New York: The Latest Architecture and News

Tadao Ando’s first residential building in New York City—152 Elizabeth—has topped out in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood. A collaboration with architect and designer Michael Gabellini of Gabellini Sheppard Associates, as well as developer Sumaida + Khurana, the project will feature Ando’s hallmarks, poured-in-place concrete, burnished, metal, voluminous glass, and a living green wall.

Conceived as an inner sanctuary within downtown Manhattan, the building highlights acoustics as a key consideration, with a façade system and exterior glass enabling a high OITC rating to “ensure a tranquil home environment in the center of this vibrant neighborhood.”

As rising rents have began to drive out historic garment companies from New York City’s storied Garment District in Midtown Manhattan, mayor Bill de Blasio has announced plans for a new development that would bring together the artistic fields into one creative hub in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Conceived and designed by WXY architecture + urban design, the $136 million “Made in NY Campus” will provide the setting for film and television production, virtual reality tech offices, and a new home for New York’s fashion and garment manufacturing industry.

+ 2

Looking to add a beautiful piece of art to your render to really sell your project? Look no further.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced its new Open Access policy, which releases over 375,000 images of artworks from their expansive collection for free download, with absolutely no restrictions under copyright law – meaning you are completely free to copy, remix, or distribute any image for any use, including commercial.

+ 8

Digital technologies heighten our awareness of ongoing conflicts around the world. A main strategic focus for Storefront in 2017 is to investigate the ways in which art, architecture, and design participate in the articulation and resolution of local and global struggles affecting individuals and collectives around the world.

Storefront announces a call for a one-year Program and Strategy Fellow who will develop and present a critical new project: Architecture Conflicts. This grant-funded position aims to reach candidates from underrepresented backgrounds and communities that have faced barriers to entry for leadership roles on major global projects. The fellow will work alongside Storefront's team in New York City.

The Office for Creative Research's winning design for the 2017 Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition, We Were Strangers Once Too, has officially opened in New York City's Times Square. A celebration of New York City’s rich immigrant culture, the sculpture takes the form of 33 metal poles inscribed with the origins of foreign-born NYC residents. As visitors travel around the sculpture, the red and pink blocks come together to create an iconic Valentine’s Day heart.

In 2013 former Los Angeles Magazine architecture critic Greg Goldin and journalist Sam Lubell co-wrote and co-curated Never Built Los Angeles. The acclaimed book and accompanying exhibit at the Architecture and Design Museum of LA celebrated hundreds of projects that never quite reached fruition. Following its success, the duo published a second installment: Never Built New York. Having just sold out of its first pressing, the book has garnered similar praise as its predecessor. Goldin and Lubell are currently planning an accompanying exhibit at New York’s Queens Museum that will debut this fall. Fresh off their NYC book tour, I sat down with Mr. Goldin to discuss his latest book and the future of Never Built.

Thomas Musca: You’ve been able to snag two high-profile architects to write the foreword for each book: Thom Mayne for Never Built LA and Daniel Libeskind for Never Built NY. Why do you think they’re so willing to help? Why are they so interested in the unbuilt?

Greg Goldin: I think architects feel that a lot of the work they do is the stuff that we would describe as "on paper." It’s not something that got realized. So, I think that there’s a natural sympathy for this subject matter in general. We didn’t have to convince anyone: "Oh, overcome your worst fears, you’re going to be included in this book that is consigning you to the dung heap of history." I don’t think anybody ever felt that way. I think that they feel like these are things that they don’t want to see just disappear into the archives. There’s a sympathy that already exists. Sam and I knew Thom Mayne and we thought Thom would be good for this and he just said yes. The same is true with Daniel Libeskind. Our editor, Diana Murphy, is friends with him. We felt fortunate because he has an amazingly positive attitude for a guy who’s been batted about by how things work in the real world of trying to get stuff built. You can have the dream project, Freedom Tower, and get ground down by it. But Daniel, bless his heart, is kind of upbeat about the whole thing, and that comes across in what he had to say in the foreword.

+ 9

Jungwoo Ji (of EUS+ Architects), Bosuk Hur (of Folio:), and Suk Lee (a fourth-year student at Iowa State University) have won the Liberty Museum / New York competition with their speculative design for a museum at the site of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in New York City.

Inspired by the concept of civil candlelight marches against social injustice in Korea—the designers’ home country—the proposal is designed to be an architectural device that reflects human rights and social justice disparity in real time. When visitors send messages, namely tweets, about dire events in their cities to the museum with their phones, each unit of the proposal receives electronic signals and changes its position to point towards the region in question.

+ 3

The Office for Creative Research has been announced as the winners of the 2017 Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition. Their winning design, titled We Were Strangers Once Too, is a public data sculpture in the shape of a heart that “highlight[s] the role that immigrants have played in the founding, development, and continued vibrancy of New York City.”

As long as there have been buildings mankind has sought to construct its way to the heavens. From stone pyramids to steel skyscrapers, successive generations of designers have devised ever more innovative ways to push the vertical boundaries of architecture. Whether stone or steel, however, each attempt to reach unprecedented heights has represented a vast undertaking in terms of both materials and labor – and the more complex the project, the greater the chance for things to go awry.

+ 16

+ 15

In this latest photoseries, architectural photographer Danica O. Kus takes her lens inside New York City’s SeaGlass Carousel, designed by WXY Architecture + Urban Design with artist George Tsypin. Completed in summer 2015, the 2,575 square foot nautilus-shaped pavilion has become a new attraction within a Piet Oudolf-designed landscape in Battery Park, drawing in visitors with an immersive LED and audio experience inspired by bioluminescent organisms found deep within the ocean.

+ 10

Videos

Continuing in her firm’s tradition of blurring the lines between architecture, art and environment, Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is producing an opera for the High Line. Dubbed the “Mile Long Opera,” the production will be set along New York’s new favorite attraction, which was designed by DS+R with James Corner and Piet Oudolf and opened to the public in 2009.

In the words of Bill de Blasio, New Yorkers have a “crisis of affordability” on their hands. This is a crisis built upon the success that the city has had in recent decades. These years have made the city safer, and more appealing, for people from all over the world to come and start businesses, studies, and their lives. This has put a huge strain on housing stock, and has led to New Yorkers having to spend increasing amounts to cover their housing expenses and have made entire neighbourhoods unaffordable.

In its latest installment of the Private View series, Nowness has released a short documentary by New-York based filmmaker Alexandra Liveris profiling Santiago Calatrava. In the film, Calatrava discusses his perspective as an artist and an architect, as well as his creative process, mainly within the scope of the World Trade Center Transit Hub.

"You see, the first goal in this place was to deliver something beautiful where such an ugliness was there before,” says Calatrava in the film. “To deliver something optimistic looking to the future where so much sadness and depression was there.”

New York City’s busiest airport is about to receive a major overhaul.

Proposed by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, the plan calls for a $10 billion renovation to New York City’s busiest airport, transforming the facility into a “a unified, interconnected, world-class’ complex.”

“If you took the whole world and collapsed it into one little ball, you’d find it here, in this city.”

In this video from the Louisiana Channel, Daniel Libeskind talks about the chaotic beauty of and his love for New York City. Born in Poland, at the age of 13 Libeskind immigrated to New York, where he witnessed both the building and the collapse of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Intimate with the site, Libeskind was later tasked with designing the masterplan for the World Trade Center's reconstruction.

Check out the video to hear the architect discuss the tolerance, complexities and fascination of his adopted home.

The Hudson River Park Trust has revealed plans to transform the 800-foot-long Pier 26, located on the Hudson River in the New York neighborhood of TriBeCa. Currently vacant, the pier is set to receive a new park designed by landscape architects OLIN Studio and a maritime education center designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects.