Midtown Missionaries
Made in Midtown project fellows (clockwise from top left): Jordan Alport, Interboro Partners, Sarah Williams, and Tom Vanderbilt. (Courtesy Design Trust)
The Design Trust for Public Space, in partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), has announced four fellows for Made in Midtown, a land use and zoning study of Manhattan’s Garment District. Filmmaker Jordan Alport, urban design group Interboro, writer Tom Vanderbilt, and urban planner Sarah Williams will work together to illustrate the connections between fashion industry businesses and the spaces they occupy. Read More
Eavesdrop NY 01
Sutton Scarsdale Hall is looking to fill its walls with something. Anything. Please. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Pimp Our Ruins
Formula for architectural mischief: Start with a fabulous ruin. Then add a public entity with oversight of fabulous ruins, which, in turn, summons a quirky arts organization to devise a competition to do something useful with said ruin in peril. Governors Island? Nope. Think England: The fabulous ruin is Sutton Scarsdale Hall, a dilapidated wreck of a structure in the countryside of Derbyshire. The public entity is English Heritage, which watches over Stonehenge among other oddities, and the arts organization is something called the Centre of Attention. The 1724 Georgian hall was stripped to its foundation in 1919, and some of the interior paneling ended up in the Hearst Castle and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, although apparently there are still “traces of sumptuous plasterwork.” (Don’t miss the ha-ha ditch on the picturesquely wrecked grounds.) The Centre of Attention has called for proposals to transform the stone shell into “a pavilion of post-contemporary curating.” If that’s your cup of tea, dive right in. Read More
Farm Economics
Students at PS 216 in Brooklyn will soon have a new class in their curriculum: Farming 101. (Courtesy WorkAC)
A couple of days ago the New York Times buried a bit of architecture news in their Dining & Wine section: WorkAC has designed facilities for the first New York affiliate of the Edible Schoolyard program. Initiated by the Chez Panisse foundation and begun 15 years ago at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA, the program offers students the opportunity to be involved in the planting, growing, and harvesting of seasonal produce. While much of the project will involve tearing up an asphalt yard to make way for planting beds, the heart will be a new kitchen classroom designed by WorkAC, which has dabbled before in edible architecture. The building’s butterfly-shaped roof will collect rainwater for irrigation, and a 1,600-square-foot moveable greenhouse will extend the growing season. The building will be solar powered and will also include a chicken coop, dishwashing facilities, and a toolshed. More images after the jump.
P.S. 1 is SO-IL
Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, in the studio with their daughter. (Courtesy SO-IL.org)
UPDATE: Get the full story, including renderings, on our main page.
Well into its second decade, P.S.1 and MoMA’s Young Architect’s Program looked just south of its Queens home for this year’s winner, selecting Brooklyn’s SO-IL Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu to design the now famous summertime pavilion in the P.S. 1 courtyard. They beat out two fellow Brooklynites, Freecell and Easton + Coombes, Cambridge’s William O’Brien, Jr., and a dark horse Danish contender BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. Renderings will be released at a MoMA event tomorrow, but a press release describes their entry thusly: Read More
The Rain in SF is Mainly in the Drain
Islais Creek is San Francisco's equivalent of the L.A. River--it's currently hidden underground. Courtesy Rosey Jencks/San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
The winter rains in the Bay Area, as usual, seem to be too much of a good thing. There’s a fair number of flooded streets and general consternation about this stuff falling from the sky. But if we thought about it differently, it might seem more like manna from heaven. I did a little calculation this morning to see what was going down the drain. Read More
Turning Up Design
(images courtesy of the Volume Gallery)
We have previously reported on Chicago’s burgeoning independent design scene, and now the Windy City is gaining a new venue to see the newest design thinking. The Volume Gallery will serve as a “platform for emerging American designers to engage with an international audience,” according to a statement form the organizers. Their first exhibition on designer Jonathan Nesci, called THE NEW, will be held at the Andrew Rafacz Gallery in the West Loop, and will feature limited editions, including tables, chairs, and pendant lamps. Nesci’s work has been widely published and has been show at Design Miami, ICFF, Design Art London, and the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Read More
Messrs. Fixit
All aboard. (Teamsugar.com)
With the loss in yesterday’s Massachusetts special election no doubt hanging heavily over the White House today, the Obama administration can at least take solace in the fact it’s done at least one thing right. Planetizen points us to a Brookings Institution report from Friday that gives the 44th president an A- grade for infrastructure from his first year, meaning there’s still room for improvement (launch an infrastructure bank) but things are generally pretty good (high speed rail, grid upgrades, job creation). Read More
Where Today Meets Tomorrow Night
(Click to enlarge)
What do Eero Saarinen and Susan Skarsgard have in common? They both worked for GM: he, the Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, his first great commission; she, graphic design for the Big Three car company for more than 15 years. They also share space at the Museum of the City of New York, where Skarsgard will be giving a talk tomorrow night at 6:30 about her sumptuous, custom-made book as part of the museum’s ongoing Saarinen show, Shaping the Future. Weighing 35 pounds, Where Today Meets Tomorrow was painstakingly produced by Skarsgard over a number of years at the Technical Center, which also happens to be her office. The one-of-a-kind book, through which Skarsgard will guide the museum’s guest on a virtual tour, includes rarely seen archival materials from GM and Saarinen. We got a few more shots after the jump to whet your appetite, but if that’s not enough, check out a book of the same name we just found online produced when the center first opened, with principal photography from none other than Ezra Stoller. Read More
Drawing Attention
Jean Tschumi's Nestlé Headquarters (Courtesy Artinfo.com)
Just when we thought the season of giving was behind us, Bernard Tschumi has brought out one last gift for MoMA. The architect announced yesterday that he would donate 43 of his father’s architectural drawings to the museum, making it the only non-European institution with a collection of Jean Tschumi originals. Read More
Trumpets, Please!
Anne Guiney and AN gang at the bar on Inauguration Day.
Former AN editor, Anne Guiney, has been named executive director of The Institute for Urban Design, the organization dedicated to fomenting debate about urban planning and development policy. With longtime experience as a magazine editor including stints at Metropolis and Architecture magazines, Guiney was part of the original team of editors at The Architect’s Newspaper, making sure that urban planning received as much coverage as architecture and design. Read More
Targeting the Loop
(courtesy Joseph Freed and Associates)
Crain’s Chicago Business reports that big-box retailer Target is negotiating with the developers Joseph Freed and Associates for space at the venerable Carson Pirie Scott & Co. building, now named the Sullivan Center. Formerly home of the department store Carson Pirie Scott, the building, designed by Louis Sullivan, has remained largely vacant following a recent substantial rehab effort. The upper floors house the School of the Art Institute Chicago’s departments of architecture, interior architecture, and designed objects and the architectural mega-firm Gensler. The building anchors the slightly more downtrodden southern end of State Street within the Loop. Read More
Spielberg Wades Into The Pit
Steven Spielberg has captured some dicey events on film: World War II, Alien Invasions, and Dinosaurs gone wild. But none of that can prepare him for the mess that he’s about to cover: the World Trade Center. Spielberg is producing a documentary for the Science Channel called Rebuilding Ground Zero, a six-part series set to run next year. The show is the brainchild of architect Danny Forster, who hosts and produces the Science Channel’s Build It Bigger, and it will be directed by Jonathan Hock, who shot Through the Fire, a documentary about Coney Island basketball star and NBA dud Sebastian Telfair. Each episode of Rebuilding will chronicle one aspect of the ultra-slow redevelopment, including the Freedom Tower, the memorials, the park, the museum, and the transportation hub. Perhaps Spielberg will conjure up some CGI magic to make the site look like more than a hole in the ground? We’ll have to wait and see.
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