New York: The Latest Architecture and News

The Ford Foundation has received Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) approval for renovations to its building at 320 E 43rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, reports New York Yimby. Constructed from 1963 to 1967, with a design by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo and an atrium garden by Dan Kiley, the building became an instant architectural mecca and was made an individual and interior landmark in 1997. The proposed renovations, designed by Gensler, seek to restore a half century of alterations to the building’s appearance, in addition to subtle changes to adhere to adhere to fire and accessibility codes.

Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) have recently won two competitions for temporary installations in Washington DC and New York, both using salvaged materials. The first, Raise/Raze, is the winning proposal for DC’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley station repurposed as a contemporary arts and culture space. The project reuses the balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” installation at the National Building Museum for a new environment-generating initiative, which opens on April 30.

As winners of the 2016 Folly Competition held by the Architectural League of New York, Hou de Sousa will also soon build a pavilion in Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens. A simple wooden canopy, the structure is a multi-purpose space made of standard dimensional lumber, but has been accentuated with shingles of scrap wood found on-site. Known as Sticks, the pavilion will open to the public on July 9.

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Several new renderings have been released of Robert A.M. Stern Architects’ TriBeCa condos at 70 Vestry Street, according to New York YIMBY. Located next to the West Side Highway in TriBeCa in New York, the 14-story building will contain 46 condos and over 153,000 square feet of residential space, with each apartment ranging from 1,700 to 7,000 square feet.

Pier 55, the floating park designed by Heatherwick Studio and landscape architecture firm, Signe Nielsen, received a green-light from the New York Supreme Court this past Friday, April 8, according to a report by the Architect’s Newspaper. Floating above the Hudson River on the Lower West Side of Manhattan, the park is anchored by an aggregation of enormous petal-like stilts that are submerged in the water below. The park is being funded by the philanthropy of Diane von Furstenberg and her husband Barry Diller.

Pier 55’s legal troubles began last spring when the non-profit, City Club of New York filed a lawsuit against Pier55 Inc. and Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT) to stop the project.

Syracuse Architecture along with IE Business School and IE School of Architecture and Design have teamed up to offer an innovative summer course: The Business of Architecture. The six-week, 3-credit hour-long course will be conducted at the state-of-the-art Fisher Center, home of Syracuse Architecture in New York City. This course is intended for those studying for a professional degree in architecture (B.Arch and M.Arch) as well as for young professionals and qualified students in related design fields.

New York-based ODA has revealed their design for new residential towers in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. These three towers, called 416-420 Kent, aim to revitalize the neglected East River waterfront and will introduce a new sense of community, while providing ample natural light and green spaces for residents.

Photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu has captured the latest photos of BIG's courtscraper, VIA 57WEST. Exploring the urban context of this unconventional high-rise, the images illustrate how the building's swooping facade and peak appear from different sight lines.

For more on BIG's courtscraper and the firm's boundary-pushing design philosophy, check out this New York Times video or this gallery of under-construction photos.

Thomas Heatherwick has been selected to receive the Tribeca Film Festival's (TFF) 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. Part of the TFF's seventh annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (TDIA), the Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Heatherwick for his "dedication to bringing design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace at his own Heatherwick Studio." He will be presented the award alongside Kenya Wildlife Service Chair and leading paleoanthropologist and conservationist Dr. Richard Leakey.

Tonight, the "Pritzker Laureates' Conversation"—titled Challenges Ahead for the Built Environment—will be broadcast live at 6.30pm ET. It will provide a rare opportunity to hear 2016 Pritzker Laureate Alejandro Aravena in conversation with previous Pritzker Prize Laureates, including Richard Meier, Glenn Murcutt, Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Christian de Portzamparc, Richard Rogers, and Wang Shu. The conversation will be moderated by Cathleen McGuigan.

The panel will explore architecture through media in motion. It will look at how the field has evolved in the social media age, through the introduction of various technologies such as film and virtual reality, and business models, such as crowdsourcing. Viral Voices V will look at architecture as the intersection of environment, technology, and design, and how it will influence the new careers of tomorrow.

Tonight the Pritzker Prize will hold its annual award ceremony, this year honoring the work of 2016 Laureate Alejandro Aravena, who is also directing this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. The ceremony is being broadcast from the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Make sure to catch the event live right here, tonight at 7.30pm Eastern Time (4.30pm PDT, 12.30am GMT, 1.30 am CET, 7.30am HKT).

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has announced Phyllis Lambert, architect and CCA Founding Director Emeritus, as the winner of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize 2016 Architecture Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. The $20,000 prize is given to an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art.

Lambert "is the conscience of modern and contemporary architecture, protecting its past and advocating for its future as a vital art form," said jury chairman Elizabeth Diller.

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Recently the subject of a competition to reimagine its expansive facade, the MetLife building is one of Manhattan's most noticeable - and hated - buildings. In this article originally published on 6sqft as "Great Game Changers: How the MetLife Building Redefined Midtown Architecture," Carter B Horsley tells the tale of how the building came to be.

Perhaps the most detested midtown skyscraper by the public, this huge tower has, nevertheless, always been a popular building with tenants for its prime location over Grand Central Terminal and its many views up and down Park Avenue. It is also one of the world’s finest examples of the Brutalist architecture, commendable for its robust form and excellent public spaces, as well as its excellent integration into the elevated arterial roads around it.

However, it is also immensely bulky and its height monstrous. As shown in the photograph ahead, the building completely dominates and overshadows the former New York Central Building immediately to the north, which had been designed by Warren & Wetmore as part of the “Terminal City” complex. The New York Central Building, now known as the Helmsley Building, straddled the avenue with remarkable grace and its distinguished pyramid. As one of the city’s very rare, “drive-through” buildings, it was the great centerpiece of Park Avenue. But by shrouding such a masterpiece in its shadows, quite literally, the Pan Am Building (today the MetLife building) desecrated a major icon of the city that will unfortunately will never recover from this contemptible slight on such a prominent site.

The Bridge at Cornell Tech, designed by WEISS/MANFREDI and developed by Forest City Ratner Companies, has been topped off after starting construction in the summer of 2015.

The building, which begins the first phase of the two billion dollar Roosevelt Island tech campus, will be a first-of-its-kind building that will house companies, researchers, and entrepreneurs who aim to drive the economic growth of New York through the commercialization of new products. The Bridge is scheduled to open to the public in the summer of 2017, along with two other CornellTech projects.

Turncoats, the irreverent architectural debate society from London, is launching an international series, starting chapters in Canada, Scotland, Serbia and the US. Originally created by Phineas Harper, Maria Smith and Robert Mull, Turncoats has “electrified London’s architectural scene” since its inception.

Combining architectural debate with unique settings, alcohol, and an absence of recordings or wireless devices, Turncoats has gathered significant attention, their signature flaming envelope emblem appearing on lapels across the city, and soon all over the world.