New York City is celebrating the opening of its seventh annual Valentine’s Day installation in Times Square. As part of Times Square Alliance’s heart design competition, Brooklyn-based, Venezuelan-born firm Stereotank has constructed their heart-beating urban drum in hopes to bring New Yorkers together through music.
Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s Storefront for Art and Architecture has hosted its share of installations, but its newest intervention envisioned by SO-IL as part of the Blueprint exhibition is a whole new concept: covering the entire facade with shrink-wrap. The seamless outcome is deceptively simple, however, as the installation involved some careful calculations, a massive frame, and a dedicated team with an acute attention to detail. Read more about the project, see the finished product, and watch the process, here.
New York developer Related Companies has reportedly commissioned OMA to design their newest High Line project on West 18th Street. The Rotterdam-based practice is the latest to join a list of internationally acclaimed architects who will be leaving their mark on the elevated Manhattan parkway, including Zaha Hadid who also was tapped by Related Companies to design an 11-story, luxury apartment project on 520 W. 28th Street. Few details have been released; the commission will be OMA’s first major project in New York City. They will be working on the project alongside practice’s comprehensive “Rebuild by Design” strategy for Hoboken.
Although the Young Architects Program (YAP) announced Andrés Jaque of Office of Political Innovation as winner of its 2015 MoMA PS1 competition last week, the competition was fierce. Phenomena by Studio Benjamin Dillenburger addressed the idea of phenomenology in design, creating an experiential space that stimulates all the senses and hosts multiple programs.
Phenomena was one of the five shortlisted proposals for this year's MoMA PS1 YAP competition. Read more about the proposal after the break.
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Eight practitioners from the US, Canada and Mexico have been selected to receive The Architectural League of New York’s 33rd annual Emerging Voices award - one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. Each recipient was selected for being a “distinct design voice” with the “potential to influence" disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.
“This year’s Voices critically re-envision solutions for contemporary design concerns—programmatic, typological, and tectonic—that have the potential to inspire new approaches to building and form,” says program director Anne Rieselbach.
This year’s emerging voices are…
The latest in the debate over Paul Rudolph's controversial Orange County Government Center, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times stresses the importance of its survival in "A Chance to Salvage a Master's Creation." The much debated plan for the now monumental structure would alter much of its existing character, whether by removal or replacement. Kimmelman argues that despite the criticism the Government Center has garnered from some, Orange County should reconsider architect Gene Kaufman's alternate proposal which would keep the structure intact and would restore it to its former glory.
BLUEPRINT is the latest exhibition on display at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Curated by Sebastiaan Bremer, Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, the exhibition features 50 blueprints from participating artists and architects, ranging from as far back as 1961 to 2013.
In the US, most people drive alone to work. This isn’t surprising, considering car culture has been a staple of American life since the end of World War II. However, with the potential of high speed rails making way in California and the push for public transit in many other states, it will be interesting to see how this map may (or may not) change over the next decade.
When it comes to discussing informal housing, it's usually cities in developing nations that take the spotlight - however, as revealed by SITU Studio's contribution to MoMA's Uneven Growth exhibition, issues of informal housing are indeed present in cities across the spectrum of development. In this interview, originally posted on Arup Connect as "Inequality and informality in New York," Sarah Wesseler speaks to SITU Studio principle Bradley Samuels about their unconventional proposal to address an issue that is frequently overlooked in New York city policy.
Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a newly opened exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, focuses on the complex relationship between urbanization and inequality. Over the 14-month period leading up to the launch, six interdisciplinary teams explored how these issues are playing out in different parts of the world, each developing an architectural response for a specific city.
Architecture firm SITU Studio (together with Cohabitation Strategies [CohStra]) was tasked with studying its home city, New York. (Arup transport planner Michael Amabile also consulted with the team.) We spoke with SITU principal Bradley Samuels about the project.
As uncovered by Curbed, construction workers at Rafael Viñoly's 1,396 foot (426 meter) tall 432 Park Avenue were served with a full stop work order last week by the New York City Department of Buildings, after an 8 foot (2.4 meter) long section of steel pipework was dropped from a construction hoist on the building's 81st floor.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the topping out of New York City's Hearst Tower, Lord Foster returned in order to narrate a short film shedding new light on the building with the aid of camera drones. The 46 storey building - which is integrated into a 6 storey base brick structure designed by Joseph Urban in 1928 - was "one of the most sustainable buildings of its time." Now, ten years later, this footage captures spectacular new views of the main atrium.
Two winners have been announced for the fifth annual cycle of New York’s “City of Dreams” competition: the “Billion Oyster Pavilion” by locally-based BanG Studio and “Organic Growth” by Izaskun Chinchilla Architects of Madrid and London. Pending approvals and fundraising, both pavilions will be assembled on Governors Island and open to the public for the summer 2015 season. The winning pavilions, after the break.
Something he has “dreamed of capturing for decades,” Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet has released a stunning set of images that captures his hometown of New York in a way that has never before been seen. Taken from a nauseating 7500-feet above the city, Laforet’s “Gotham 7.5K” series reveals the unrelenting, pulsating energy that radiates from the Big Apple’s city grid.
All the images and the making-of video, after the break.
In a film for the BBC Magazine, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava talks through his designs for the new St. Nicholas Church - the only non-secular building on the 9/11 Memorial site. The building, which broke ground last year, has been described by Calatrava as a "tiny jewel" for lower Manhattan, comprising of a white Vermont marble shrine sat beneath a translucent central cupola that is illuminated from within. The new church, of Greek Orthodox denomination, replaces a church of the same name which was destroyed during the attacks of 9/11. It is sited close to its original location on 130 Liberty Street, overlooking the National September 11 Memorial park and museum. With the building set to open in early 2016, Calatrava discusses the key conceptual ideas and references behind its unique, controversial design.
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LEGO® has unveiled the latest buildings to join their architecture series: the Washington D.C. Lincoln Memorial and the New York City Flatiron Building. Both will be released in 2015.
The Lincoln Memorial, a national monument honoring the 16th President of the United States, was designed by Henry Bacon and features a sculpture of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French. The Flatiron Building, originally known as the Fuller Building, is a landmark Manhattan skyscraper designed by Daniel Burnham Frederick Dinkelberg.
The news was released following the grand opening of a new LEGO® Brand Store adjacent to the Flatiron.
More images of the new LEGO® sets, after the break.
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