New York: The Latest Architecture and News

Mexico City-based Escobedo Soliz Studio has been named the winner of MoMA and MoMA PS1's annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York - now in its 17th edition. Selected over four other finalists, the winning project, Weaving the Courtyard is “neither an object nor a sculpture standing in the courtyard, but a series of simple, powerful actions that generate new and different atmospheres," says the architect. It will serve as a "temporary urban landscape" for the 2016 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.

"Weaving the Courtyard is a site-specific architectural intervention using the courtyard’s concrete walls to generate both sky and landscape, with embankments in which platforms of soil and water suggest the appearance of a unique topography," says MoMA.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has released the plans for Manhattan West, a new office and residential development spanning five million square feet over the 2.6-acre platform that covers the active rail tracks connecting Penn Station to New Jersey and Upstate New York.

A design for a pavilion constructed out of recycled clothes hangers has been selected as the winner of the sixth annual City of Dreams Pavilion Competition. The temporary structure will be built on Governors Island and available to the public for summer 2016, pending final approval and fundraising.

Hosted by FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY), the competition speculates on possible futures with solutions to the current strain on economic and natural resources. Designers are required to consider their materials from sourcing to disposal, or ideally, reuse, promoting sustainable thinking.

Over 100 design proposals were submitted, and the jury selected four finalists who were each given a month to further develop their designs in response to jury comments. See the winning design and the three finalists after the break.

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Studio Gang has designed a new training facility - Fire Rescue 2 - for New York's elite FDNY Company 2. Planned to be built on a Brownsville site in Brooklyn by 2017, the station uses voids as an architectural element that helps the fire team better stage and simulate emergency situations, while bringing natural light and fresh air deep into the building.

"Company 2 is trained to respond to various emergency scenarios, from fire and building collapses to water rescues and scuba operations. During emergencies, the Company must often utilize voids in buildings, whether creating them to let heat and smoke out of a structure or locating them as a means of escape," describes Studio Gang.

An image of Álvaro Siza's first US building has been released. The luxury New York tower, planned for the corner of West 56th Street and Eleventh Avenue in Midtown, will rise up to 120 meters (just over 400 feet) and offer 80 units, a private roof garden, sun deck, spa and fitness center, and more.

Siza is working with real estate development firms Sumaida + Khurana and LENY on the project. Sumaida + Khurana is the same developer who is collaborating with Tadao Ando on a luxury condominium at 152 Elizabeth Street.

Over the past few years, Netherlands-based artist Stefan Bleekrode has been creating cityscape drawings from memory of cities across the globe. Basing his work on impressions from trips throughout Europe and North America, Bleekrode utilizes pen and ink with watercolor shading to bring urban landscapes to life.

Please join us for the opening of Structures of Coastal Resilience: Designing for Climate Change!

Brooklyn-based artist and designer Ekene Ijeoma has created Wage Islands, an interactive art piece that “expands New York City’s ‘tale of two cities’ by revealing the geographies of access to housing based on wages.”

In the project, a 3D map of the city is submerged in a box filled with black water, showing only the parts of the city that have affordable housing based on a wage of $8.75 and median monthly housing costs from $271 to $4001. Viewers press a button, which increases the wage on the display up to $77, concurrently raising the map out of the water to highlight the severity of the wage gap in relation to housing.

Maya Lin has been commissioned to design a 20,000-square-feet urban mansion in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. The five-story proposal, seen first on Tribeca Trib, aims to replace a 1980s mixed-use building on 11 Hubert Street. If approved, the of metal, glass and limestone building would rise 70-feet and house five bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a dog room, wine closet, screening room, landscaped courtyard, 5,000-square-foot fitness center, basement, garage and more.

Adjaye Associates, SHoP Architects and Snøhetta have been shortlisted for a new National Veterans Resource Complex (NVRC) at Syracuse University. The three practices, all of which were among seven recently shortlisted to design the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago, were selected over 28 considered firms by a group of faculty, staff, students and design professionals, including Martha Thorne.

“The three finalist firms and their teams are outstanding,” says Thorne. “I have no doubt they will propose ideas that go beyond traditional academic buildings and make the NVRC a pioneering facility that will contribute to the University, as well as the broader community.”

Two major tenants, 21st Century Fox and News Corp have pulled plans to relocate to the BIG-designed 2 World Trade Center - the final building planned for the 16 acre site. 2 WTC was unveiled last summer after news broke that BIG would be replacing Foster + Partners as the building's architect. According to a report on The Wall Street Journal, the two media companies based their decision on the high cost of relocating; they plan to stay in their current Midtown site until at least 2025.

The project will be placed on hold until a new tenant is found. 

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UPDATE: This article has been updated with the latest project information and new renderings.

Herzog & de Meuron has released new images of their latest project in New York, a 12-story condominium building at 160 Leroy Street with a curved concrete and glass facade. The project is their third major New York building in recent years, following another condo building at 56 Leonard Street and a hotel at 215 Chrystie Street, and once again features a concrete structure which is clearly expressed on the facade.

Featuring 49 luxury apartments, 160 Leroy Street is the latest in a series of developments which will upgrade Manhattan's West side, after former mayor Michael Bloomberg designated the area as the city's new 'Gold Coast'. The $250 million project is slated for completion in Fall 2016.

"It will be apparent when Ian Schrager's 160 Leroy building rises out of the ground that it was inspired by the philosophy of the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer—which Pritzker Prize winning architects Herzog & de Meuron used as a starting point in conceiving this original, new iconic structure," says the developer.

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Alongside a series of 2016 proposals, including the plans to transform Penn Station, Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced that New York will be expanding its Jacob K. Javits Convention Center - the busiest convention center in the US. Originally designed by James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1986, the structure has undergone a number of renovations since; this time, it will be expanded by 1.2 million-square-feet, totaling 3.3 million-square-feet, with the addition of "the largest ballroom in the Northeast," new exhibition space, a four-level truck garage, and a 34,000-square-foot solar array.

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