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Lowline: The Latest Architecture and News

NYC Lowline Receives First Official City Approval

Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen and NYCEDC President Maria Torres-Springer have announced New York City’s first official approval of the Lowline project in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As the first major step in making the project a reality, the approval will help to create the world’s first underground park, a community-oriented public and cultural space that will become both a local resource and an attraction for worldwide visitors.

Although the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) did express interest in the space last fall, the Lowline team was awarded conditional use due its high community potential.

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The Landscape Architecture Behind the Lowline

In 2013 New York City ranked 14th among high density cities in the United States in parkland per 1,000 residents with only 4.6 acres/1000 residents. With almost 8.5 million people living in New York and more commuting on a daily basis, NYCers are finding it harder and harder to get outside and experience nature. The harsh winter and constant demand for growth and construction only make this more challenging.

In recent years New York has become famous for an unusual method of bringing green space to the city, the hugely popular “High Line” which reused industrial infrastructure in the creation of a new park. But as unconventional as the High Line is, it’s nothing compared to James Ramsey's of Raad Studio and Dan Barasch’s state-of-the-art proposed counterpart, the subterranean “Lowline." Working alongside others including Signe Nielsen, principal at Matthew Nielsen Landscape Architects, and John Mini, the pair recently opened the Lowline Lab, an environment similar to that of the actual Lowline site that gives the team a space to put their theories and ideas to the test, gather results and make final decisions. I had a chance to catch up with Ramsey and Nielsen to discuss the landscape of their test space.

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6 Designs By And For Architects that Made TIME's 25 Inventions of the Year

In this day and age, innovation is occurring at a faster rate than ever before. And while a majority of ideas may make a small impact before fading away, some inventions are able to slip through the cracks and become a real game changer in their field. Our field, of course, is architecture, and this year there have been no shortage of inventions that may change the way we live and work forever. In TIME magazine’s annual release of inventions of the year, at least 6 may have an impact on the world of architecture, encompassing inventions within the field of architecture itself and developments that could change how we design and experience space. Read on for those projects and what they might mean for our future.

Sneak Peek at the World's First Underground Park - The Lowline

A 1,200 square-meter "test lab" of what aims to be the world's first underground park has opened its doors to New Yorkers. View a sneak peek above, shared with ArchDaily by The Spaces, to see just how the Lowline (as the project's known) plans to "plumb" sunlight into an abandoned trolley terminal beneath the city's Delancey Street in an attempt to transform the forgotten space into a sun-lit, subterranean public garden.

What Happened to Manhattan's Lowline Project?

In 2011, the Tribeca-based design duo of James Ramsey and Dan Barasch proposed a radical project to transform an abandoned subterranean trolley terminal in Manhattan's Lower East Side into an underground park filled with natural light and vegetation, eventually proving their design with a full size mock-up of their design for light-capturing fiber-optic tubes. Since then, they haven't had nearly the same level of publicity - but that doesn't mean they aren't still working. This article by The Architects' Newspaper catches up with Ramsey and Barasch as they attempt to make their $50 million project a reality by 2018. Read the full article here.