Storefront Gets Real (estate) with NYC
"New York City Bar Graph" by Lan Tuazon organizes scale models on shelves to differentiate function: banks, public housing, media, etc. (Courtesy Storefront).
The Storefront for Art and Architecture launched Ingredients of Reality: Dismantling of New York City last Tuesday night. The show features work by Lan Tuazon, whose bio reads that she was born in the Philippine Islands and “lives and works in New York whether she likes it or not.” It would seem from the show, that she likes it–but with reservations. Through a series of seemingly disparate works, Tuazon calls attention to how real estate decisions have the ability to divide the New Yorkers economically and socially.
IESNYC Student Lighting Competition
2012 IES Student Competition. (Naomi Castillo)
The 12th annual IESNYC Student Lighting Competition, “Fraction/Refraction”, was held Wednesday night at the appropriately well-lit Helen Mills Event Space in Chelsea. The competition was open to all interested students in New York City and included entries from designers at Pratt Institute, Parsons/New School, Fashion Institute of Technology, Fordham, and New York School of Interior Design. Over 100 entries created a luminous one-night exhibition of over 100 light-sourced objects, each with a different take on this year’s theme of “how light plays with textures, flows through materials and creates layers of contrast.”
Read More
Chakrabarti Joins SHoP as Partner
The partners of SHoP (from right) Gregg Pasquarelli, William Sharples, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, Kimberly Holden, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Jonathan Mallie
Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Columbia Center for Urban Real Estate since 2009, has been appointed a partner at SHoP Architects effective immediately. The seventh partner (and only the second not related to the firm’s founders by blood or marriage), Chakrabarti will focus on large-scale urban projects, drawing on his years of expertise through such on-going endeavors as Related Companies’ involvement with the Moynihan Station project and development at Hudson Yards. (While he will remain director of the Columbia real estate program, he will forgo his consultancy with Related.)
Ornate Cornices Disappearing in Washington Heights
The lion's heads that once graced the cornice of 4195 Broadway, now in a dumpster. (Courtesy Trish Mayo)
When the attention of real estate speculators diverts, sometimes old neighborhoods have time to acquire a majestic patina. The Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan has been neglected for some time, but is now getting a fair share of spillover interest from Columbia’s Manhattanville project and the university’s nearby hospital campus. In 2009, the Audubon Park Historic District was created to protect the area just behind Audubon Terrace, home to the Hispanic Society and the Academy of Arts and Letters. But just north of the district, years of landlord neglect has unwittingly preserved row after row of early 20th century apartment buildings festooned with ornate cornices. But the cornices are now in danger of disappearing.
The initial SOM proposal for Cornell's tech campus. (Courtesy SOM)
And then there were six. Cornell University announced that six firms were selected from a field of 43 contenders to design their new tech campus on Roosevelt Island. SOM, the firm that pushed Cornell over the top in the national competition to build on Roosevelt is still in the running, alongside OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture)
, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
, Morphosis Architects
, Steven Holl Architects
, and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. SOM will remain on the job to define an overall campus plan. The university is still running with its net-zero plan for the first core building. Residences and other multi-use buildings will follow. A contract with the winning firm is set to be signed in April.
Selling Via Verde
About 40 co-op units are still available at Via Verde. (Courtesy Phipps Rose Dattner Grimshaw)
Who wouldn’t want buy into an eco-conscious, sustainable, and affordable apartment building whose Grimshaw/Dattner-designed architecture received rave reviews on the front page of the New York Times? With more than 40 of the 75 co-ops still available at Via Verde, the gang at developer Jonathan Rose Co. and Dattner are giving the project the full media push. Jonathan Rose’s Ari Goldstein and Dattner’s Bill Stein were on New York 1 this morning promoting the design and high living standards. The 151 rental units of this muli-income complex were snapped up right away. But while the co-ops sales aren’t exactly flagging, they’re not exactly flying off the shelves in this economy.
CB2 Votes Unanimous Nay on NYU Expansion
Arial view of NYU's expansion plans.
Manhattan Community Board 2 unanimously voted against the NYU expansion plan in Greenwich Village last night citing the impact its scale would have on the neighborhood. Grimshaw with Toshiko Mori designed four of the proposed towers and Michael Van Valkenburgh designed the landscape for the 2.4 million square foot expansion. The plans were set within two superblocks that sprang from Robert Moses-era urban renewal projects that featured buildings by I.M. Pei, Paul Lester Weiner, and a garden by Hideo Sasaki.
Read More
Monday> Panel Discussion Investigates Urban Maps & Public Discourse
Otto Neurath – City Planning: Proposing a socio-political Map for modern Urbanism
This Monday, February 27 at 6:30p.m., the Van Alen Institute and the Austrian Cultural Forum are hosting a panel discussion on urban mapping and participatory public discourse in the city at the Austrian Cultural Forum of New York. The event celebrates the publishing of Sophie Hochhäusl’s new book Otto Neurath – City Planning: Proposing a Socio-Political Map for Modern Urbanism (Innsbruck University Press, 2011) and Otto Neurath, an Austrian philosopher and economist who studied maps in search of “humanizing knowledge.”
Foreclosed Forum: Suburbs, Cities, and Crisis
The "What is Foreclosed?" Forum was held last Saturday at Columbia's Low Library.
It might have been the first time that the works of Jay-Z, Malice, and Nas were evoked under the great dome of Columbia’s Low Library, but given the trend among young academics to cite rap alongside Socrates, it’s probably won’t be the last. That the quotes were used in the panel discussion called “Suburbs, Cities and Crisis,” spoke to a slightly skewed perspective of discussing the suburbs within the confines of Manhattan.
EVENT> Architecture Criticism Today: February 27 in NYC
**2/27 Breaking news: The New Yorker‘s Paul Goldberger will be joining the panel discussion. Critical mass!
Monday, February 27
Architecture Criticism Today
6:00pm-8:00pm
Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
Who is best served by criticism? Who is the proper audience? Can it simultaneously serve the profession and the wider public, or are they mutually exclusive? How has role of general-interest media critics evolved? As a project comes to life, at what point(s) should critics weigh in?
The first of a four-part series on Architecture and the Media will address some of these questions, when architecture critics discuss the role of criticism in the field of architecture today and how it informs the general public’s understanding of design.
AN‘s executive editor Julie Iovine will moderate a panel discussion among architecture critics at consumer, business and trade publications: Justin Davidson (New York Magazine), Cathleen McGuigan (Architectural Record), and James Russell (Bloomberg), with audience Q&A to follow.
1.5 CEUs; $10 for members and students; $20 non-members. TICKETS
Organized by the Oculus Committee, the AIANY Marketing & PR Committee, and The Architect’s Newspaper.
Pratt Student Awarded Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship
Tina Uznanski's concept for a flexible library. (Courtesy Gensler)
While most design students are starting the scramble for plum summer internships, Tina Uznanski can rest easy, knowing a desk with her name on it will be waiting at Gensler’s London office. Uzanski, an interior design student at the Pratt Institute, has received Gensler’s annual Brinkmann Scholarship, winning a paid summer internship at the Gensler office of her choice and a cash prize to be put toward her final year of study at Pratt. The award was established in 1999 as a memorial to interior designer and former Gensler partner Donald G. Brinkmann.
Uznanski won the competition with her clever concept for a renovation of her neighborhood library in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, that creates a flexible room through “shifting stacks.” images after the jump
On View> Luka Fineisen: Phase Transitions
Luka Fineisen: Phase Transitions
Hosfelt Gallery
531 West 36th St.
Through March 31
“Phase transition” refers to the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one state of matter to another. German artist Luka Fineisen explores these shifts by framing the moment of transformation from one condition to another; she sculpts dynamic systems, the final work of art being the system’s realization of potential. In this way, even sculptures that appear static, such as Bubbles (above, 2010), draw attention to the temporality of material—this is not plastic, but a material in search of its form. This will be Fineisen’s first solo exhibition in the United States.
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
