Lowline Advocates Tout Economic Benefits of Proposed Subterranean Park
(Courtesy Lowline)
Lowline boosters James Ramsey and Dan Barasch spoke with the Wall Street Journal this week, shedding light on a few economic details surrounding what could become New York City’s first subterranean park, built in an abandoned trolley terminal owned by the MTA underneath Delancey Street in the Lower East Side. Project co-founders Ramsey, an architect and principal at RAAD Studio, and Barasch have most recently been working on creating a full-scale mock-up of their fiber-optic skylight that will bring natural daylight to the cavernous underground space after raising $155,000 on Kickstarter.
The team is now promoting the park armed with a new economic impact summary, claiming that it will add value to the adjacent Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Specifically, Ramsey and Barasch argue that building the park would boost SPURA land values by $10 to $20 million and generate up to $10 million in taxes over the next 30 years. The Lowline also revealed its estimated budget, clocking in somewhere between $44 and $72 million to be paid for by a combination of fundraising, donations, and tax credits. If all goes according to plan, the Lowline could be financially self-sufficient, with a $2 to $4 million operating budget paid for by special events and commercial space. Uncertainty still looms over project, however, as the MTA hasn’t agreed that the space will be allowed to be converted into a park.
Governor Cuomo To Fund Study of High Line-Style Park in Queens
Plans for The QueensWay Highline (Courtesy of Friends of the Queensway)
New York Governor Cuomo might have just tipped the scale in the heated dispute over a 3.5-mile stretch of abandoned railroad track in Queens with his donation of nearly a half-million dollars to the Trust for Public Land to conduct a feasibility study for a High Line-style linear park called the QueensWay. Slated to begin in January and February of next year, the study could take up to eight months to complete. But some Queens residents are pushing to restore train service on the elevated viaduct, and in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a faster and more efficient connection between the Rockaways and Midtown Manhattan is winning the support of some local advocates and politicians. As Crain’s mentioned in a recent story, it would be no easy feat to rebuild the Long Island Railroad’s Rockaway branch, and could likely cost up to half-billion dollars.
Video> Fly Through Norman Foster’s Proposed Changes To the New York Public Library
Last week, AN reported on Norman Foster’s newly-rendered plans to transform the landmark New York Public Library at Bryant Park. Foster’s $300 million plan will, most dramatically, gut the off-limits-to-the-public book stacks and replace them with a light-filled atrium and reading space. The NYPL has now released a video fly-through of the project, above. Enjoy!
On View> Diagramming Schematic Intangibility by Robert Strati
(Courtesy Robert Henry Contemporary)
Diagramming Schematic Intangibility
Robert Henry Contemporary
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn, NY
Through January 6
Robert Strati’s work uses everyday materials to expose overlooked and unseen parts of our everyday lives. Employing ink-jet prints, wire sculptures, balloons, and packaging tape, Strati blends art with architectural theory, music, and science. His prints imitate scientific formulas, on top of astrological maps, on top of musical staffs, creating an interaction between formal shapes—points, lines, and planes—and metaphysical visualizations. Three-dimensional space is explored through wire sculptures and balloons that reveal invisible forces, like air and wind. The use of simple materials to reveal complex “dimensions of reality” was inspired by the works of Kasimir Malevich, Agnes Marin, Eva Hesse, Guglielmo Marconi, Leslie J. “Airplane” Payne, Gego, and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
Playing House: Amanda Burden Smitten With Tiny Apartments
Amanda Burden stands in a full-scale floor plan of a Micro Apartment with HPD Deputy Wambua and Mayor Bloomberg. (Courtesy of NYC Mayor’s Office)
Do radically small apartments automatically beget a transient population and all that entails? That’s the fear of residents in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, the pilot site for a new building that will be 75 percent micro-units, or apartments that total about 300 square feet each. Community Board 6 finds it hard to imagine that anyone other than students or elves would be game, but City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden is charmed by the diminutive plans, stating at a recent presentation, “I think you’ll all agree that the apartment behind me is some place that one and two [person] households would be delighted to live in.”
On View> Marking Time at New York’s Yossi Milo Gallery through January 19
(Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery)
Marking Time
Yossi Milo Gallery
245 10th Avenue
New York
Through January 19
Chris McCaw’s continuing work on Sunburned, a series of photographs that began in 2006, will be displayed in his solo exhibit Marking Time. By combining a large-format camera with a high-tech lens normally used for military surveillance and inserting expired gelatin silver photo paper, McCaw captures images of the sun, exposing the paper from anywhere between 15 minutes to 24 hours. The extended exposures intensify the sun’s rays on the photo paper burning holes on the photographs. Thus, McCaw is able to capture and track the earth’s orbit around the sun. His photographs are taken at various locations across the globe including the Galapagos, the Sierras, and the Arctic Circle, enabling him to capture different rotations of the sun due to solar eclipses or equinoxes. In his image Sunburned GSP #429 (North Slope Alaska, 24 hours) McCaw captures the trajectory of midnight sun during the Arctic Circle’s summer solstice. The sun’s path dips to the horizon line then rises, marking the beginning of a new day.
Cornell NYC Tech Campus Takes a Step Forward
The Cornell Technion Campus on Roosevelt Island. (Courtesy Kilograph)
Manhattan Community Board 8 has approved the Cornell Tech Campus plans and launched it one step further in NYC’s public land use review process. The plan for the 12-acre site now moves forward exactly one year after Cornell University, in partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was selected by the City to develop the applied science and engineering campus.
A New Chapter for the New York Public Library: Foster + Partners Reveal Renovation Plans
Rendering of Foster + Partners’ proposed renovation of the New York Public Library. (Courtesy Foster+Partners / dbox)
New Yorkers, not to mention architecture critics, have been waiting with bated breath to see the plans for the controversial $300 million overhaul of the New York Public Library’s historic flagship branch on Fifth Avenue. And today, the designs by Foster + Partners, were finally unveiled. The renovation of the Beaux Arts-style library, completed in 1911 by Carrère and Hastings, will remove seven floors of stacks under the grand Rose Main Reading Room to make way for a 300-person workspace with an expansive atrium, balconies, floor-to-ceiling windows, bookshelves, and new areas devoted to classrooms and computer labs. As of now, interior finishes will include a combination of bronze, wood, and stone.
Architect Proposes Greening the West Side Highway with the “Vine Line”
Rendering of the Vine Line proposal for Manhattan’s Upper West Side. (Courtesy Laurence Tamaccio Architect)
Stuck with the post-Sandy realization that buried waterfront highways are unlikely to be buried for fear of flooding, designers are looking to spruce them up, instead. The emerging “funderpass” movement hit Brooklyn last week, and now Manhattan’s Upper West Side has its own proposal, the leafy “Vine Line.”
Architect Laurence Tamaccio has proposed hiding, or rather masking, an elevated section of the West Side Highway between 61st and 72nd streets with a green scheme of vines and waterfalls. Plans had been on the table to bury the highway once and for all after a collapse in the 1970s and the contentious process of rebuilding it, but after Hurricane Sandy, that option seems in doubt. So far, Tamaccio’s plan, which also offers a grey water filtering system and a café, has been greeted with support from the community board and many local residents.
Forest City Breaks Ground at Atlantic Yards’ B2 Tower, Shows Off Modular Design
The B2 Tower sits next to Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards. (Courtesy SHoP)
At Tuesday’s groundbreaking of B2, the first 32-story residential tower to be built at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, New Yorkers got a sneak peek at how the world’s tallest modular building will be constructed. Just beyond the podium stood what officials call the “chassis,” a steel framed box that makes up an essential structural element of the building. “You don’t need to compromise on design when it comes to modular,” said Developer Bruce Ratner.
Adrian Smith+Gordon Gill’s First Manhattan Skyscraper Among the City’s Tallest
Extells new tower will be built on 57th Street east of Broadway. (Courtesy Google)
Extell Development made waves as when they announced their 1,004-foot-tall skyscraper One57 by Christian de Portzamparc on Midtown Manhattan’s 57th Street (which made headlines most recently for crane troubles during Hurricane Sandy), but their next project a few blocks down the street looks to climb even higher. Developers announced in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture will design an 88-story, 1,550-foot-tall tower on West 57th Street just east of Broadway, an area quickly becoming known for skinny skyscraper proposals.
New York City Planning Looks To Better Prep Buildings After Sandy
The Edge in Williamsburg. (Courtesy of Thorton Tomasetti, the structural engineers of The Edge)
While the majority of New York City is pre-occupied with the recovery efforts post-Hurricane Sandy, the Department of City Planning (DCP) is discussing and introducing different measures that can be taken to protect our buildings from future storms. At a review session yesterday, Howard Slatkin, the Director of Sustainability and Deputy Director of Strategic Planning for the DCP, presented Hurricane Sandy: Initial Lessons for Buildings. From the start, Slatkin maintained that newly constructed buildings designed to code “fared better.” He listed several buildings—such as The Edge in Williamsburg, IKEA in Red Hook, and Arverne by the Sea in the Rockaways—as examples of new developments that successfully withstood the storm.
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