The Hudson River Park Trust announced July 30, 2009 that it has selected a development team headed by Young Woo & Associates to redevelop Pier 15 between 15th and 16th Streets on the Hudson River just to the south of the Chelsea Piers complex.

Young Woo's proposal calls for the pier to be used for a Contemporary Culture Complex that will be created by Philips de Pury and Company, the auction house, a major rooftop venue for the TriBeCa Film Festival, and a covered open-air marketplace using recycled shipping containers, some of which will protrude from the facade "as an interpretation of the gangways and steamer trunks that once served a bustling maritime New York," created by Urban Space Management USA, which has created indoor and outdoor retail facilities at Grand Central Terminal, and Union Square and numerous other locations.

The $210 million project on the pier will also have a variety of retail and restaurant spaces as well as an underwater discovery center.

The pier was built in 1954 for Grace Lines after a fire in 1947 destroyed the previous pier on the site and insured about 200 firefighters. After W. R. Grace Company sold its shipping line in 1969, the pier was used a bus garage and maintenance facility by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

In 2005, the trust selected a proposal by a joint venture of the Witkoff Group, Plaza Construction and Giuseppe Cipriani to develop the pier into a fashion emporium with showrooms, shops, a marina and restaurants and a 70,000-square-foot "event space." The project was known as "Leonardo" and would also have included a rooftop club and a community educational facility and a floating swimming barge and possibly a bridge from the rooftop park to the High Line elevated park. The Witkoff Group eventually pulled out of the project and the Trust issued a new "request for proposals."

Young Woo was chosen over proposals from The Related Companies, the Durst Organization and C & K Properties.

Young Woo recently bought two office buildings from AIG including its great Art Deco skyscraper at 70 Pine Street whose small observatory is one of the greatest rooms in the world. Young Woo & Associates recently built the nearby Chelsea Arts Tower and is constructing the 16-story residential condominium building where most apartments incorporate a room to garage a car at 200 Eleventh Avenue.

The trust is also considering the redevelopment of a large waterfront site, Pier 40, several blocks to the south where The Related Companies had submitted a proposal to create a venue for Cirque de Soleil and the TriBeCa Film Festival but community groups campaigned against it on the grounds that it would generate too much traffic and would interfere with its use as a soccer field and parking facility.

LOT-EK, which is headed by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, is the design architect for the Young Woo project. It designed two impressive low-rise buildings last year in Beijing, a very striking, four-story building with a blue-metal mesh facade with angled windows at Sanlitun North, and an orange-metal-mesh facade structure with jutting containers and scaffolding-like frames in alleys at Sanlitun South.

Philips de Pury & Company, which is headed by Simon de Pury, is a major auction house specializing in Contemporary Art, Design, and Photographs and in recent years it has been operating in a commercial building overlooking the High Line Elevated Park on West 15th Street across from the great Chelsea Market building.