Only a month after the Garden Bridge was scrapped, Thomas Heatherwick's plans for a park on New York's Hudson River have been abandoned ? and the designer has described the decision as "really, really sad".
Billionaire Barry Diller announced yesterday he is giving up his battle to replace an old pier with an undulating park and events space designed by Heatherwick Studio.
The project, called Pier 55, had been granted planning permission, and had also overcome a series of court challenges. But construction wasn't able to start, due to problems with the permit, and the delays caused by the ongoing legal disputes led to costs ballooning up from $35 million to $250 million.
Thomas Heatherwick designed Pier 55 to jut out over New York's Hudson River "It's really, really sad that the project isn't happening," Heatherwick told Dezeen.
"There was enormous public support, everyone was behind it, except there was an unelected group of people who, from a commercial real-estate perspective, had their own gripes. They held the project hostage, slowing it down through repeated legal cases that the project was winning each time, but which were grinding things down."
Despite the obvious similarities between Pier 55 and the Garden Bridge, the designer insists that the two outcomes have nothing in common.
He claims Pier 55 would have been "a new public space that's never existed before".
"The pier would have been an amazing public space,&q...