Note: The tour day for this location has changed. Tours will only be offered on Friday. 

Designed by London-based Heatherwick Studios and New York’s landscape architecture firm MNLA, Little Island is a 2.4-acre urban oasis built at the City’s Pier 55 location. A multi-media entertainment venue on the Hudson River, visitors are surrounded by hundreds of species of trees, shrubs, grasses, vines and perennials. But to build Heatherwick’s unique design required innovative engineering expertise from Arup.

The design pictured a park ‘floating’ above the Hudson, propped up by an array of constructs of different heights and shapes fused together. Arup’s engineers suggested building concrete ‘pots’ from precast concrete. Arup designed these, using advanced digital modeling, as a ‘Cairo pentagon’ pattern, in which the pattern appeared not to repeat, as per the desired aesthetic design.

The result is a sustainable plot of park land first, its flora acting as ‘one giant green roof,’ and with all the public health benefits of an urban oasis. But it also has the flexibility of Arup’s integrated acoustics, audio-visual and theater design for the space, which incorporates venue sound and sightlines seamlessly into the park’s greenery.

Looking for a place to grab a bite or a drink while you’re exploring? Check out The Infatuation’s top West Village picks.