Studio V Bets on a Curving Lattice Porte-Cochère for Yonkers
The canopy looking north with the curved glass facade serving as backdrop. (Studio V)
For those heading north on the New York State Thruway, the Yonkers Raceway emerging on the right is just another part of the landscape. But Studio V Architects is about to change all that with their massive porte-cochère that serves as the iconic tour de force for the $45 million expansion of the Empire City Casino. The curved lattice canopy will be clad in ETFE foil—a polymer membrane often used for roofing—that will reflect LED lights resting atop the steel frame.
Behind the canopy, a four-story, 300-foot-long glass wall will serve as a clear backdrop to the canopy, mimicking its curve, while allowing visitors to see the action inside. “The sculptural steel and foil shell grow out of the landscape,” explained Studio V founder and principal Jay Valgora. That landscape will eventually get the Ken Smith treatment. AN took a trip up to Yonkers to check out the construction and all seems on track for opening this fall. We’ll keep you updated on its progress and more from Studio V.
Fabricate It Yourself With Computer Augmented Craft
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Machine collaborates on your design as you make it
Earlier this summer Design Hub Limburg mounted “The Machine,” an exhibition that anticipates what the Netherlands-based design collective is calling the designers’ industrial revolution, a movement that sees more and more designers developing and building machines specially suited to their particular needs, like the Computer Augmented Craft project (CAC) by German designer Christian Fiebig. He was commissioned by Design Hub Limburg to create an interactive machine with a digital interface that makes suggestions to the designer during the fabrication process. Using custom-made sensors, the computer tracks the making process and instantly generates formal possibilities based on the designer’s chosen parameters, bridging hi-tech with traditional craftsmanship.
Fiebig enlisted the help of product and interaction designer David Menting and his company, Nut & Bolt, to devise a system of sensors specifically for spot welding strips of metal. First, Menting used an off-the-shelf CNY70 reflective infrared sensor to detect the position of the metal strips and created an adapted pair of digital calipers to measure the length. A custom-made circular infrared sensor was then created to measure the angle at which two different strips meet. The values read by the sensors are registered by an Arduino, a microcontroller chip that enables a computer to communicate input and output components, in this case the sensors. The Arduino checks whether the infrared sensor can detect the light from a ring of LEDs on the workstation at a rate of approximately a thousand times per second. If not, it knows the light is being blocked by a strip of metal, which it measures the length and angle of, and then sends that information to the computer.
Open Source Mobile App Aims To Make Multi-Modal Transit Trips Easy
You might have heard that the next version of Apple’s iPhone software, iOS 6, is scrapping transit directions when it revamps its mapping program. That’s a big deal for city dwellers in a constant rush to grab the closest subway or the fastest bus and caused quite an uproar earlier this summer when news hit the internet. While Google’s standard app is no longer default, a plethora of software developers have jumped at the opportunity to design custom transit apps. Open Plans, a non-profit software developer in New York, is one of them, and they’re in the final hours of a Kickstarter campaign to fund their transit app.
As of publishing, their open-source OpenTripPlanner Mobile project is still about 20 percent short of its goal, but closing in pretty quickly. The software promises features that the current Google maps app doesn’t allow, like planning for multi-modal trips involving transit, walking, and bikes. New Yorkers can check out an example of Open Plans’ bike-share software Cibi.me, which will help plan Citi Bike trips once the city finally works out all the bugs.
Zaha Hadid Reveals a Pleated Vision for the Venice Biennale
Before the 2012 Venice Biennale opens on August 29, Zaha Hadid Architects has released its own preview of the firm’s pavilion to be displayed at the Giardini and the Arsenale in Venice. The pavilion will be one of 66 projects in the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Biennale, entitled Common Ground.
Cleaning up an Arts District in Cincinnati
Brownstones in Pendleton, a neighborhood in downtown Cincinnati. (Wikimedia Commons)
In its ongoing march to reclaim downtown neighborhoods marred by blight and suburban exodus, Cincinnati this week added Pendleton to the Neighborhood Enhancement Program. The district is known for its art center, and was a natural choice for the program now in 14 areas of the city.
Like its neighbor to the west, Over-the-Rhine, Pendleton has struggled with crime. The “90-day blitz of city services” offered by NEP is designed to begin the process of long-term revitalization for the neighborhood by addressing that issue. Kennedy Heights saw a 16 percent drop in crime after it embarked on NEP earlier this year. The program will be reevaluated every 90 days, and again six months after completion.
New Design Trends and Policies Help City Dwellers Touch Water
The Field Operations’ new plaza fronting New York by Ghery features flush fountains. (Stoelker/AN)
An interesting trend to hit landscape architecture in recent years is borderless fountains, where water flows flush with the pavement. If so inclined, visitors can kick off their shoes and stroll though damp pavers. Such fountains can be found by Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro on the High Line, Digsau’s Sister Cities Park in Philly, and Field Operations’ recently completed plaza fronting New York by Gehry. The trend seems to speak to city dwellers need to touch water.
Hard Core Cake-Off: Architects Bake Cakes & Eat Them, Too
A Guggenheim cake under construction, although unrelated to the exhibit. (Michelle Schrank/Flickr)
On a recent sunny day in Silver Lake the Materials & Applications gallery got folks together to eat cake. In honor of the group’s 10th anniversary M&A hosted an architectural bake-off called “Elevate Your Cake,” with groovy deliciousness by an impressive group of designers. They included Predock Frane; Chu + Gooding; Escher GuneWardena Architecture; Gensler; Deegan Day; Deutsch; Patterns; Noah Riley Design; Warren Techentin; Barbara Bestor; MASS; Osborn; Modal Design; Taalman Koch; and Andy Goldman.
That’s right, this was no amateur night. These were serious architectural cakes. Chu + Gooding’s cake, “Inopportune Totem,” looked like a porcupine had mated with a death-by-chocolate. Warren Techentin’s entry, “cubisphere,” was made up of Japanese Mochi and chocolate cake balls. It looked like a cube made of colorful (but edible) golf and ping pong balls stacked on each other. After several of the cakes were raffled off everybody got down to business: eating the rest.
Art Elevates Neutra and Koenig Icons in Los Angeles
Mobile from Architectones at the VDL (Joshua White)
Art’s power can be magnified by architecture. French artist Xavier Veilhan knew that well when he took over two of LA’s most famous houses last week: Richard Neutra’s VDL Research House and Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House 21. The installation at the VDL, called Architectones, consisted of VDL-inspired sculptures in the garden, the front yard, in most of the home’s rooms, on the rooftop, and even in the reflecting pool.
Nods to Neutra himself and to the modernist movement included a large steel profile of the architect, as well as an evocative mobile and models of rather menacing-looking boats, flags, rockets, and cars.
A couple of days later came the finale: a haunting performance installation at CSH 21 that transformed reflecting pools with black ink and made the transparent house opaque with dry ice-produced smoke.
According to the New York Times, Amtrak is gaining riders in the northeast corridor thanks in part to arduous airport security procedures and frequent airline delays. Amtrak also beats airline shuttles in on-time arrivals and proximity to major business centers. In Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority is counting 16 months of ridership increases for both rail and bus lines. The rail system has seen 51 consecutive months of ridership growth, including a 6.2 percent jump over the last six months. Last year the CTA carried 523 million riders. [Photo: Bruce Fingerhood/Flickr]
See You Tonight for Maps to Apps at the Center for Architecture!
Don’t miss Maps to Apps, the Digital Cityscape tonight at the Center for Architecture! Here’s a short synopsis of the event:
The advent of digital technology and the near universal adoption of the smart phones and the iPad have inspired many cities to experiment with using digital technology both for cultural tourism and for planning. In a couple of years the technology has developed from cell phone tours to QR codes placed on civic buildings. The just launched iPad app for the London Olympics ‘London A City Through Time’ transforms an entire encyclopedia’s worth of content into a tool for understanding the archaeology of a city. Probably the first attempt to use state of the art technology to take the pulse of a city and then share it was in Boston with the Where’s Boston exhibition at the Prudential Center in 1976. This summer cultureNOW is surveying Boston again through the lens of its Museum Without Walls/ iPhone app. This symposium will examine the project and look at it in the broader context.
In yet another example of public private park partnerships, New York City has put out an RFP for a developer to buy air rights for land near Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, DNA.info reports. The deal would allow the city to finance a promised park on the Greenpoint waterfront and to move MTA tram tracks that currently sit on the site.
Back to the Future in Los Angeles: Giant Waterwheel to Irrigate State Park
Courtesy Zev Yaroslavsky
Los Angeles is putting a new spin on an old technology, returning to one of the oldest forms of irrigation: the water wheel. Aqueducts have played a significant role in Los Angeles’ history, such as a waterwheel placed on the Zanja Madre—the Mother Ditch—in the 1860s that brought water from Rio Porciuncula to the Los Angeles River. As a dedication for the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a new waterwheel designed by Metabolic Studio‘s Lauren Bon, will be installed near the same site by November 5th, 2013. Bon, an Annenberg heiress, artist, and philanthropist, gained notoriety for her Not a Cornfield installation that involved transforming 32 acres of brownfields into a fertile planting ground.
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