New York: The Latest Architecture and News

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The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is pleased to announce TIMBER IN THE CITY: Urban Habitats Competition for the 2015-2016 academic year. The student competition is a partnership between the Binational Softwood Lumber Council (BSLC), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design (SCE).

The purpose of the Competition is to engage students to imagine the repurposing of our existing cities with sustainable buildings from renewable resources, offering expedient affordable construction, innovating with new and old wooden materials, and designing healthy living and working environments.

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Storefront for Art and Architecture hosts Facing East: Chinese Urbanism in Africa, an exhibition by journalist Michiel Hulshof (Tertium, Amsterdam) and architect Daan Roggeveen (MORE Architecture, Shanghai). Facing East investigates the impact of Chinese development on fast-growing African cities, and is built around personal stories of individuals involved in the urbanization process.

Videos

BIG has revealed plans for the fourth and final skyscraper planned for the World Trade Center site - the 2 World Trade Center (2 WTC) - confirming rumors that the Danish architect has replaced Norman Foster as the project's architect.

As announced by WIRED, the controversial take over is the result of James Murdoch's distaste for Foster's decade-old scheme and preference for a more integrated workplace. Though the foundation of Foster's building has already been built, the BIG scheme will now be realized and become the new headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s media companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp.

Designed as seven unique building stacked on top of each other, the stepped 2 WTC tower will rise 1,340 feet - a height that would make it Manhattan's third-tallest building if built today.

Watch Bjarke Ingels explain the concept in a video, after the break. 

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For the next year, visitors at New York's Brooklyn Bridge Park will have the chance to interact with "Please Touch the Art", an exhibition of works by Danish artist Jeppe Hein. Playful, inventive, and immediately striking, Hein's work engages audiences as "active participants," inviting spontaneity and user interaction. Curated by Nicholas Baume, the exhibition contains three bodies of work by Hein: the soaring water jets of Appearing Rooms, the sixteen bright red benches of Modified Social Benches, and the reflective vertical planks of Mirror Labyrinth NY.

The exhibition is a project of New York City's Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization responsible for numerous free exhibitions offering "powerful experiences with art and the urban environment".

Learn more about the Mirror Labyrinth NY installation and view selected images after the break.

Next week, the New Museum in New York will kickstart the annual IDEAS CITY Festival on Thursday, May 28th. Themed after Italo Calvino's "The Invisible City," the three-day event will "explore questions of transparency and surveillance, citizenship and representation, expression and suppression, participation and dissent, and the enduring quest for visibility in the city" through a number of platforms, such as panels discussions, poetry slams, mobile art installations, workshops, exhibitions and most notably the transformation of New York City's Bowery neighborhood into a "temporary city of ideas."

Interested in attending? Five of our readers have the chance to win tickets to the festival's opening conference. Enter the sweepstakes below for a chance to watch a screening of Mannahatta: Studies for an Opera about Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, listen to Bjarke Ingels discuss the relevance of literary speculation, and much more (the full conference schedule).

All those who will be in New York City on May 28th are eligible to participate. Follow the instructions to enter below.

Construction has commenced on Steven Holl Architects' Hunters Point Community Library in Queens, New York. Rising along the shoreline on the city's East River near a cluster of newly built high-rise condominiums, the 22,000 square-foot (6,705 meter) library aims to provide a community-centric public space and park to the increasingly privatized Long Island City waterfront.

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Videos

The first phase of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Renzo Piano Building Workshop's (RPBW) expansive Manhattanville Campus plan for Columbia University is making significant progress; completion is nearing on a highly-anticipated portion of the project - RPBW's LEED platinum Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which is scheduled to open in Fall of 2016 just six miles North of the practice's soon-to-open Whitney Museum.

More on the mixed-use structure after the break.

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