Client

Location: New York, NY, United States

Completion date: 2020

Project Team

Artist

Elmgreen & Dragset

Fabrication of Buildings

Steelworks (Germany)

Fabrication of Substructure and Base Frame

UAP

Structural Engineer

CRAFT | Engineering Studio

Public Art Facilitator

Public Art Fund

Client

Empire State Development

Overview

The Hive is an installation by artists Elmgreen & Dragset designed as part of the reconstituted James A. Farley Post Office in Manhattan. Located in the Moynihan Train Hall of the new Penn Station terminal building, the illuminated installation captures the “city’s irresistible urban energy” via an imaginary global metropolis hanging upside-down from the ceiling. Nearly one hundred unique aluminum and stainless-steel building structures, measuring up to nine feet in length, representative of signature buildings from cities around the world, cantilever downward from a mirror polished urban grid. Reflective of interconnectivity, it is thought of as a world city with representations of symbolic buildings all over the globe collected into one urban landscape. Seismically, the individual buildings act as pendulums within the entry hall connected directly to the terminal building’s structure which itself acts as a pendulum cantilevered out of the ground plane above the train tunnels below. The complex interplay of movements between the various components of the miniature and full-scale buildings became a key component of the structural investigation.

Goals

The goal of our studio was to create a methodology for almost one hundred miniature building structures to be engineered as cantilevers from the ceiling structure of a train hall suspended over a train terminal below, while navigating between key stakeholders in Germany and the US.

Process

Collaboration was vital to the success of this installation. The fabricator and artist worked exclusively in Germany and relied on CRAFT for the analysis and verification of nearly one hundred building structures suspended over a very active entry hall with no visible means of assembly or fastening.