the funding limit invested for the building. But this project is intended to be not only fictionally flexible but actually flexible. It takes advantage of the existing rail system and proposes a new design of carriers traveling on it to offer flexible public space to people who really need it. This new carrier, Possibility Maker, uses mechanical systems learning from the Shed but on a smaller scale and is used with different proposals to unfold publicness as a means for collective emancipation instead of occupying and privatizing public space.
