New York City: The Latest Architecture and News

The New York Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has approved Stephen Wang + Associates and Herzog & de Meuron’s townhouse transformation project on New York’s Upper East Side.

Located at 15 East and 75th Street, the project entails combining three separate townhomes -- two Queen Anne-style, and one Neo-Federal -- into one large home for Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Spanish, New York-based architect Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation) has been awarded the 10th Kiesler Architecture and Art Prize by the Mayor of Vienna, citing Jaque’s "capacity to go beyond assumptions about traditional practice and urban life." In 2015 Jaque was declared the MoMA PS1 YAP (Young Architects Programme) winner for COSMO – a complex, and beautiful, water purifying prototype that has been installed in Brooklyn. He and his office are also collaborating with Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina on the design for the upcoming Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human?

A new video by JDS Development Group, Building Knowhow: Skybridge, begins with an anecdote of a day when the firemen showed up at the site. “We got a call – the buildings are falling down!” the chief fireman told Michael Jones, director of JDS. Jones responded with a chuckle, "they're supposed to be like that!"

Located on the East Side of Manhattan, the American Copper Buildings, designed by New York-based SHoP Architects, test the boundaries of engineering. In an informative video, JDS Development Group documents the building of a skybridge between the towers, outlining their detail-oriented, step-by-step approach. Located 300 feet in the air, it is New York's first major skybridge in 80 years.

Design firm WXY architecture + urban design has released plans for a reconnection of nearly 50 acres of public space between downtown Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Called The Brooklyn Strand, the project seeks to create a more appealing and accessible waterfront, while transforming the quality of public space in the area.

Throughout the four years since the opening of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, New York City Hall has been arguing with the nonprofit group, the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, over whether the park is adequately accessible to disabled people, reports The New York Times.

The park was designed from 1972 to 1974—before the advent of the American With Disabilities Act of 1990—by architect Louis Kahn, who died in Pennsylvania Station carrying the plans for the finished memorial. At its southernmost end the park features a 12-by-60-foot sunken terrace that, ironically, President Roosevelt himself would not have been able to use with his wheelchair.

Arch Out Loud has announced the winners of their New York City Aquarium and Public Waterfront Competition, which invited students and professionals alike to design "an intertwined public aquarium and park" on an underutilized riverfront property located on the East River in Queens. Participants were asked to “redefine the aquarium typology, examining its relationship to the urban context and the public domain.”

The call for submissions was answered by 556 participants and 178 proposals from forty counties, and included ideas that pushed the physical boundaries of the site and responded to the idea of redefining the typical aquarium typology.

Twelve years after Santiago Calatrava revealed his design for the World Trade Center Oculus, the PATH station finally opened to the public in March. Although not officially confirmed by the Port Authority, the total cost of the Oculus is estimated to be nearly four billion dollars - almost double the original budget. The Real Deal has broken down the big-ticket costs that went into the making of the Oculus.

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.

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.

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).

Volume Magazine in advance of their 47th issue, The System*.

Two recent trends have recently emerged from the United States’ real estate market that pick up on societal transformations in the way architecture and the city is inhabited. If synchronized, they stand to alter the principles under-riding contemporary logics of urban development. They do so by embodying an alternative system of values, framing its spatial articulation as a critical design project. The purpose of this short text is to present the two trends next to one another, evaluate the prospects of their synchronization, and speculate toward the future they potentiate in unison.

If you haven't had the opportunity to step inside Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Oculus, here is your chance. Miguel de Guzmán of Imagen Subliminal has captured the incredible space in VR (Virtual Reality), granting you 360-degree views of the infamous oculus. Put on your Google Cardboard and see it for yourself.

Santiago Calatrava's long-awaited World Trade Center Oculus has officially opened. Thanks to EarthCam and the project's contractor Skanska USA, you can watch the $4 billion transportation hub take shape over the course of 42 months in just 65 seconds, from June 2011 to December 2014. For more, see what the critics have to say about the newly opened building here.