New York: The Latest Architecture and News

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Four teams have been selected as finalists in the “Driverless Future Challenge.” Organized by Blank Space with the City of New York and NY Tech Meetup, the competition asked teams to envision future strategies for implementation of autonomous transit in New York City.

Participants were tasked with evaluating the future of autonomous transportation through the four principles outlined by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s OneNYC initiative:

• Growth - Improve city infrastructure, modulate traffic, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, eliminate traffic lights, autonomous deliveries.
• Equity - Making sure all citizens benefit from autonomous technology, focusing on accessibility, focusing on transit deserts, creating new jobs.
• Sustainability - Reduce need for parking, curbing emissions, increase carpooling, introducing micro-transit, new green spaces and bike lanes, renewable energy sources.
• Resilience - A more durable and safer transit system, reducing drunk driving, “Vision Zero,” pedestrian-first, faster emergency services.

Entries were received from more than 25 countries, proposing ideas for everything from driverless food carts and a fully-autonomous MTA transit system, to enhanced use of NYC’s 311 system as a driverless dispatching center, to Link NYC Wifi stations that become stops for autonomous micro-buses. The four finalist teams were selected by a multidisciplinary jury featuring top architects including Jeffrey Inaba (Inaba Williams), Odile Decq (Studio Odile Decq) and Jürgen Mayer H. (J. MAYER H.).

The four finalists include:

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Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning has unveiled a 12-piece versatile furniture series designed for the school's New York City space in Manhattan's financial district. Created by Hong Kong-based architecture office CL3 and interdisciplinary design studio Lim + Lu (founding partners of which are Cornell alumni), each piece has been inspired both by their New York context and intuitive operation by a global user.

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New York City’s fast-tracked Penn Station transformation project is moving forward, as Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced the closing of the $1.6 billion deal to redevelop a large section of the James A. Farley Post Office into the new “Moynihan Train Hall.”

The project will consist of a new 255,000-square-foot terminal for the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak, increasing Penn Station’s total concourse floor space by more than 50 percent, while an additional 700,000 square feet will be developed for commercial, retail and dining spaces to create a new mixed-use civic space for West Manhattan.

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Architect Jeehoon Park has filed a lawsuit against Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), claiming the design of New York City’s One World Trade Center was stolen from a project he developed as a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1999.

The lawsuit states that the 104-story One World Trade bears a “striking similarity” to his 122-story “Cityfront ‘99” tower, which also featured a glass facade of inverted triangular planes.

Videos

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From wonderment to disgust, the opening of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959 was met with a wide range of reactions from the public. This profound cultural moment was distilled in a series of witty cartoons published in the New Yorker that simultaneously lampooned both the innovative architecture and its critics, which were recently shared in a blog post by the Guggenheim Museum. Through detailed sketches, cartoonist Alan Dunn represents the experience of the building, from staring into the exterior porthole windows to walking around the grand ramp. In one drawing he depicts the perspective from the first floor looking up at the dome, giving a sweeping sense of the curvature and geometries of the building.

At this morning’s press event, The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) unveiled the completed renovations to the east end of its museum campus, while also revealing for the first time the full design of their multi-year expansion project designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler.

With the completion of the east wing renovation, which began in February 2016, the museum has created two spacious third-floor galleries by reconfiguring 15,000 square feet of space, allowing for better flexibility in installing the collection and temporary exhibitions.

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With construction nearing completion ahead of its September opening date, the first building at the new Cornell Tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island has been dubbed “one of the most environmentally-friendly buildings in the world” by the university, as they revealed their aspirations for the building to reach Net Zero and LEED Platinum status.

Designed by Morphosis, The Bloomberg Center (named for Emma and Georgina Bloomberg, daughters of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg) will employ a range of strategies including solar power; geothermal ground source heat pumps; a dynamic energy-efficient facade which balances transparency and opaqueness to maximize building insulation; and an array of smart building technologies that monitor lighting and plug load use, among other metrics.

Development on the site of the former Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is moving straight along, with today marking the launch of leasing at 325 Kent, the first building to open as part of the mega-development. Designed by SHoP Architects, the doughnut-shaped building will offer up 16-stories of modern apartment units arranged around an elevated courtyard featuring uninterrupted views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline.

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Early design studies have been unveiled of Adjaye Associates’ first New York City skyscraper. Developed by the Lightstone Group, the 61-story, 750-foot-tall ‘Wall Street Tower’ will be located at 130 William Street in New York’s Financial District.

Uncovered by CityRealty, these initial visualizations show a gold-detailed structure featuring arched windows that expand as the building rises, and an abundance of luxury amenities including sports facilities, a swimming pool, a movie theater, lounge areas and rooftop observatory.

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