Opening March 15 on Manhattan’s West Side, Hudson Yards will be “bigger than the United Nations, the World Trade Center, or Rockefeller Center and physically vaster, more populous, and more expensive than any private development in the country,” writes New York’s architecture critic Justin Davidson, in a curtain-raiser on the project. After several visits and a tour with an executive from the project’s developer, Related Companies, Davidson says: “I can’t help feeling like an alien here, as though I’ve crossed from real New York, with all its jangling mess, into a movie studio’s back-lot version. Everything is too clean, too flat, too art-directed. This para-Manhattan, raised on a platform and tethered to the real thing by one subway line, has no history, no holdover greasy spoons, no pockets of blight or resident eccentrics—no memories at all.” He does see “one grain of unpredictability in Related’s grand oyster, one hope for humanism at Hudson Yards: the Shed, a lavishly funded but endearingly weird headquarters of interdisciplinary art.”