Hudson Yard | Manhattan

I conceived the Hudson Winds installation project in response to the duality of two very different and yet synergistic realities: the Hudson River’s endlessly flowing natural landscape to the west and the newly constructed Hudson Yards urban environment sleekly stretching into the future to the east, This work intends to offer visitors a real-time, immersive experience of the natural and built environment that co-exists through the heightened awareness of three local, present and intangible entities: wind, light, and sound.

An invisible force, it has the power to penetrate Manhattan’s urban grid corridors but is nowhere more apparent than along the Hudson waterfront. It inspired my idea to position three poeticly conceived, human-friendly wind turbines that give body and grace to the wind while capturing its energy to visually and audibly transform and enhance the site around it.

These state of the art devices would enrich the urban landscape experience with their unique blend of electric, participative, and meditative energy. At 9 meters tall, the turbines are not only visible from afar but can uniquely be viewed up close and approached by passersby because of their safety features.

These turbines are designed explicitly to the Golden Ratio scale, establishing a harmonic relationship with people who are in their presence. The brushed steel towers and the specially designed blue ‘interference aluminum pigment’ enameled carbon-fiber wings connect the reflective glass architectures’ stillness to the ever-changing light of the sky.

Illuminated at night by a LED spotlight system housed within in-ground recesses and powered by the energy harvested and stored in day time, the whole installation is self-sufficient, active and visible 24 hours a day from the street as well as the elevated levels, ever-changing under the varying lighting conditions. Accumulated energy stores can feed functional public access points and monitors, and provide information on local environmental conditions.

In addition to interacting with light and wind, the turbines are to be installed with a dedicated audio system that captures the surrounding ambient sounds, transforming them into a sound composition synchronized to the turbine wings’ rotation speeds. Through multimodal engagement with their sites and those in their presence, the turbines allow an enfolding perception of the environmental conditions, weaving a tangible fabric of time and place.

The wind turbines are produced by the Italian eco-craftsmen, green energy company
ENESSERE, based in the Italian province of Vicenza.