Little Island
Little Island In 2012, following a design competition, the Hudson River Park Trust and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation appointed Heatherwick Studio to design a new pier on Manhattan’s southwest riverside. The brief asked for a public park and outdoor performance space. Pier 54 had recently been damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the design was inspired by the structural remnants of previous piers and hundreds of old wooden piles poking out of the Hudson River. This idea evolved to take the new concrete piles needed to support a structure in the choppy Hudson River and continue them out of the water, extending skyward to raise up sections of green landscape. The individual piles come together to form the park’s unique topography. Raising up the pier counteracts this windswept environment and creates a sheltered space acoustically optimised for theatre and performance, with raked seating shaped into the landscape to give the audience better views and better comfort. It also allows sunlight to penetrate below the pier and support the marine ecosystem. The resulting design developed as a system of repeating piles. Each of them forms a generous planter at their top.
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