[NYguy]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj
West Side's Museum Mile

November 3, 2011
By JENNIFER MALONEY

The first lease for the Hudson Yards project is breathing life into another idea: A new space for arts and culture on the site that, along with the Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District, would bookend what is envisioned as a kind of Museum Mile for the West Side. City officials say they are planning a Hudson Yards arts center that serves as a blank canvas. It could simultaneously host theater performances, traveling exhibitions and community events on different floors—or the entire space could be marshaled to stage one large show.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that the center, which has been part of the project's plans since its 2005 inception, will become the home of Fashion Week. "This would add a great deal to New York's ability to have big events and keep the industries that are coming here growing," he said while announcing that Coach Inc. plans to be the first tenant in an office tower built by Related Cos.

If the plan comes to fruition, people will be able to stroll along the High Line from the Whitney, stop at a few Chelsea galleries and continue to the Culture Shed, a space that city officials say would showcase not just art, but fashion and industrial design.

City officials cautioned that the Culture Shed is still in its infancy. Officials, who are shepherding the idea but won't run the center, said they hope to have a clearer plan by next summer for the building's design, the money required to build it and the shape of the nonprofit organization that will lead it. The design, by Diller Scofidio & Renfro, in partnership with the Rockwell Group, is still under development. An early rendering showed a five-story building with a footprint of 22,000 square feet, couched in two outer shells that could be rolled outward to expand the space to more than 55,000 square feet.