A Spruced Up Central Park Precinct Opens to Public
Exterior of Central Park Precinct (Courtesy of New York City Department of Design + Construction)
Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD gathered yesterday to unveil the newly renovated Central Park Precinct, the oldest stationhouse in the city. According to DNAinfo, the $61 million project included repairs to the crumbling building and a new canopy and glass atrium over the lobby, with the help of Karlsberger Architects.
Photo of the Day: Central Park Aerial Panorama
(Courtesy AirPano)
We’ve all become accustomed to seeing aerial photography from apps like Google Maps, but this aerial panorama by Russian photographer Sergey Semonov presents Manhattan’s Central Park and its surrounding cityscape with fascinating new detail. The Atlantic found the image, submitted as part of the Epson International Photographic Pano Awards. Created in collaboration with aerial-panorama-makers AirPano, the team photographed the park from a helicopter and later stitched the various images together creating the unique, albeit slightly distorted, view of the city.
A Spinning Piper Seneca Lands in Central Park
(Courtesy Public Art Fund)
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s actually a plane. On the corner of 60th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a six-seat, twin-engine Piper Seneca aircraft balances on two vertical steel posts positioned at the end of its wings, playfully rotating on its own axis and likely confusing visitors to Central Park. After doing a double take on the surreal scene, find a plaque located nearby and you’ll learn that this mysterious aircraft is actually an installation by artist Paola Pivi, whose portfolio includes scenes of zebras on snowy mountaintops and arenas of screaming people. Working with the Public Art Fund, an organization dedicated to present artists’ work throughout New York City, Paola Pivi opened her newest installation featuring the Piper Seneca, How I Roll last Wednesday, June 20th.
Central Park Pavilion Restored with Historic and Contemporary Concerns in Mind
The Heckscher Building
Until recently, the only way to enter Central Park’s oldest and largest playground was through a chain-link fence. The great Heckscher Playground, impressive in scale and amenities, did not have an entrance to match, but a recently completed renovation to the building has retuned the structure to it’s original use with a contemporary twist blending the building’s history with contemporary needs.
Quick Clicks> Broken Houses, Tree Mapping, AIA Matchmaker, & Tiny Parks
Ofra Laprid's Broken Homes (Courtesy the artist)
Objects of Ruin. Israeli artist Ofra Lapid has taken society’s obsession with ruin to a whole new level. Inspired by amateur photographs from North Dakota’s urban and rural decay, Lapid’s Broken Houses series consists of small models of the dilapidated buildings that are re-photographed without their original context. Her work produces an eerie sense of reality set against a stark grey background. Check out more images after the jump.
Tree Time. A place for every tree, and every tree in its place. Two maps from New York and Philadelphia are pinpointing the exact location of trees in each city. The Dirt reported that Edward S. Bernard and Ken Chaya have produced an illustrated map entitled Central Park Entire that seeks to honor the work of landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux by graphically representing all of the flora and fauna of Central Park. In Philadelphia, the PhillyTreeMap provides a similarly detailed online database that crowdsources each green public and private property.
Making Connections. According to the Daily Joural of Commerce Oregon, the AIA will launch an online matchmaking service in September for stalled development projects and their potential real-estate investors in hopes of giving life to long-stalled projects while compiling data that helps identify problem developments.
Parklet, PA. Philly is the latest city to jump off the bandwagon and set up a park, joining pavement-to-parks pioneers New York and San Francisco. The city will convert parking spots into miniature parks as a low-cost way to open up green space in University City. Additional parklets could be introduced the upcoming years pending the success of their pilot project.
Quick Clicks: Ruination, Context, Issues, Movement, Resolutions
Obelisk in Central Park (Courtesy Thom Watson/Flickr)
[ Quick Clicks> A hand-selected tour of links from around the world. ]
Ruination. Mayor Bloomberg received an angry letter in the mail last week from Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. According to the NY Times, Hawass is threatening to take back the circa-1500 B.C. monument if the city doesn’t properly care for the inscribed hieroglyphics. Heavily eroded, the obelisk was a gifted to the United States in 1869 to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal.
James Gardner Goes Gaga for Central Park Kiosk
The "drably mansarded structure in red brick" during its previous life as a mere concession stand. (Courtesy NYMag.com)
As editors ourselves, we know writers don’t usually write the headlines. Still, we were struck by one atop a recent review by our friend and sometimes contributor James Gardner in The Real Deal, which declared, “Central Park’s Le Pain Quotidien ranks as one of the best things about New York City.” You don’t say. And yet, for all the hyperbole, the guy’s got a point: Read More
Pop-Up Hadid
“Don’t panic, don’t wander off…. Open my bag, as they say in French…” Thus begins the audio-tour of the Chanel pop-up architecture pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid and launched this morning in Central Park (Fifth Avenue and 69th Street). The throaty dominatrix on the tape could have been Zaha herself, Read More
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
