Architect’s Plan Would Add A Bike and Pedestrian Tube to San Diego’s Coronado Bay Bridge
Rendering of the proposed bike and pedestrian tube on the Coronado Bay Bridge. (Courtesy Domus Studio)
From the top of San Diego’s soaring 200-foot-tall Coronado Bay Bridge, architect Lew Dominy says you can see Mexico, but outside of special events when the bridge is closed to automobile traffic, pedestrians and bicyclists who might stop to admire the view are prohibited. Dominy, principal at San Diego-based domusstudio architecture, has a plan to build a tube through the distinctive archways of the Coronado’s support piers that would bring multi-modal access to the bridge.
Norman Foster Turns the World on Its Head With Mirrored Pavilion in France
(Nigel Young / Courtesy Foster+Partners)
Norman Foster has hoisted a slender sheet of mirror-polished stainless steel above a plaza on the edge of Marseille’s historic harbor, creating a new pavilion that reflects the activity of the bustling public space overhead. Foster + Partners’ “Vieux Port” pavilion officially opened over the weekend in the French city. The pavilion roof measures 150 feet by 72 feet, tapering at its perimeter to create the illusion of impossible thinness and is is supported by eight thin stainless steel columns inset from the pavilion’s edge.
Slideshow> Manhattan’s Second Avenue Subway Pushes North
Inside the Second Avenue Subway. (Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin)
Manhattan’s Second Avenue Subway continues construction on the island’s east side. A new construction update from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority details excavation work at what will one day be the line’s 86th Street station and the various pieces of heavy machinery that are used in the construction process. Take a look at the photos below and be sure to check out more spectacular tunneling photos from the Seven Line subway expansion and the East Side Access Tunnel for the Long Island Railroad.
Groundbreaking Pushes Bjarke Ingels’ Hedonistic Sustainability Into Spotlight
Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant. (Courtesy BIG)
Against all odds, BIG-founder Bjarke Ingels is actually building a mountain-slash-ski-slope-slash-waste-to-energy-power-plant in his hometown of Copenhagen. Announced in 2011, the project nearly stalled during the approval process, but officials in the Danish capital broke ground on the facility on Monday. Called the Amager Bakke Waste-to-Energy Plant, the structure represents Ingels’ concept of Hedonistic Sustainability, the notion that a sustainable building shouldn’t only be green, but should also be fun.
Related Breaks Ground on Two SHoP-Designed Towers at Hunters Point South
Rendering of Hunters Point South. (Courtesy SHoP Architects)
While everyone is transfixed on SHoP’s dramatic unveiling of its new plan for the Domino Sugar Factory on the Brooklyn waterfront, another SHoP-designed project began construction to the north on the Queens waterfront. The first two towers of the Hunters Point South development, what will be New York City’s largest affordable housing project since the 1970s, broke ground, and the $332-million first phase could accept its first residents as soon as 2014. The first phase includes 925 permanently-affordable housing units, 17,000 square feet of retail space, an already-under-construction 1,100-seat school, and a new five-acre park.
President Obama is expected to announce Gina McCarthy (above, right) as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ernest Moniz (above, left) as the Secretary of Energy. McCarthy now serves as an assistant administrator at the EPA where she oversees regulating air pollution, including helping to double fuel-efficiency standards for cars, according to NPR. Moniz is currently a nuclear physicist at MIT, where he directs the university’s Energy Initiative, according to the Washington Post. He has been a proponent of alternative energy sources, but some environmentalists are wary of his support for natural gas and “fracking.” (Photo: Courtesy MIT / EPA)
Pei Cobb Freed’s 7 Bryant Park Tower Breaks Ground in Manhattan
Mayor Bloomberg participates in the groundbreaking, left, and a rendering of the new building, right. (Edward Reed; Courtesy Pei Cobb Freed)
Another skyscraper is rising in Midtown Manhattan. Developers Hines and Pacolet Milliken broke ground this week on Pei Cobb Freed’s 7 Bryant Park tower (aka 1045 Avenue of the Americas) that was unveiled in 2011. The 28-story, 470,000-square-foot tower sits at the southwest corner of Bryant Park and features a distinctive hourglass-shaped cutout on its corner. “The hourglass facade detail will be a lens through which building occupants can view the park with dramatic and alluring immediacy,” architect Henry N. Cobb told AN in 2011. A 46-foot-diameter stainless steel disc will hover above the entrance. The building hopes to achieve LEED Gold status and is expected to be complete in early 2015.
Smithsonian Taps Bjarke Ingels For DC Campus Master Plan
In the courtyard at the Hirshhorn Museum with Bjarke Ingels. (Holley St. Germain / Flickr; Montage by AN)
Since announcing his first North American project in New York and opening an office in the Big Apple, BIG-founder Bjarke Ingels has been moving fast. His meteoric ascent into a Danish-American icon is happening so quickly, that the starchitect has landed himself in the Smithsonian, in a manner of speaking. The venerable institution has just hired Ingels to prepare a master plan for the museum’s Washington, D.C. campus, and we’re left wondering if that might mean a new mountain range rising off the National Mall.
Slideshow> New York Subway Construction Creates Enormous Cathedrals of Transit
Manhattan’s East Side Access Tunnel will connect the Long Island Railroad with Grand Central Terminal. (Courtesy MTA / Patrick Cashin)
There’s plenty of tunneling going on underneath the streets of Manhattan. On the west side, digging through the city’s bedrock has given way to interior station fit-ups for the Dattner-designed 7 line subway stations connecting Times Square to Hudson Yards as early as 2014. To the east, sandhogs continue to carve through solid rock for the $4.5 billion Second Avenue Subway Line while other crews outfit the tunnels with concrete and rebar.
Between the two, more massive caverns are being opened up beneath Grand Central Terminal, which turned 100 this month, that will extend the Long Island Railroad to the famed station from Sunnyside, Queens in 2019. The $8.24 billion East Side Access Project will allow commuters to bypass Penn Station and enter Manhattan 12-stories below Grand Central. Now, the MTA has released a dramatic set of photos from inside the 3.5-mile-long tunnel, revealing enormous cathedral-like spaces connected by perfectly cylindrical tunnels. Take a look.
In Construction> High Line Construction Reaches into Hudson Yards
(Timothy Schenck / Courtesy Friends of the High Line)
Hudson Yards broke ground late last year, but the Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed tower that will one day be the headquarters of fashion-label Coach isn’t the only construction activity causing a buzz on the 26-acre site on Manhattan’s West Side. Wrapping around the south and west sides of the Hudson Yards site, construction crews are busy building out the final segment of the High Line, including sandblasting and refurbishing the steel viaduct, repainting the steel structure’s beams, girders, and columns with the High Line’s signature “Greenblack” color, and removing and storing existing railroad tracks. Landscape construction is expected to begin later this spring.
The Friends of the High Line recently stopped by the construction site with photographer Timothy Schenck to take these photos of work in progress. Be sure to take a look at James Corner Field Operations’ design for the final segment here.
Tree Expert: Speed Art Museum Mystery Tree Likely A Youngster
The Oak tree in 1974, left, and a more recent view, right. (Speed Art Museum / Via WFPL)
Over the past week, news of one allegedly-very-old tree cut down on the University of Louisville’s campus where a wHY Architecture-designed addition to the Speed Art Museum is being built has tree experts in Louisville counting rings on a stump. Students creating a map of all 2,500 trees on the University’s campus as part of Dr. Tommy Parker’s Urban Wildlife Research Lab had estimated the tree was over 300 years old, generating an impassioned oped in the student newspaper. The Speed and local news sources looked further into the mysterious tree, using the stump and historical photos of the museum (above) to determined that the tree was really only 60 years old. Steven Bowling, Director of Marketing and Communications at the Speed Art Museum, also wrote in with this statement about the tree’s removal:
As part of the Speed Art Museum’s long planned expansion, the Speed and its architect, wHY Architecture, carefully analyzed the site and its space constraints. The goals were threefold: to protect the Museum’s 1927 historic building to accommodate the Speed’s growing audience, to link the expanded green spaces of the Museum with the University of Louisville Campus and to seamlessly integrate art and nature on the 6-acre site. During the planning phase, the Speed, together with the architects, reviewed several possibilities in consultation with landscape architects and an arborist to expand the Museum’s footprint with minimal interruption to the historic building, the surrounding area, and trees within the Museum’s footprint. In the final plan, the tree needed to be removed. Removal of the tree, which the arborist determined was 60 years old, allows the site to be re-graded and expands accessibility for all visitors to the Museum and its grounds. While both the Museum and the architects regret the removal of that tree, the new Speed Art Museum which will re-open in 2016 will provide students and visitors with expanded green space that includes an art park and public piazza, as well as the planting of more than 40 new trees.
Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis Broke Ground 50 Years Ago Today
St. Louis’ Gateway Arch under construction. (Courtesy Missouri State Archives)
Fifty years ago, the St. Louis waterfront was one gigantic parking lot after 40 blocks of the city’s gritty industrial quarter were cleared in the late 1930s to create a site for a new Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. It took another two decades to get anything built, but on February 12, 1963, the missing slice of St. Louis began to change as ground was broken for Eero Saarinen’s famous Gateway Arch that still defines St. Louis in one dramatic gesture.
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