Jersey City: The Latest Architecture and News

Jersey City’s Journal Square will soon reach new heights, as Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) and Handel Architects have broken ground on what will be the tallest building in New Jersey: Journal Squared. The transit-oriented urban renewal project will be completed in three phases; the first, which will add 540 residential units to the area, is planned for completion in mid-2016. Once the 2.3 million square foot project is complete, three metal panel clad towers will dominated the skyline, ultimately totaling in 1,840 units and reaching up to 70 stories.

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New York's Park Avenue Armory, originally built in 1861 for the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard and restored by Herzog & de Meuron in 2007, is about to be temporarily taken over by Rafael Viñoly. On April 30th 2014 Artvest Partners will launch Spring Masters New York, "a fair for art produced between antiquity and the 20th century, which corresponds with Christie’s and Sotheby’s signature Impressionism and modern art auctions". Viñoly's hexagonal grid of exhibition rooms will fill the 55,000 square foot Drill Hall in an attempt to break with the monotony of the rectangular grid format.

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The Woolworth Building, an innovative and elegant early skyscraper completed in 1913, endures today as an iconic form on the New York City skyline. A historicist exterior sheaths a modern steel tower, embodying both the era’s modern spirit of progress and its hesitation to fully break from the past. Cass Gilbert, selected as the architect, believed the designer should “weave into the pattern of our own civilization the beauty that is our inheritance.”[1] An ornate monument to the growing economic dominance of New York City, the building was dubbed the “Cathedral of Commerce.”

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Located on a small and irregular shaped island at Columbus Circle, one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan, lies 2 Columbus Circle, formerly known as the Gallery of Modern Art. Famously described as a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops” by Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times architecture critic at the time, the 10-story poured concrete structure has been a source of consistent controversy and public response since the 1960s. Designed by Edward Durell Stone, an early proponent of American modern architecture, 2 Columbus Circle represents a turning point in his career. Uncharacteristic of Stone’s prior work, his use of ornament on an otherwise modern structure can be seen as an important precedent of the development of the soon-to-emerge Postmodern movement.

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Young Projects will be spending the week playing “Match-Maker” in New York City, as the Brooklyn-based studio has debuted their interactive Valentine’s Day installation in the heart of Times Square. Made in collaboration with fabricator Kammetal, as part of Times Square Alliance’s sixth annual heart design competition, the interactive heart-shaped sculpture is designed to cosmically connect people based on their zodiac signs by arranging curious passerby's at twelve points surrounding the installation.

As Young Projects describes, “Peering through colorful, interwoven periscopes provides glimpses of each viewer's four most ideal astrological mates, offering potentially novel connections between lonely souls or settled lovers.”

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The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 has selected "Hy-Fi," a “circular tower of organic and reflective bricks” designed by The Living (David Benjamin), as the winner of the 15th annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. An exemplar of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy, the temporary installation will be built entirely from organic material via a new method of bio-design.

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Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo established their own practice in 1966, after heading the firm of Eero Saarinen for several years. The Ford Foundation Headquarters is regarded as the pair's first major success, a combination of Roche's unique ideals and Dinkeloo's innovative structural solutions. They introduced an office typology in which employee interaction extended beyond departments and levels, reaching even to the public.

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New designs of the six-story, 34,000 square foot building on the intersection of Broadway and Spring Street in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District in New York City led Commissioner Fred Bland to proclaim it as the most exciting building proposed during his tenure.

The proposal, designed by BKSK Architects, sits on a $147.9 million site purchased in December of 2012 by prominent developers, setting a per-buildable-square-foot record for SoHo retail. Their early intent of demolishing the existing building and constructing a new one garnered significant opposition. That is, till they revealed what was to replace it.

The entrance to the Museum of Modern Art is tucked beneath a demure facade of granite and glass in Midtown Manhattan. Its clean, regular planes mark Yoshio Taniguchi's 2004 addition to the MoMA's sequence of facades, which he preserved as a record of its form. Taniguchi's contribution sits beside the 1984 residential tower by Cesar Pelli and Associates, followed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone’s original 1939 building, then Philip Johnson’s 1964 addition. Taniguchi was hired in 1997 to expand the Museum’s space and synthesize its disparate elements. His elegant, minimal solution presents a contemporary face for the MoMA while adhering to its Modernist roots.

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Following the news that Studio V Architecture has been commissioned to convert the 19th century Empire Stores, next to Brooklyn Bridge, into 380,000 square-feet of office, restaurant and commercial space, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled designs for "a flowering meadow with seasonal grasses, a sprawling field and a triangular wooden viewing platform" close by.

After fifty years of neglect the Empire Stores, located next to the Brooklyn Bridge, are now the most coveted waterfront property in New York. Midtown Equity has partnered with Studio V Architecture to adaptively reuse the 19th-century coffee warehouse into 380,000 square-feet of office, restaurant and commercial space, highlighted by a Brooklyn-centric cultural museum. "After the Brooklyn Bridge," says Joe Cayre, Chairman of Midtown Equities, "the Civil War era Empire Stores are the most iconic structures on the Brooklyn waterfront. As a Brooklyn native who raised my family in the borough, it is an honor for my firm to be chosen for the redevelopment of the Empire Stores."

Learn more after the break...