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Hotel Grand Prospect rendering (Courtesy Curbed)
Parking Slope. A parking lot in Park Slope, Brooklyn could soon sprout an 11-story, 166-room hotel designed by Doban Architecture (pictured above). Curbed stopped by a community meeting last Thursday and reports Hotel Grand Prospect has extended the neighborhood an olive branch in the form of a 400-car parking garage which has won over some community members. The project is still in its early phases and traffic and environmental studies have yet to be completed. (More at Curbed.)
No Green in Green?
The solar panels are just the start of this green-house in Harlem. (Courtesy Warburg Realty)
Is it really possible to make your house too green? California may not think so, but a Harlem brownstone is finding that to be the case. Last week, Curbed spotted 151 West 122nd Street, which the realtors declare to be the “greenest house in Manhattan.” While there are a few others that might argue for that throne, this one holds the title by apparently being the first standalone townhouse in the borough to achieve a LEED rating, Silver to be exact, courtesy a Better Homes and Gardens makeover. But all that green cred is not translating into green credit, as the building’s price has fallen from $4.05 million some 17 months ago to $2.79 million. At least one critic, gadabout blogger Harlem Bespoke, has complained that the problem is the project has forgone its charm for slick environmentalism—there’s no brownstone left in this brownstone!. Could this be the case, as ArchNewsNow turned up more green backlash today? Or is it simply the fact that no one is willing to spend this kind of money, no matter how nice a house, in Harlem?
Kicked by the Curb
Curbed calls Calatrava's 80 South Street the biggest disappointment of the decade.
The recent building boom has proven to be as much about what got built—40s Bond and Mercer, One Bryant Park, the High Line—as what hasn’t—our Gehry Guggenheim, ample affordable housing, so much of the World Trade Center, not to mention Dubai. Our good pals at Curbed New York, so often trafficking in our real estate dreams and nightmares, have put together a run-down of their top 10 projects that never got built. Read More
Kings of Curbed
Some Curbed fan favorites: The Standard Hotel in New York, San Francisco's de Young Museum, and the Caltrans HQ in LA.
It must be said that Curbed, in its short life, has become one of the preeminent sites for not just real estate but also architecture and planning news, one of—not the, mind you, as that would us—best places for info on the evolving built environments of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They are most certainly in our Top 10. Reaffirming that fact is a Top 10 of Curbed’s own, a celebration of the best buildings of the past decade, something the site(s) weren’t around to see the dawning of, though who cares, since neither were we. Read More
SCI-Arc Moving?
The LA Downtown News and Curbed LA report that SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) is having some serious issues with its current location in LA’s Arts District, and may be considering a move to Hollywood, the Wilshire Corridor, or the Westside. The school rents its massive train-depot-turned-school building from developer Meruelo Maddux, which apparently charges a pretty penny (and recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy). Their lease is up in one year. According to Jamie Bennett, SCI-Arc’s COO, the school has not yet decided on whether it will renew the lease, and wants a building of its own. “We will be operating in our own self-interest. We haven’t been unhappy down here in the Arts District. We’ve got flexibility in terms of our future and we have optimism about our future, but our future will include owning where we are,” he told the Downtown News. Stay tuned, because we know downtown doesn’t want to lose one the Arts District’s driving forces…
Emerson Morphs in Hollywood
Thom is right at home with this Emerson project. (Courtesy Curbed)
When Boston’s Emerson College chose to open a satellite “campus” for students studying and interning in LA (it’s really just one building), the school would have been hard pressed to find a more suitable architect than Thom Mayne. After all, Morphosis has had a string of academic successes of late, including the new 41 Cooper Square in New York and the Cahill Center for Astronomy at Caltech. Indeed, some of the firm’s earliest successes were two high schools in Southern California. Now, Curbed alerts us to this latest project, complete with the above rendering. The details are kind of sketchy, though we do know there will be 224 residences in that La Defense-like box with classrooms in the inner blob, which is, like, so Thom Mayne.
The Future Is Video
When CAD rose up in the ’80s and began replacing hand-drawing as the preferred means of rendering architecture-to-be, practitioners began decrying the death of the field. Obviously that was not the case, but in our increasingly digitized age/culture/lives, where sexy renderings predominate (to the cost of real architectural discourse, some might say, and probably rightly) on blogs and, uh, architectural websites and beyond, videos are becoming an increasingly important component of the process of placemaking. Or at least competitionwinning, as the above video by SPF:architects shows. Read More
Korean Rainbow
Thanks to our friends at Curbed LA, we learn that LACMA has wrapped its Ahmanson Building in a rainbow of fabrics for its upcoming show, “Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from South Korea (June 28-Sept. 20). Read More
Far Far Away
According to Architect's Journal, the second Death Star evinces a "pleasing return to Classical symmetry."
Yesterday, New York real estate blog Curbed picked up a rather nerdy feature in the UK-based Architect’s Journal: their top ten list of the most important buildings from Star Wars. In addition to judging each project by aesthetic and programmatic merit, the journal draws parallels between the architecture of that galaxy and that of earth. Notables include the Cloud City of Bespin (“a well-appointed luxury resort… complete with hotels and casinos”), the Bright Tree Village on Endor (“rated BREEAM Excellent, the development—by architect Wicket W Warrick—makes use of locally sourced materials, is carbon neutral, and far exceeds Endor’s notoriously strict building regulations”), and Jabba the Hutt’s palace on Tatooine (“originally built as a monastery by the B’omarr Monks”). The “run-away winner” however is the second Death Star (“a menacing spherical chunk of Brutalist infrastructure”).
HSM: Warped on Wooster Street
Smith-Miller + Hawkinson's proposed designs for 27 Wooster Street, which have been replaced by ones by KPF. (Courtesy SMH+)
Yesterday, Curbed got the scoop on the new 27 Wooster Street, designed by KPF. Just as they were hitting publish, Henry Smith-Miller, principal of Smith-Miller Hawkinson and the designer of the proposal KPF is replacing, had written us about the project–and his apparent consternation. We asked to know more, and he gamely responded, even encouraging us to air his grievances here-in: Read More
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