Full Steam Ahead
A bronze mural, one of two designed by Beyer Blinder Belle, adorns the recently renovated lobby of 230 Park Avenue (Courtesy Monday Properties)
While the preservation experts at Beyer Blinder Belle are typically busy making old structures look new with new components that look old (like, say, the signage at a certain skyscraper), BBB’s designers also from time to time design from whole cloth. Or whole bronze, as is the case for a pair of murals created for a recent lobby renovation to 230Park Avenue, the former Helmsley Building that caps Grand Central. Last Monday, Monday Properties president Anthony Westreich, the building’s owner, dedicated the murals along with local pols Scott Stringer and Daniel Garodnick and Landmarks Preservation Commission chair Robert Tierney. Weighing more than a ton, the murals—which were drawn by Chris Ludlow and sculpted by Joan Benefiel under the direction of BBB—hark back to the building’s history as the former headquarters for the New York Central Railroad, depicting a train speeding by with the distinctive profile of 230 Park in the background. See more photos from the dedication and shop after the jump. Read More
NOLA Lights Up
Star light, star bright.
For the last three years, AIA New Orleans has invited teams of architects and artists to takeover “hidden” spaces within the city, transforming them with the latest design tech and hopefully testing the boundaries of this at-times-ephemeral place in the process. One of installations at this year’s DesCours comes from the Chicago team of Marshall Brown and Dana Carter. (Brooklynites may know Brown from his work on the anti-Ratner UNITY plan for the Atlantic Yards.) The duo has focused their gaze on the heavens, where they are harnessing the sun—through photovoltaic, of course—and transforming it for the weeklong nightly event into a constellation in no less a celestial place than Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia. More illuminating photos after the jump, and if you happen to be in town for the event, let us know what you think about this or any of the other 13 projects. Read More
The City of Benchly Love
Three of the new Corian seats, deployed across the city by C.H. Briggs in honor of Design Philadelphia 09.
It would seem Philadelphia has a bit of a seating fixation going on with this year’s Design Philadelphia event. First there was the new Veyko subway chairs, and now—as you’ve noticed if you’ve been out wandering the streets of town during October—more than a dozen seats/sculptures scattered about, all cut from DuPont Corian, all created by prominent local designers. Reading-based C.H. Briggs, the interiors supplier, decided it wanted to celebrate Philly’s top designers and the city’s popular public spaces by commissioning them to create site-specific seating from that most ubiquitous of building materials. The results will only officially be up through the end of the month, though Briggs is currently negotiating with the city and certain institutions to donate the pieces so that they might find a permanent home—not unlike those damn cow parades that were so popular earlier in the decade, though at least these seats have a far greater purpose. You can see a slideshow of all 14 here.
Waterfalls of Revenue
Though some people were more than happy to see Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls dry up a few weeks ago, one person who will dearly miss them is the mayor. Read More
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