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Thursday, December 18, 2014

Arch Daily- New York


Davis Brody Bond and KieranTimberlake Chosen to Design NYU Facility

US Embassy in London / KieranTimberlake Architects
As the culmination of a five-month selection process,  University (NYU) has announced that Davis Brody Bond and KieranTimberlake will be designing its major new facility along Mercer Street between Houston and Bleecker in New York. The facility’s many uses will include classrooms, teaching spaces for performing arts, a state-of-the-art sports facility, and student and faculty housing.
Collectively, the team was chosen for its high profile portfolio, which includes projects like the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the U.S. Embassy in London, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the 1983-2006 restoration and expansion of the New York Public Library.

Mariner Harbor Branch Library / A*PT ARCHITECTURE

© Albert Vecerka / Esto
Architects: A*PT ARCHITECTURE
Location: Mariners Harbor, Staten Island, NY, USA
Design Team: Anna Torriani, AIA; Lorenzo Pagnamenta, AIA; Wasmiya Tan; Raffaele Stefani; Damien Romanens; Nam Suk Oh; Juan Carlos Salas Ballestin; Caterina Inderbitzin; Petya Ivanova; Felix Lederberger; Roxane Bervini; Anais Iglesias; Nuria Forques.
Area: 10000.0 ft2
Year: 2014
Photographs: Albert Vecerka / Esto

Stereotank Designs Heart-Beating Urban Drum for Times Square

© 
Come February 9,  City will be celebrating the opening of its seventh annual Valentine’s Day installation in Times Square. As part of Times Square Alliance’s heart design competition, Brooklyn- based and Venezuelan-born firm Stereotank will be constructing a heart-beating urban drum in hopes that it will bring together New Yorkers through music. 

Studio Gang Tapped to Extend American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History. Image Courtesy of Wikipedia
Chicago’s Studio Gang Architects have been selected to design a new Center for Science, Education and Innovation for the American Museum of Natural History in . Named after its largest donor, the $325 million Gilder Center will include 218,000-square-feet of existing and new space. It is slated to open on Columbus Avenue at 79th Street on the west side of the Museum campus, in conjunction with its 150th anniversary in 2019–2020.

SHoP Architects Reveal Restoration Plan for New York’s Seaport District

© SHoP Architects
SHoP Architects have revealed a mixed use proposal to pedestrianize  City’s historic Seaport District. Extending the  grid out into the waterfront, the scheme seeks to harmonize pedestrian infrastructure and increase access to the shoreline, while proposing a 500-foot luxury residential tower by developer Howard Hughes Corporation that would jut out into the harbor. More about the proposal, after the break.

Why New York Shouldn’t be a City for the One Percent

View above Central Park looking south towards “Billionaire’s Row” towers, with Midtown towers in background and various Financial District and Downtown Brooklyn Towers in far background. Image Courtesy of CityRealty
In recent years, it’s been difficult to miss the spate of supertall, super-thin towers on the rise in Manhattan. Everyone knows the individual projects: , One57, the Nordstrom Tower, the MoMA Tower. But, when a real estate company released renders of the New York skyline in 2018, it forced New Yorkers to consider for the first time the combined effect of all this new real estate. In this opinion article, originally published by Metropolis Magazine as “On New York’s Skyscraper Boom and the Failure of Trickle-Down Urbanism,” Joshua K Leon argues that the case for a city of the one percent doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.
What would a city owned by the one-percent look like?
New renderings for CityRealty get us part way there, illustrating how Manhattan may appear in 2018. The defining feature will be a bumper crop of especially tall, slender  piercing the skyline like postmodern boxes, odd stalagmites, and upside-down syringes. What they share in common is sheer unadulterated scale and a core clientele of uncompromising plutocrats.

10 Points of a Bicycling Architecture

© Steven Fleming and Charlotte Morton
A revolution is occurring in street design. New York, arguably the world’s bellwether city, has let everyday citizens cycle for transport. They have done that by designating one lane on most Avenues to bicyclists only, with barriers to protect them from traffic.
Now hundreds of cities are rejigging to be bicycle-friendly, while in  there is a sense that more change is afoot. Many New Yorkers would prefer if their city were more like Copenhagen where 40% of all trips are by bike. But then Copenhagen wants more as well. Where does this stop? 
If you consider that we are talking about a mode of transport that whips our hearts into shape, funnels many more people down streets than can be funneled in cars, has no pollution, and costs governments and individuals an absolute pittance, you wont ask where it stops, but how close to 100% the bike modal share can possibly go and what we must do to achieve that.

The Room at Technicolor Postworks / Rafi Segal Architecture

© Kate Joyce
Architects: Rafi Segal Architecture
Location: , NY, USA
Design Team: Rafi Segal A+U , Sara Segal
Project Manager: Bill Topazio (PostWorks)
Area: 1400.0 ft2
Photographs: Kate Joyce

New York’s $4 Billion Train Station Takes Shape

Screenshot. Image © Bedel Saget/The  Times
Santiago Calatrava’s head-turning World Trade Center Transportation Hub has assumed its full form, nearly a decade after its design was revealed. In light of this, the New York Times has taken a critical look at just how the winged station’s budget soared. “Its colossal avian presence may yet guarantee the hub a place in the pantheon of civic design in New York. But it cannot escape another, more ignominious distinction as one of the most expensive and most delayed train stations ever built.” The complete report, here.

Kimmelman Reviews the One WTC: An Emblem of New York’s “Upside-Down Priorities”

One WTC. Image © James Ewing OTTO
Nearly a month since the official (and somewhat mundane) opening of ’s One World Trade Center, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has published a scathing review of the SOM-designed tower, claiming it to be a “flawed” emblem of the city’s “upside-down priorities.”
“Replacing the twin towers with another giant office building was somehow supposed to show New York’s indomitable spirit: the defiant city transfigured from the ashes. To the contrary, 1 World Trade implies (wrongly) a metropolis bereft of fresh ideas. It looks as if it could be anywhere, which New York isn’t.” You can read Kimmelman’s complete review, here.

Peloton / Bernheimer Architecture

© Naho Kubota
Architects: Bernheimer Architecture
Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Photographs: Naho Kubota Eric Hwang

Thomas Heatherwick Opens Up About His Design For Pier 55

© Pier55, Inc. and 
Last week, Thomas Heatherwick unveiled his fairytale-like designs for what will hopefully be New York‘s latest and most ambitious park, Pier 55 (with apologies to the High Line, New York’s last ”next big thing” in the public park arena). Envisaged as an undulating artificial landscape on a cloud of mushroom-like supports, Pier 55 has the internet buzzing. In this interview with FastCo Design, Heatherwick discusses the inspirations behind his latest project, explaining how everything including New York’s street grid, the ruins of Pier 54 and yes, even the city’s other recent global green space phenomenon, have manifested themselves in his latest madcap creation. Read the full article here for more.

In Honor of Michael Graves, The Architectural League Revisits 200 Years of Drawing

Denver Library, South Elevation, 1994, pencil and colored pencil on yellow tracing paper, 14 x 26 inches. Image Courtesy of Michael Graves & Associates, photo: Ken Ek
With their “Past as Prologue“ symposium – a day of lectures celebrating fifty years of Michael Graves‘ career - approaching tomorrow, the Architectural League of New York is taking a look back at one of its seminal exhibitions which heavily featured Graves’ work. When “200 Years of American Architectural Drawing” launched in 1977,  Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable said “By any definition… a major show,” adding “here is architecture as it comes straight from the mind and the eye and the heart, before the spoilers get to it.” In memory of the show, the Architectural League has published a selection of essays and images from the accompanying book, including the work of Graves, Peter EisenmanJohn Hejduk and Richard Meier.
Check out the Architectural League’s collection of 200 Years of American Architectural  here, and don’t forget to tune in to the livestream of the Past as Prologue symposium here at 9.30 EST on Saturday.

Surface Mag Interviews Liz Diller on Architecture, Art, and Early “Aha” Moments

© Ungano + Agriodima
Below is an excerpt of the cover story of this month’s Surface magazine: an in-depth interview with Elizabeth Diller, published online for the first time here on ArchDaily.
The 35-year career of Elizabeth Diller, a founding partner of the New York–based architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is a study of contrasts: conceptual and pragmatic, temporary and permanent, iconoclastic and institutional. After graduating from Cooper Union in 1979, Diller started her practice mounting temporary installations with her partner and future husband, Ricardo Scofidio, their interests leaning closer to art and theory than conventional buildings and construction. Today the duo—along with Charles Renfro, who became a partner in 2004—is responsible for some of the most important architectural projects in the country. DS+R counts Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (completed in 2006) and a makeover of New York’s Lincoln Center (finalized in 2012) among its highest-profile works. Especially influential, at least among architects and academics, has been the firm’s unbuilt Slow House (1991), a proposal for a residence on Long Island, New York, renowned for its examination of how we see in a media-saturated world.
One notices sharp contrasts not just in the firm’s work history but in its public reception as well. Widely lauded for repurposing a dilapidated elevated railway into New York City’s beloved High Line park (the third phase opened in September), DS+R received heavy criticism this year for its involvement in a major expansion proposal for the Museum of Modern Art. The museum’s plans included the demolition of its little-guy neighbor, the American Folk Art Museum; despite efforts to work the idiosyncratic building into the design scheme, Diller’s studio, hired to lead the expansion, ultimately acknowledged that the structure couldn’t be saved.
Surface recently met with Diller at her office in Manhattan to speak about the ensuing controversy, as well as early career experiences that have influenced her firm’s recent commissions for cultural institutions, including the current exhibition “Musings on a Glass Box” at the Cartier Foundation in Paris (through Feb. 25, 2015), a collaboration with composer David Lang and sound designer Jody Elff. Diller, 60, is pensive and surprisingly relaxed for someone whose aides are constantly interrupting her to remind her of meetings she has to attend. She speaks with an erudite inflection befitting her academic credentials and professional accolades (she is, after all, a professor at Princeton and a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient), though she smiles with the ease of an affable neighbor.

Red Bull’s New York Offices / INABA

© Greg Irikura
Architects: INABA
Location: , NY, USA
Architects In Charge: Jeffrey , Ostap Rudakevych, Yoichiro Mizuno, Alan Kwan
Area: 16800.0 ft2
Year: 2014
Photographs: Greg Irikura Naho Kubota

Check Out These Images of New York’s Skyline in 2018

View looking south above Central Park showing “Billionaires Row” towers visible in foregorund, midtown towers in background, and various Financial District and Downtown Brooklyn Towers in far background. Image © CityRealty
If New Yorkers thought that construction during Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as Mayor was frantic, then what’s coming next might be quite a shock: courtesy of CityRealty, these images show the  skyline in 2018, when many of the city’s current projects will be complete. Produced from building models by TJ Quan and Ondel Hylton as a marketing ploy for Jean Nouvel‘s  which recently (finally) began construction, the images include all of Nouvel’s illustrious future neighbors: the “Billionaire’s Row” including 111 West 57th Street, 220 Central Park South, 225 West 57th Street (Nordstrom Tower) and One57; new Midtown developments such as 432 Park Avenue520 Park Avenue425 Park AvenueOne Vanderbilt610 Lexington15 Penn Plaza, and the Hudson Yards towers; and even the latest financial district towers, 1WTC, 30 Park Place, 125 Greenwich, and 225 Cherry Street.

Heatherwick to Construct $170 Million “Pier 55″ Park Off Manhattan’s Hudson River Shoreline

Pier 55 from the esplanade looking west. Image © Pier55, Inc. and Heatherwick Studio
Billionaire Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp and former head of Paramount Pictures and Fox, has commissioned  to design a $170 million “futuristic park” on ’s lower west side. Replacing the deteriorated Pier 54, the new “Pier55” will be a lush undulating landscape, raised atop 300 mushroom-shaped concrete columns placed 186 feet off of the Hudson River shoreline, that will host outdoor performances, act as a marine sanctuary for striped bass and guard the city against storms.
Heatherwick will be collaborating with landscape architect Mathews Nielson. Read on to learn more about the project.

Video: Snøhetta on Designing the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion

“So in some ways I think that this tragedy gave a sense of purpose to people that was very positive, and we tried to translate that feeling into this building.” In this video from the Louisiana Channel of Snøhetta describes how his own experience with the events of 9/11 and the positivity of the spirit of people around him helped inspire the design process of the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion.
He speaks of the journey of healing and understanding as central to the design and experience of the building itself. “As you move through these cycles, you realize one day that you are alive, and you that have to present the strength of being alive to those around you, and this building is meant to be a part of that cycle…to allow you to see yourself, at a moment in time.”
Watch the video above to learn more about the challenges of designing a memorial museum fully integrated within an essentially nonexistent site. 

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