New York: The Latest Architecture and News

Artist and architect Inés Esnal’s Prism installation uses colorful elastic rope to form triangular spaces that filter light into the lobby of a new residential building in New York.

The installation's vivid colors and optical illusions provide a bold contrast to the concrete walls.

View images and learn more about the project after the break. 

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British architect David Adjaye is set to submit plans for new Studio Museum in Harlem. Designed to replace the 47-year-old museum's existing facility on Manhattan's West 125th Street, the new $122 million proposal will more than double the museum's space, allowing it to become a premier center for contemporary artists of African descent.

According to the New York Times, Adjaye was chosen to design the museum due to his sensitivity regarding the artists and surrounding neighborhood, which in turn inspired the project; the project's main space will feature a four-story, multi-use core marked by an "inverted stoop" that will act as an inviting "living room" and host for public programs.

“I wanted to honor this idea of public rooms, which are soaring, celebratory and edifying — uplifting,” he told the New York Times. “Between the residential and the civic, we learned the lessons of public realms and tried to bring those two together.”

After renovations by Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, the New York Hall of Science’s (NYSCI) Great Hall has reopened to the public, reclaiming its place as the centerpiece of the NYSCI. Originally designed by Harrison and Abramovitz Architects, the Great Hall was the main exhibit space of the Hall of Science during the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, encapsulating visitors in an illusion of deep space with its irregular plan surrounded by undulating glass and concrete walls. Still one of the most formally interesting buildings in Queens, the Great Hall is one of the original World’s Fair’s last surviving structures and a landmark of mid-century modernism.

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A team of students from Austrian-based Studio Hani Rashid at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna have unveiled their conceptual design for a Cirque du Soleil Performance Center in Brooklyn, New York.

With its interior and exterior blended together, the entire building becomes a stage. Featuring large windows that allow the public to watch performances and training activities inside, people on each side are both viewers and viewed.

Currently under renovation in order to turn its soaring shell into a hotel, Eero Saarinen's iconic TWA Flight Center has been off limits to the public since 2001. However last week, while a team of digital preservationists were making scans of the swooping curves of the building's interior, photographer Max Touhey was allowed access, camera in hand, to catalog the building's mid-century elegance. The photoset, published in full on Curbed NY, shows the building in a generally good condition considering its decade-long slumber. Read on after the break for a selection of these images.

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COOKFOX Architects’ new project, 550 Vanderbilt Avenue has opened for sale. The 17-storey building will be the first of four condominiums in the 22-acre Pacific Park Brooklyn development in Prospect Heights. The project aims to create a new neighbourhood of 14 buildings, all connected to 8-acres of public green space designed by landscape architecture firm Thomas Balsley Associates. Read more about this project after the break.

The New York Lowline, a project which was first announced in 2011 and was rekindled last year, have now launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to make their dream of using solar technology to "transform an historic trolley terminal into the world's first underground park" closer to a reality. Their proposal, which seeks to unlock the potential of underused subterranean urban spaces, would see the creation of a living, green public space built beneath the streets of New York City. They are currently seeking funding to build a long-term solar device testing laboratory and public exhibition in order to test and present their designs.

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Norman Foster attended the recent groundbreaking ceremony for 425 Park Avenue, which will be the first full-block high-rise office building to be built on New York City's Park Avenue in the past 50 years. Foster+Partners, in collaboration with Adamson Associates, designed 425 Park to be a new icon in the Manhattan skyline, featuring a tri-blade, sheer wall top. In addition to its LEED Gold certification, the 560,000m² tower will be the first in New York to be WELL certified.

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New York-based studio Dror has unveiled design concepts for three new residential buildings in New York City. The imagined buildings, spread throughout lower Manhattan, are based on the studio’s idea to “disrupt conventional building design by rethinking structure, where beauty and efficiency result from an imaginative, clever framework.”

Learn more about each of the plans, after the break.

A photo posted by Andrés Jaque (@andres_jaque) on Jun 23, 2015 at 10:11am PDT

This week COSMO begun its venture to filter more than 42,000 gallons of New York City water during the course of MoMA PS1's Summer Warm Up series. The 16th installation built as part of the annual Young Architect's Program (YAP), COSMO is a portable water purifier designed by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation to combat the world's clean water crisis while serving an animated backdrop to PS1's party atmosphere.

An interview with Jaque, after the break.

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The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has shortlisted four buildings for the annual "Best Tall Building Awards." Considered to be the four best skyscrapers of the year, the buildings have been named from each of the four competing regions in the world - Americas; Asia and Australia; Europe; the Middle East and Africa - from nominees representing 33 countries. One of the buildings will be crowned the world's best at a ceremony this November.

The four top skyscrapers for 2015 are...

Currently on display at the Chamber in New York, Sung Jang’s “Mobi” is the investigation of transforming a modular, buttress-like element into “the human perception of beauty.” Mobi is part of Chamber’s latest exhibit, “This is Not a Duet,” curated by Maria Cristina Didero and Juan Garcia Mosqueda, and which showcases the oppositional work of two artists. Sung's Mobi is complimented by Gala Fernandez Montero's “Caro Ettore.”