A fourth death – a 14-year-old boy visiting on 29 July with his family – from Vessel, the 16-storey, 46m-tall, staircase sculpture at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. The tragedy has seen the honeycomb structure, variously derided as the “colossal shawarma”, the “stairway to nowhere”, a “giant’s wastepaper basket” and a “pineapple thing”, now labelled a “suicide machine”.

Amidst calls for the $US200-million tourist attraction opened in 2019 to be demolished, its designers, Heatherwick Studio, released a statement: “We’re distraught about the news of last week’s tragedy. Working with our partners at Related, the team exhaustively explored physical solutions to increase safety. [These] require further rigorous tests, and we continue to work to identify a solution that is feasible in terms of engineering and installation.”

The statement doesn’t say that all the deaths were entirely preventable had Vessel been designed as suicide prevention experts and community board members had repeatedly called for. Or that, before it was built, many had highlighted the height of the glass balustrades lining the 154 interconnecting flights of stairs and 80 landings as inadequate. “As one climbs up Vessel, the railings stay just above waist height all the way up to the structure’s top but, when you build high, folks will jump,” wrote one architectural critic of the design. There’s no mention either that Heatherwick had reportedly designed safety barriers before the climbable structure was built but they were never installed.

Related is the developer of Hudson Yards and operator of Vessel. Its billionaire CEO Stephen Ross said of the latest suicide: “It’s hard to really fathom how something like that could happen. But I feel terrible for the family. I want to explore every feasible possibility we can, but, for now, the Vessel is closed.” That suicide is indiscriminate, frequently unexpected and always devastating for the loved ones ensnared by its brutality isn’t that hard to fathom. To date, in Ross’ world, exploring every feasible possibility has meant anything other than installing safety barriers. When Vessel reopened in May, after the third death in January, raising the height of the balustrades, while entirely feasible, didn’t happen. Instead, there were: a new entry fee of $10 (access was previously free), a buddy system, meaning visitors were no longer allowed to enter alone, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline signage and more security officers trained in suicide prevention. It took only two months for those woefully insufficient mitigation methods to prove ineffective.

What is difficult to fathom is the resistance to doing the right thing when architecture is used in such a violent, unintended, yet predictable, way. Closer to home, it took two deaths, the first in November 2012, the second in January 2014, before barriers were added to balustrades looking into the 26m-high atrium of the Owen G Glenn Building (OGGB), the home of the University of Auckland Business School. Following the November 2012 death, the university released a statement saying it had engaged consultants to advise on measures to increase the safety from falling, “even (though) the building’s design exceeded Building Code requirements”.

But, as Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner write in Life and Death and the University, doing the right thing also has an ongoing effect: “The construction of the barriers can be considered a form of feedback, through which the building produces an upgraded version of itself, taking into account the possibility of this kind of behaviour on the part of its inhabitants, as suicide can now be considered a clue to how this building works. The barriers mark a wound upon the building and its inhabitants”. 

Sturm and Turner argue that the suicides in the OGGB mean that it can never be the same building it was before they took place “because their emergency brings its prehensive structures into question and calls for a social account that is irreducible to the econometric social scripts of the university”.

Today, the university silently demonstrates a newfound architectural consciousness saturated in suicide prevention. Roof decks, including that of the School of Architecture and Planning, once the site of frequent convivial student gatherings and sometimes learning, are now firmly shut and permanently off limits, the cost of remediating deemed too high. New student residence towers – balconies absent and with windows stopped from opening more than a sliver – struggle not to feel like prison blocks.

But there are signs of how architecture can be part of the solution to suicide prevention and how, with good design, the solutions needn’t be an eyesore. A subtle example can be found in the university’s $145-million Science Centre (Building 302) by Architectus, where the stairs beside the soaring eight-level canyon atrium, bounded by a béton brut concrete wall of sheer brutalism, are made safe by an understated, thin, enclosing mesh stretched taut above the balustrades. 

As a journalist, I’m acutely aware that media coverage of suicide can be part of the problem – that sensational, detailed reporting can contribute to more loss of life. There are also arguments about the naming of locations of suicides leading to places developing notoriety and leading to further tragedy. In my experience of talking to those affected by suicide, the far greater problem is the silence and stigma always associated with the subject. Invariably, those affected see breaking the silence as the way forward. The architecture of suicide is not an easy topic but, for architects who might adhere to an ethical position akin to “first, do no harm”, it’s a topic that can’t be avoided.