New York: The Latest Architecture and News

The Buell Center will be hosting a public forum entitled What Is Foreclosed? Housing, Suburbanization, and Crisis, which marks the opening of Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, an exhibition co-organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. The event will take place on Saturday, February 18, 2012, in the Low Memorial Library Rotunda at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary group of scholars, activists, and architects, will debate the future of American housing, cities and suburbs and the cultural narratives that have accompanied the home foreclosure crisis and the economic crisis more generally. More information on the event after the break.

Just last week, Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn enacted 29 new recommendations of the Green Codes Task Force that will provide the proper foundation for New York to meet the aggressive PlanNYC Goals for 2030. The impact of these new codes is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent; lower the energy costs for lighting by 10 percent; save 30 billion gallons of water through better plumbing regulations; treat 15 million gallons of toxic construction water; recycle 100,000 tons of asphalt; and save $400 million in overall energy costs. The implementation of such codes is the result of the formation of the NYC Green Codes Task Force, an organization led by Urban Green Council, that proposed over 100 recommendations in 2010 to address a wide range of sustainable issues; and, in the two years since that report, the Mayor’s Office and City Council have made 29 of those recommendations law, and are currently working to codify 8 others.

More about the new building codes after the break. 

An event marking the publication of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S’ new book, Embedded brings together authors, contributors, mentors and confabulators to discuss some of the most relevant issues haunting contemporary architectural practice and discourse today, such as the perceived divide between progressive design culture, the politics of form and social responsibility. The event takes place Thursday, February 9th from 6:30-8:30 PM at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick St. Suite 1610, New York, NY 10014. More information after the break.

Strip Morphologies III is a two-day intensive design, prototyping, and fabrication workshop put on by Studio Mode / modeLab to be held in New York City during the weekend of March 03-04.

Launching in fall 2012, Parsons The New School of Design is offering a new graduate program in urbanism in New York City, the MA Theories of Urban Practice. The 2-year, 36-credit research-oriented program is designed for those who want to transform cities through actionable research, strategic knowledge, and critical theories. In other words, knowledge can transform cities! The program will redefine urbanism and urban design as a field of transformative practice.

The Van Alen Institute, a non-profit architectural organization in New York City, is hosting a Q&A between Aaron Levy of Slought Foundation and William Menking of the The Architects’ Newspaper, with editor Thomas Weaver on February 3rd at 7:oo pm. Located at Van Alen Books, 30 W. 22nd Street, on the ground floor between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan, you can “grab a seat on their yellow steps and join the conversation”.

Read on for more information on this event!

The Excavating Wilderness: A Orienting Trajectory Across Central Park proposal by Syracuse University graduate Jeff Kamuda investigates the tensioning between natural wilderness and the built environment. With the rise of modern civilization, a fluctuating tenet between humans and nature can be observed in its reincarnation of the urban park. Situated in New York City’s Central Park, the project introduces a set of natural phenomena through a unique and atypical approach, which in turn serves to stimulate a dialogue between the individual, the park, the city, and the cosmos. Stretching a mile across Central Park from Grand Army Plaza at 59th street to the American Museum of Natural History at 77th Street, the triparted project achieves a dramatic juxtaposition of subterranean experience combined with elevated architecture. Read more after the break.

Tomorrow, the New York Public Library will be hosting a talk between architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects and Town & Country Executive Editor Mark Rozzo that will discuss “the role of place, nature, materials and craft in creating Kundig’s bold and sensitive designs”. The talk is free for the public to attend and will feature Kundig’s most recent collection of houses: Tom Kundig: Houses 2. Continue reading for more details.

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Studio Mode / modeLab is pleased to announce the modeLab 2012 Spring Workshop Series. The series starts off with the Agent Forms, a two-day intensive design and programming workshop to be held in Brooklyn during the weekend of February 04-05.

The origin of Songlines can be traced to Australian indigenous systems for navigation and caretaking of land achieved by mapping space through the creation of music based on the topography of land. For 007_Urban_Songline, the artist, Allard van Hoorn, creates a series of Dreaming Tracks utilizing the changing morphology of Storefront’s façade and the sounds that emerge from the urban sonic context of the gallery. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York taking place at Storefront for Art and Architecture from January 18-February 18. More information on the exhibition after the break.

Informality, which was first categorized and described in the 1970s, is now pervasive — across cities, in the places we live, work, and move through the everyday. For many, the informal is no longer a discrete sector appended to the workings of the “formal” city, but an integral effect of the structuring of cities and landscapes by contemporary economic, political, and technological change. Self-built architectures and urban agglomerations, ambivalent landscapes, nomadic and temporal spatial manifestations of informalized are situationally specific, but globally ubiquitous. Design Tactics and the Informalized City symposium, being put on by Cornell University on April 13-14, brings a discussion of this reality to disciplines that work on the city in material and spatial terms: architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, engineering, media and product design. More information on the event after the break.

In his State of the State address last week, New York Governor Cuomo introduced the notion of replacing the Jacob Javits Center along Manhattan’s West Side with a new convention center in Queens. Such a plan envisions a 3.8 million-square-foot exhibition center at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Jamaica, Queens – a project that would become the largest convention center in the United States and a major urban redevelopment project. Through a joint-partnership with Genting Americas, the government would provide the land and Genting would provide the $4 billion to finance the convention center. “Let’s build the largest convention center in the nation, period,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It will be all about jobs, jobs, jobs, tens of thousand of jobs.”

More about the Convention Center after the break.