Event> Open House New York Tours Spacious Lofts Around New York
Chris Coleman’s Williamsburg Loft. (Johnny Valant/Courtesy Interior Design)
Space-starved New Yorkers—especially architects and designers—love to see how Gotham residents with a space surplus (which usually equates money) live in their brownstones, townhouses, and elegant apartments. This weekend, October 6 and 7, Open House New York will celebrate its 10th OHNY weekend and open some of the most interesting private residences in the city for limited public tours.
For example, OHNY will open up beautiful Midtown residences by Jayne Michaels and Ali Tayer and an elegant Brooklyn Heights home by Lea Ciavarra. Even two hip homes in Williamsburg by Aizaki Allie and Christopher Coleman will be on display. These tours are always very popular, but it’s necessary to reserve your spot before you arrive on their stoops and lobbies.
Crooked Columns Raising Eyebrows at The New School
Southwest View (Courtesy afinecompany.blogspot.com)
If you walk down Fifth Avenue and 14th Street toward Union Square and notice a building under construction with crooked columns, don’t worry—it is not about to collapse. According to NBC New York, the SOM-designed New School University Center, previously detailed by AN, is raising eyebrows from the local community because some of its columns are slightly skewed.
But it’s no mistake. “It’s the most efficient way to carry all of the different structural loads of the building from the top of the foundation, ” Joel Towers, Parsons The New School for Design dean told NBC. The New York City Department of Buildings has confirmed there are no safety issues with the project.
Moody Rating: App Tracks New York Neighborhoods’ Feelings
(Courtesy Wyst)
Wyst, the social media app that allows users to tag locations in New York City with an emoticon, has published a mood map of New York City. Wyst’s tagline: “a new kind of message in a bottle.” The app launched in August 2011, and now has a year’s worth of data to analyze.
It’s predictable that the angriest nabe is the high-testosterone Financial District. More unexpected is Hasidic-hipster South Williamsburg’s status as the flirtiest. Cheers, East Village, you’re the drunkest. Roosevelt Island? The most surprised (“You can only drive here from Queens?” “There’s a Louis Kahn-designed park?”). Poor Clinton Hill ranks as the absolute saddest—chin up, Pratt students! Cross the river and get some liquid courage with your NYU friends.
Event> OHNY Celebrates Ten Years with a Party in Times Square!
(Courtesy Sergio Lora & OHNY)
This weekend, October 6 and 7, Open House New York (OHNY) is celebrating the tenth anniversary of its popular weekend of tours, lectures, and open houses of many of the New York City’s most important buildings and spaces. In its ten years OHNY has hosted over two million guests and remains New York’s most important architectural outreach to the public. It will launch the weekend with a party at the Times Square Museum and Visitors Center and the city’s architecture community should be there to support the organization and its mission to serve as a bridge between great design and the public. The Architect’s Newspaper will be there with David Rockwell and we look forward to seeing you!
Empire Stores in DUMBO Might Finally Get a Make-Over
Empire Stores (Photo: Julienne Schaer via Crain’s)
The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation issued an RFP last week seeking qualified developers to revamp the post-Civil War Empire Stores warehouse in DUMBO, according to Crain’s. The adaptive reuse project, originally drafted in 2002, has been postponed several times over the last decade due to a lack of developers willing to address the building’s “scary structural issues.” Proposals, which are due on December 10th, could add up to 70,000 square feet and two additional stories to the existing buildings. Projects must be community friendly and address design challenges at the intersection of preservation and sustainability.
On View> Objects of Architects
Nervous System Orbicule Lamp (Courtesy of Irina Chernyakova)
Objects by Architects opens tonight in The Keller Gallery at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. The exhibition features a collection of design objects “smaller than a breadbox,” by various working architects/designers.
The massive development planned at the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) was unanimously upheld by the New York City Council Land Use Committee on Thursday, and the Lower East Side might be getting a new school. Or not. City officials won’t decide whether to build the project—part the 1.65 million square foot development at SPURA—for at least another five years, claiming initially that the community did not need a new school. According to City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, the city will set aside 15,000 square feet in the new mixed-use buildings in case a school becomes necessary in the future. The city will also reevaluate the funding available to build it and will keep the potential space available until 2023.
Unveiled> SANAA Meanders Through What Could Have Been a Subdivision
(Courtesy SANAA and OLIN)
Tokyo-based SANAA has unveiled its next U.S. project, a meandering structure called The River for the Grace Farms Foundation, a faith, arts, and social justice non-profit in New Canaan, CT. Situated on one acre of the 75-acre Grace Farms, the building is defined by its flowing roof that hovers ten feet above the landscape on slender metal posts. Interior spaces are formed by increasing the building’s width and enclosing spaces in floor-to-ceiling glass, creating a seamless transition between interior spaces and a landscape designed by Philadelphia-based OLIN.
Welcome to Staten Eye-Land: World’s Tallest Ferris Wheel to Anchor New Waterfront Development
The planned New York Wheel development includes the world’s tallest Ferris wheel. (Courtesy NYC Mayor’s Office)
Today, thousands of tourists and New Yorkers make a loop on the Staten Island Ferry between the borough and Manhattan, but as soon as 2016, they will also be able to make a vertical loop on the world’s tallest Ferris wheel, anchoring a new mixed-use project on the North Shore waterfront in St. George. Mayor Bloomberg today unveiled plans for Harbor Commons, which includes 350,000 square feet of retail space for 100 outlet mall stores, a 200-room, 120,000 square foot hotel, and a massive green-roofed parking structure, but all eyes were on the project’s neighbor; the 625-foot-tall New York Wheel will offer stunning views of New York City and its Harbor to an estimated 4.5 million people per year.
Event> Art, Environment, Action! at Parsons
Map-knitting of Union Square. (Courtesy grassrootsmapping.org)
On Friday, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at The Parsons New School for Design will kick off their annual fall exhibition, Art, Environment, Action! The 11-week interdisciplinary and interactive laboratory, open to the public, includes workshops, lectures, discussions and a wilderness hike through Greenwich Village. A varied group of contributors, from dancers and chefs to designers and scientists will investigate the common premise of how their interactions within the natural world can be used to bring consciousness to the environment.
In the first event of the showcase, the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science will host a map-knitting workshop. Participants will remap a public area in the city using an elaborate handmade camera rigging system along with balloons and kites to capture aerial images of the site below. The images will then be posted online and layered atop existing satellite images of the area. The result is an attempt to use maps as communication and a tool in redefining public areas as a community owned territory.
Discover the Landscape Architecture of Washington D.C.
Meridian Hill (Malcom X) Park (Photo Credit: Glenn LaRue Smith, ASLA)
Washington, D.C., is often admired for its monuments. Now there is another part of our nation’s capital that its 19 million annual visitors can tour and enjoy. The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has recently announced the launch of an online mobile-friendly guide meant to give not only tourist, but also locals a new perspective on the historic, modern, and contemporary landscapes in Washington, D.C. and Arlington, VA.
On View> From Farm to City: Staten Island 1616–2012
(Courtesy MCNY)
From Farm to City: Staten Island 1616–2012
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue
Through January 21, 2013
From Farm to City: Staten Island 1616–2012 explores the history, evolution, and future of New York’s often overlooked fifth borough. The island has served as the city’s breadbasket, a pastoral escape for the city’s elite, an industrial center, an international port, and a toehold for new immigrant communities. Divided into four sections—Farms, Pleasure Grounds, Suburbs, and City—the exhibition examines the major forces that have shaped land use on the island, including the development of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The exhibition includes historic photographs, maps, and other ephemera and objects, as well as an online mapping component tracing the chronology of major developments on the island.
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