Project by Lee Nien, Siao Guan, Yi, Wang Shao-Wei

The Vessel is emblematic of the increasing dominance of the image in architectural culture and material production. Images play a crucial role in the operation of the vessel throughout the design and fabrication process into its use as a landmark and spread as an architectural image. From its replication of historical precedents through reference images, over the excessive design explorations though physical and digital models carefully documented in publications, and through the final presentation renders, the design process of the Vessel is clearly aimed at producing an iconic image. Throughout the design process, supported by an extensive team of consultants, engineers, contractors, and fabricators, a bespoke material system was devised to fulfill this image imperative. No effort was spared, the heavy steel structure was prefabricated in truck size chunks, pre-assembled on a test-site in Italy, shipped to New York to be reassembled and to be clad in a reflectively shiny bronze-like skin made of polished stainless-steel panels with a copper-colored coating. The resulting structure is an image generating device that functions for and through the image. It is positioned for alignment with the Empire State Building from specific vantage points along the river, it crowns the Hudson Yards development as a visual centerpiece, and it offers multiple framed views from its internal staircases and decks. Its unavoidable selfie-producing reflective surfaces not only mirror the surrounding buildings but invite constant photographic engagement. It’s an object to be captured as an image, and to capture images from and with. It is no surprise that the Vessel has rapidly become part of the accelerating visual culture enabled through digital media, endlessly photographed, vlogged, shared and liked.

The project After Vessel, builds on the After Materialities fieldguide, exploring the acceleration of contemporary image culture and the resulting mutations of materiality in an era we could label post-digital and a time in which digital technologies are so pervasive they even affect how we relate to the material world around us. The Vessel is initially used to map and trace these mutations and shifts in materiality. Through this analysis, the project argues that the Vessel is more than just a building; it is deeply connected to larger systems shaped by social media, digital technology, and new modes of generating value and meaning. The project further speculates on these shifts through a series of critical copies and speculative mutations of the Vessel. Using existing data sources, scraped images, models and maps, the video both reveals the footprint of the Vessel in contemporary media ecologies, and highlights broader architectural shifts it exemplifies, namely the transformations of crucial notions of locality, temporality, materiality, value and place. Rather than focusing on these bootleg copies as singular instances, the resulting video demonstrates the multitude of instances and the entanglement between these copies and the ideas they represent. Rather than depicting the Vessel as an easy ‘bad guy’ as has often been done in architectural critique of the project, the project proposes to question and explore what happens when architecture is experienced mainly as an image, and when public spaces are influenced by evolving ideas of value, memory, materiality and locality. We hope that by using mutation as a thoughtful approach, searching for new possibilities, we can help architecture find more meaningful roles in an age shaped by after-images and appearances.