West Side Rail Yards Rendering Fakery

When Tishman Speyer's bid was selected as the winner in the West Side Rail Yards development derby, politicians were relieved but the NY Times' architecture critic was upset. Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote the design "lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition" and called it a "wishful fantasy" and "a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York."

In today's NY Times Arts & Leisure section, Ouroussoff takes on "big-time development" and how renderings are so scrutinized, "the public is often left without the visual tools it needs to make thoughtful judgments about a development’s impact." Instead, renderings are a marketing tool and he uses Tishman's Hudson Yards proposal as a typical example of what developers are doing, leaving only a "distorted picture of reality, one that stifles what is supposed to be an open, democratic process."

You can see six things that are obscured/glossed over/manipulated in the Hudson Yards rendering, which you can see in this interactive graphic.