Hmm. Moloch? A face mask without a self? Ever bigger guys pressing down on the littlest guy? There’s something Kafkaesque about this “stairway to nowhere.” An Escher painting catching real humans? It recalls a trilobite or exoskeleton–or perhaps an ant farm. It catches light and the eye (and “the light of the body is the eye”), and yet it seems to be a metaphor for something alienating and dark: perhaps the breastplate of Achilles pushing through a grove of trees, heading for war. Perhaps the silent monolith from Kubrick’s 2001. Who will inquire of this Sphinx? And now I see an orgy of giant tarantulas back to back to back. Where are we going? Is this the herald of the death of God?
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Stephen M. Ross, who is developing Hudson Yards, has a nickname for Thomas Heatherwick’s 15-story structure on the plaza: “the social climber.”
NYTIMES.COM|BY TED LOOS
Prometheus Unbound 