The Spring Street Salt Shed: a faceted concrete crystal on the Hudson beside the sanitation garage in its skin of fins. Inside, five thousand tons of salt as a white mountain under the folded shell, plow blades against the wall, a loader idling, the works on the promenade around the pile.
The Spring Street Salt Shed was completed in 2015 for the New York City Department of Sanitation at the foot of Canal Street on the Hudson River. Dattner Architects designed it with WXY architecture and urban design as a faceted concrete crystal rising nearly 70 feet, the cast in place concrete serving as both structure and finish. Inside it holds 5,000 tons of road salt. Across Spring Street the Manhattan Districts 1, 2 and 5 Garage houses more than 150 sanitation vehicles and earned LEED Gold.
Source · urbanNext ↗
The tilted concrete facets cantilevering over the base, the truck door on Spring Street, the garage next door wrapped in perforated fins, the Hudson and the Jersey shore behind, the salt cone with grains sliding, the yellow plow blades, a salt spreader rolling past on West Street, gulls. Mood: the city before snow. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.