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.
On View> MoMA’s Applied Design Exhibition Tackles Video Games and 3D Printing
Screen view of the Tetris video game, 1984. (Courtesy The Tetris Company)
In MoMA’s Applied Design exhibition, which opened over the weekend in The Phillip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries, celebrity curator Paola Antonelli brings us a diverse sampling of recent and contemporary design, from old school video games like Tetris and Pac-Man to 3D printed furniture and energy efficient medical equipment. As in last year’s Talk to Me exhibition, museum guests get the opportunity to interact with the objects on display, including playing the video games. While the connections between the different pieces may be tenuous and visitors may struggle to identify the relationship between Ido Bruno’s Earthquake Proof Table and The Sims, Applied Design allows viewer to see items that have been churning up quite a bit of hype around the blogosphere, such as Massoud Hassani’s wind-powered mine detonator, pairing them with modern relics from the MoMA archives, including drawings from Lebbeus Woods and Douglas Darden. While disjointed, Applied Design does afford a glimpse of the wide varieties of methods, technologies, and materials utilized by today’s design vanguard. The exhibition is on view through January 14, 2014.
Van on Van: Guggenheim Curator to Lead Van Alen Institute
David van der Leer. (David Heald / Courtesy BMW Guggenheim Lab)
David van der Leer, an associate curator of architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim, has been appointed executive director of New York’s Van Alen Institute. He will take over in May. The Institute, which has existed for more than 100 years in various forms, is dedicated to improving the public realm through exhibitions, competitions, and programming initiatives in New York and beyond. Reached by email, van der Leer declined to elaborate on his plans for the Institute.
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.
Urban Farming Duo Plants Seeds for Boston’s First Rooftop Farm
(Courtesy Higher Ground Farm)
While rooftop farming has cropped up in a number of cities across the country, it has yet to take root in Boston. But this will soon change when founders Courtney Hennessey and John Stoddard launch operations of their new rooftop farm, aptly called Higher Ground Farm, located atop the Boston Design Center this Spring. According to CoLab Radio at MIT, the duo will start planting on a 40,000-square-feet segment of the expansive 55,000-square-feet roof within the next few months and be ready to sell the fresh produce by summer.
On View> Israeli Pavilion from the 2012 Venice Biennale Headed to New York
Fernando Guerra, Azrieli Center, Tel Aviv, 2012.
The Storefront for Art and Architecture is bringing Aircraft Carrier, the 2012 Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, to New York. The exhibit—one of the most pointedly political statements at the biennale—confronts the influence of the United States and its foreign policy in the Middle East and how it has affected Israeli architecture. The pavilion points to the year 1973 and the OPEC oil crises as a watershed in global capitalism when American strategic interests helped enable a new level of corporate architecture in Israel. The resulting reflected glass skyscrapers set against the optimism of Tel Aviv’s White City could not be more a poignant modernist image.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by German publisher Hatje Cantz and edited by the curators, which contextualizes the phenomena in larger transformative processes. The book include texts by Milton Friedman, Justin Fowler, and Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and visual works by participating artists Florian Holzherr, Nira Pereg, Jan Tichy, Assaf Evron, and Fernando Guerra.
Exhibition Opening: March 7, 2013, 7PM
Exhibition: March 7 – April, 29 2013
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.
New York City to Match Sandy-Damaged Buildings With Design Professionals
Houses in Rockaways after Hurricane Sandy. (Anique/Ma Neek/Flickr)
For property owners of Hurricane Sandy-ravaged buildings, the road to recovery just got easier. Starting on Monday, the New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) will offer a new program that provides design consultations to property owners and design professionals who want to reconstruct their buildings. Department officials and technical experts will explain the building code and zoning requirements for properties in special flood hazard areas, as indicated on insurance rate maps or on updated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) maps.
According to the announcement from the DOB: “This program is designed to accelerate the approval process for these projects, assist homeowners with their decisions on reconstruction and better ensure that new flood recommendations and standards are incorporated into the design and construction of these affected buildings.”
The consultations will be held at the Department’s NYC Development Hub at 80 Centre Street in Manhattan. Property owners will sit down with officials and compile a list of recommendations to apply to the construction plans that they intend on submitting to the DOB.
TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits Leads April 12 Workshop
Did you miss 3-D printing guru Skylar Tibbits at this year’s TED conference? Never fear, there’s an opportunity to hear Tibbits in New York City on April 12. And not just hear but participate in a hands-on workshop that Tibbits will lead as part of Facades + PERFORMANCE, a two-day conference on high-performance building enclosures sponsored by The Architect’s Newspaper.
Earlier this week at TED, Tibbits gave 3-D printing another dimension, quite literally, when he presented the possibility of “4-D printing,” or programming materials to self-reassemble into new structures over time. Tibbits unveiled a 4-D printer concept developed with MIT that he argues could have far-reaching implications for not just manufacturing but also for architecture. Will architects one day be able to design structures that build and mend themselves? Here’s the idea, as Tibbits told TED:
“If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically—genetic instructions, energy production, error correction—with those artificial or synthetic—programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms—we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms.”
Cookin’ With Gas: New York Launches First Natural Gas-Powered Food Truck
Mayor Bloomberg serves a pizza at the Neapolitan Express food truck. (Edward Reed)
If you’ve experienced a twinge of guilt for supporting an idling, carbon-emitting vehicle while waiting on line for gourmet macaroni-and-cheese, rejoice—a new day is dawning for NYC food trucks. In late February, Mayor Bloomberg inaugurated Neapolitan Express, the first food truck fueled by compressed natural gas. The truck, (which looks a wee bit like a retirement home bus) is a showcase for kajillionaire T. Boone Pickens’ company Clean Energy Fuels. Track it @NeaExpress.
City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture to Broadcast Lectures Online
Louis Kahn’s National Assembly building in Bangladesh. (William Curtis)
One of the most important components of any architecture school is its semester-long lecture series. It’s a chance for schools to bring in voices from outside their building and communicate to students a broad range of approaches and ideas percolating in the culture and profession. Many schools send out posters of these lectures to other schools across the country to announce their programing and these are posted on hallway walls for all to see even if they are thousands of miles away on another coast.
But now City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture has taken the next step and is simulcasting its lectures live online for the public to view. Old lectures will be archived and viewable any time. This semester City College is focusing its lectures on Rethinking Kahn and have scheduled a distinguished line up of Louis Kahn scholars including Stanislaus von Moos this Thursday, February 28 speaking on Kahn’s urban projects. On March 7, Ken Frampton will be speaking on monumentality in Kahn’s work. March 21 will feature Gina Pollara who will lecture on New York’s FDR Memorial on Roosevelt Island and its construction. After that Robert Twombley and William J.R. Curtis will lecture. On the Friday after William Curtis’ lecture, there will be a discussion between William Curtis and George Ranalli and Rethinking Kahn.
A Treehouse Grows in Brooklyn: Architect Salvages Sandy-Damaged Oaks for Installation
Roderick Wolgamott-Romero. (Bobby Fisher)
Last fall Hurricane Sandy swept through New York with a vengeance, knocking down more than 8,000 trees city-wide, and over 300 in Brooklyn’s Olmsted-designed Prospect Park alone. But now, Brooklyn Botanic Garden has teamed up with tree house architect Roderick Wolgamott-Romero to give a hand full of these damaged trees a second chance at life.
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