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.
Creative Corridor Plan Unveiled to Revitalize Little Rock
Aerial view of Main Street’s Creative Corridor. (Courtesy Marlon Blackwell Architect & Steve Luoni)
Marlon Blackwell, architect and professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture, and Steve Luoni, architect and director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, have unveiled a masterplan for converting Little Rock’s Main Street into a cultural center. The plan titled, The Creative Corridor: A Main Street Revitalization will include a pedestrian promenade, outdoor furniture, LED lighting installations, rain gardens, affordable living-units for artists and a renovation of downtown buildings for mixed-use. Luoni notes that execution is expected to occur in phases.
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.
Bjarke Ingels Has Phoenix Pinned, Plants Giant Observation Tower Downtown
BIG’s proposed observation tower in Phoenix. (Courtesy BIG)
Phoenix-based developer Novawest wanted a new signature project for the city’s downtown, an observation tower from which to admire the far-off mountain ranges and dramatic Southwestern sunsets, so Bjarke Ingels proposed to scoop out the spiraled negative-space of New York’s Guggenheim Museum rotunda and plant it 420 feet above downtown Phoenix. Ingels’ “Pin,” a 70,000 square foot observation tower is elegant in its simple form, a ball on a stick, indeed evoking some far away Gulliver on a real-life version of Google maps finding his way to the Sun Belt. In another light, Phoenicians could ostensibly see a larger-than-life Chupa Chup or an upended mascara brush, but that’s the beauty of pure form, right?
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.
AIA Billings Report Scores Fourth Month of Gains
BILLINGS (BLUE) AND INQUIRIES (RED) FOR THE PAST 12 MONTHS. (THE ARCHITECT’S NEWSPAPER)
A fourth straight month of increased billings by AIA members signals the architectural economy may finally have turned the corner. The Architectural Billings Index (ABI) ticked up to 53.2 from last month’s 52.8 (any score above 50 indicates an increase in demand for design services). Project inquiries also rose slightly to 59.6 from 59.4. “These are the strongest business conditions we have seen since the end of 2007 before the construction market collapse,” said AIA chief economist, Kermit Baker.
U of C addition updates old seminary for modern economics department
University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute (courtesy ann beha architects)
The University of Chicago’s ongoing development is a balancing act of preserving its collegiate gothic badge of architectural honor and making bold contemporary bounds ahead. One project that maintains that equilibrium with grace is Ann Beha Architect’s conversion of the University’s old Theological Seminary into a new economics building.
The area surrounding the site at 58th and University is on the preservation watch list, so the new steel-and-glass research pavilion along Woodlawn Avenue is likely to ruffle a few feathers. But most of the work treads lightly on the site. Glass infill will create a new entryway between the seminary building’s two main wings.
While historic facades remain throughout much of the building, designers hope a new staircase will improve vertical circulation. And a 90-seat classroom anchors an expansion below grade that improves access to existing space, drawing in light from openings to a new loggia above. Placed atop a terra cotta base, the modern addition jives tastefully with the former seminary.
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- University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute (Courtesy Ann Beha Architects)
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- University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute (Courtesy Ann Beha Architects)
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- University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute (Courtesy Ann Beha Architects)
World Trade Center Antenna Being Hoisted Into Place
Antenna segments lifted to the top of One World Trade. (Courtesy Governor Cuomo)
After a 1,500-nautical-mile voyage from Canada, half of the World Trade Center‘s antenna has arrived in New York, and, this morning, the first segments were hoisted 104 stories—over 1,300 feet above the streets of Lower Manhattan—for installation. During AN’s site tour in September, the “roots” of the antenna were clearly visible, ready to accept the structure. Building this antenna is no small effort, either. Like the scale of everything at the World Trade site, the structure is gigantic, measuring in at 408-feet tall, higher than most skyscrapers in the rest of the country. Once finished, the antenna will bring the building’s overall height to 1,776 feet.
There remains some contention on how to describe the antenna structure—as simply an antenna or, more poetically, a spire—and despite what seems a semantic argument, the results could have tall repercussions. The Port Authority and the Durst Organization—both who use the term spire—opted to remove an architectural cladding designed by SOM and artist Kenneth Snelson from the antenna earlier this year, trimming millions from the building’s price tag. Without that sculptural finish, however, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the organization charged with ranking building heights, could opt to exclude the antenna from the overall building height, where an integrated spire would count. That would mean One World Trade won’t clock in as the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, or even the tallest in New York City.
Unveiled> SOM’s Los Angeles Courthouse Is a Shimmering White Cube
The courthouse will take the form of a faceted white cube. (Courtesy Office of Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard)
Last month AN reported that SOM had won the commission to design the new $400 million federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Today, designs for the new facility were unveiled (via our friends at LA Downtown News and Curbed LA), showing a cube-shaped structure with a porous white surface. So far only two renderings have hit the web, but SOM has promised to share more with us soon.
Beantown Rising: Big Development On the Horizon In Boston
100 Pier 4 (Courtesy of ADD Inc)
For Bostonians, cranes and scaffolding have become a common fixture in the city’s landscape. In recent years, there’s been a slew of new developments cropping up everywhere from Roxbury to Fenway, with the bulk of construction concentrated in South Boston’s waterfront, and more specifically in a sub-section that Mayor Thomas M. Menino has dubbed the “Innovation District.” AN has compiled a list of some of the most high profile projects happening in the city.
New Views at Nouvel’s Tower Verre
(Courtesy Adamson Associates / Atelier Jean Nouvel)
Even after it was lopped off in 2009, Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre, aka the MoMA Tower, still remains one of New York City’s tallest planned residential towers, sited adjacent to MoMA’s headquarters on West 53rd Street. After fights with the neighbors, Nouvel’s tower has been keeping a low profile, but Curbed (via NY YIMBY) has spotted a few new renderings of the tower at Adamson Associates Architects, the architects of record for the project. While the exterior changes are minor, fans of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s now empty American Folk Art Museum can breathe a sigh of relief, for now, as the small, bronze-clad structure remains standing in the rendered views. Also of interest are a couple new renderings of the building’s interior spaces.
Hudson Yards Breaks Ground as Manhattan’s Largest Mega-Development
The towers of Hudson Yards. (Courtesy Related)
Tuesday morning, New York’s top power brokers gathered in a muddy lot on Manhattan’s west side to mark the official groundbreaking of the 26-acre Hudson Yards mega-development. The dramatic addition to the New York skyline will comprise a completely new neighborhood of glass skyscrapers at the northern terminus of the High Line. The South Tower, the first structure to be built and the future headquarters of fashion-label Coach, will rise on the site’s southeast corner at 30th Street and 10th Avenue, where Related CEO Stephen Ross, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and others celebrated the first turning of dirt as a large caisson machine bored into the ground.
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