New York: The Latest Architecture and News

Videos

Governor Andrew Cuomo has unveiled a $4 billion plan to redevelop New York's outdated LaGuardia Airport. Originally built in 1939, LaGuardia has been running inefficiently and overcapacity for decades.

The redesign, envisioned by HOK and Parsons Brinckerhoff, will unify the airport's fragmented terminals with a single roof, while providing expanded transportation access, elite passenger amenities and increased taxiway space. Terminal B will be replaced with a larger structure that will (eventually) connect to the renovated Terminals C and D.

Bjarke Ingels has become know for his “promiscuous hybrids" that are reshaping skylines worldwide. Now, after news of BIG's redesign of the 2 World Trade Center, Ingels is being credited for single-handedly transforming New York City's architecture. At the New York Times' Cities of Tomorrow conference last week, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman sat down with the 40-year-old Danish architect to discuss just how BIG is changing New York.

“I always had an affinity for architecture which I attribute to growing up in a neighborhood and town that was constantly under construction. Our house was the first on the block. I think that in a way I was more interested in the abstractness of the foundations and the initial framing then in the completed structures themselves. Things I made back then had that incompleteness about them. As I became more aware of architecture in the wider world Brutalism was one of the styles of the moment. Looking at architecture magazines as a child and seeing hotels in French ski resorts (Marcel Breuer at Flaine) made of concrete suited my sensibility, I was hooked.”

For New York-based Calvin Seibert, sandcastles are more than just a fun summer hobby. Using a paint bucket, homemade plastic trowels, and up to about 150 gallons of water he creates spectacular modernist sandcastles. Read on after the break for an interview with Seibert and to see more photos of his work.

+ 12

Steven Holl Architects has broken ground on the “Ex of In House,” an experimental guest house and artist studio in Rhinebeck, New York. The house is part of the firms’ ongoing research project “Explorations of In,” which questions “current clichés of architectural language and commercial practice” and explores spatial language, energy, openness and public space.

Grégoire Alessandrini’s blog “New York City 1990’s” contains an enormous collection of images taken between 1991 and 1998 that artfully depict New York. The website is a snapshot of New York in the 1990s, capturing the spirit of the era with photographs of New York’s architecture that could only exist at that time. As politics and public sentiment have changed, the city has changed with it, and much of the New York Alessandrini captured no longer exists.

To document just how much New York has changed in the past 25 years, we have curated a selection of Alessandrini’s images and set each photograph next to a Google Street View window corresponding to the photographer’s location at the time. In the photographs where Alessandrini observes from an elevated vantage point, the Street View images are as close as possible to the photographer’s location.

Read on after the break to see the images of New York’s dynamic change from the 1990s to 2015.

Building a city has never been so easy. With Duncan Shotton Design Studio's Sticky Page Markers you can create your own urban landscape, while marking the pages of your books, catalogues, or notes.

The paper post-it sets feature landmarks like the Empire State Building (complete with King Kong), St. Paul’s Cathedral, Skytree, and Peak Tower to create a micro landscape of either New York, London, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. City packs can also be combined with Forest, Desert, Ocean, or Polar sets, among others, to add a natural touch to some of the world’s best known urban skylines. Explore more Sticky Page Markers here.

Artist and architect Inés Esnal’s Prism installation uses colorful elastic rope to form triangular spaces that filter light into the lobby of a new residential building in New York.

The installation's vivid colors and optical illusions provide a bold contrast to the concrete walls.

View images and learn more about the project after the break. 

+ 12

+ 13

+ 16

British architect David Adjaye is set to submit plans for new Studio Museum in Harlem. Designed to replace the 47-year-old museum's existing facility on Manhattan's West 125th Street, the new $122 million proposal will more than double the museum's space, allowing it to become a premier center for contemporary artists of African descent.

According to the New York Times, Adjaye was chosen to design the museum due to his sensitivity regarding the artists and surrounding neighborhood, which in turn inspired the project; the project's main space will feature a four-story, multi-use core marked by an "inverted stoop" that will act as an inviting "living room" and host for public programs.

“I wanted to honor this idea of public rooms, which are soaring, celebratory and edifying — uplifting,” he told the New York Times. “Between the residential and the civic, we learned the lessons of public realms and tried to bring those two together.”

After renovations by Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, the New York Hall of Science’s (NYSCI) Great Hall has reopened to the public, reclaiming its place as the centerpiece of the NYSCI. Originally designed by Harrison and Abramovitz Architects, the Great Hall was the main exhibit space of the Hall of Science during the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, encapsulating visitors in an illusion of deep space with its irregular plan surrounded by undulating glass and concrete walls. Still one of the most formally interesting buildings in Queens, the Great Hall is one of the original World’s Fair’s last surviving structures and a landmark of mid-century modernism.

+ 6

A team of students from Austrian-based Studio Hani Rashid at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna have unveiled their conceptual design for a Cirque du Soleil Performance Center in Brooklyn, New York.

With its interior and exterior blended together, the entire building becomes a stage. Featuring large windows that allow the public to watch performances and training activities inside, people on each side are both viewers and viewed.

Currently under renovation in order to turn its soaring shell into a hotel, Eero Saarinen's iconic TWA Flight Center has been off limits to the public since 2001. However last week, while a team of digital preservationists were making scans of the swooping curves of the building's interior, photographer Max Touhey was allowed access, camera in hand, to catalog the building's mid-century elegance. The photoset, published in full on Curbed NY, shows the building in a generally good condition considering its decade-long slumber. Read on after the break for a selection of these images.

+ 5

Videos

COOKFOX Architects’ new project, 550 Vanderbilt Avenue has opened for sale. The 17-storey building will be the first of four condominiums in the 22-acre Pacific Park Brooklyn development in Prospect Heights. The project aims to create a new neighbourhood of 14 buildings, all connected to 8-acres of public green space designed by landscape architecture firm Thomas Balsley Associates. Read more about this project after the break.

The New York Lowline, a project which was first announced in 2011 and was rekindled last year, have now launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to make their dream of using solar technology to "transform an historic trolley terminal into the world's first underground park" closer to a reality. Their proposal, which seeks to unlock the potential of underused subterranean urban spaces, would see the creation of a living, green public space built beneath the streets of New York City. They are currently seeking funding to build a long-term solar device testing laboratory and public exhibition in order to test and present their designs.

Videos

Norman Foster attended the recent groundbreaking ceremony for 425 Park Avenue, which will be the first full-block high-rise office building to be built on New York City's Park Avenue in the past 50 years. Foster+Partners, in collaboration with Adamson Associates, designed 425 Park to be a new icon in the Manhattan skyline, featuring a tri-blade, sheer wall top. In addition to its LEED Gold certification, the 560,000m² tower will be the first in New York to be WELL certified.

+ 10

New York-based studio Dror has unveiled design concepts for three new residential buildings in New York City. The imagined buildings, spread throughout lower Manhattan, are based on the studio’s idea to “disrupt conventional building design by rethinking structure, where beauty and efficiency result from an imaginative, clever framework.”

Learn more about each of the plans, after the break.

A photo posted by Andrés Jaque (@andres_jaque) on Jun 23, 2015 at 10:11am PDT

This week COSMO begun its venture to filter more than 42,000 gallons of New York City water during the course of MoMA PS1's Summer Warm Up series. The 16th installation built as part of the annual Young Architect's Program (YAP), COSMO is a portable water purifier designed by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation to combat the world's clean water crisis while serving an animated backdrop to PS1's party atmosphere.

An interview with Jaque, after the break.