New York City: The Latest Architecture and News

Filmed in 1921, Manhatta reveals a typical day in Lower Manhattan in the early part of the 20th century. Painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand created this silent film to discover the relationship between film and photography, while exploring their love to the City. Just as it is today, the City is amidst endless chaos.

The contenders: NYU and the Greenwich Village community. Let Round 2 commence.

Almost two years after we first brought you news about NYU 2031, NYU’s plans for expansion in Brooklyn, Governor’s Island, and (most controversially) in Greenwich Village, and the fight has not only continued, but escalated. A debate, hosted by The Municipal Art Society of New York, two nights ago brought about 200 NYU affiliates and community residents together, but only spatially; there was a considerable lack of willingness to compromise from either camp.

NYU’s plan, thought up by Toshiko Mori Architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Grimshaw Architects, has ruffled feathers mostly for the fact of its bulk. The 2.5 million square-foot development (1.1 million of which would be underground) is the largest ever proposed for the Village, and has drawn criticism for its potential to diminish light, greenery, and open space in the neighborhood.

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University will be holding the Interpretations: Promiscuous Encounters Syposium taking place Friday, March 23rd from 12:00pm – 8:30pm. Promiscuous Encounters, which is free and open to the public, has two main ambitions: first, to examine the fascinating blurriness and productive interplay between the critical, curatorial and conceptual capacities of architecture, including how and where they intersect and overlap and, second, to expand the definitions of what these terms mean in relation to theory and practice by reexamining the sites of criticality and their modes of operation. More information on the event after the break.

Planned for completion in 2014, the iconic United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) is in the middle of a $1.876 billion refurbishment project, known as the Capital Master Plan, which seeks to update the aging building with a more safe, modern and sustainable work environment. Located on the 18-acre site that was donated by John D. Rockefeller in the 1950s, the Manhattan UNHQ was designed by an international team of eleven architects who worked together in a post-World War II world to create an landmark building through collaboration rather than competition.

Continue reading for more details on the Capital Master Plan. 

Today’s entrepreneurs are redefining what it means to be visionary in a slow economy. Using every available resource to create new assets, marketing through social media is becoming an important part of the strategy to reach our audiences.

Coordinated by the New York Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects, nycobaNOMA, and sponsored by Mohawk Industries, Inc., the B*Session event, The Business of Communication: Social Media and Content Marketing, will take place on March 21st at the Mohawk New York Showroom. More information on the event after the break.

BOFFO is currently accepting submissions through March 26th for art & design furniture, products and more to arrange at their Show House open May 1 – 24, 2012. The BOFFO Show House exhibition will bridge art and design through installation showcasing designers and artists in a residential setting with the goal of creating a profound and relevant experience representing modern living at a visually enticing Manhattan destination. For more information, please visit here.

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) in February. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Cameron Wu(Cambridge, MA) proposed Coney Inland, an architectural strategy which formally unifies and spatially modulates the challenging MoMA PS1 courtyard site. A series of developable surfaces (cones and cylinders) and their base structures normalize the contingencies of scale and shape of the three courtyard spaces, while their legible transformations register the idiosyncratic nature of the overall site geometry.

For generations of New Yorkers, Coney Island has served as the quintessential local retreat from the city. Unfettered access to sky, land, and sea makes it a clear contrast to the urban metropolis, drawing crowds in search of spatial and social release. Through the architectural translation of qualities inherent to this ocean-side precedent, Coney Inland imports the culture of casual beach leisure into the courtyard at MoMA PS1.

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The Design Criticism Department (D-CRIT) at the School of Visual Arts will be hosting the “Playful Experimentation and Criticism” lecture featuring Michael Meredith, co-principal and co-founder of MOS. With MOS being an architectural practice that was born out of playful experimentation, what does being experimental mean and how is this related to criticism?

After Mayor Bloomberg, Cornell President Skorton and Technion President Lavie announced Cornell’s victory over Stanford to build an eleven acre state-of-the-art tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, the team has now tackled their next step in choosing six high-profile architecture firms competing to design the schools first academic facility.

Selected from over more than 40 firms from the U.S. and abroad, the finalists include Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Morphosis Architects, Steven Holl Architects and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Continue reading for more information.

ArchDaily previously ran an article about the Manufacturers Trust Company Bank Branch at 510 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and interior designer Eleanor H. Le Maire, a building designated as protected under the Landmarks Preservation Commission with first the exterior in 1997 and later the interior in early 2011. But as recently as October 2011, the building was already listed under the 2012 World Monuments Fund in the 2012 World Monuments Watch as the current owners, Vornado Realty Trust, began compromising the landmarked conditions of the interior of the building as it was being adapted for reuse. With preservationists in an uproar, support for the protection of the building was enough to bring Vornado Realty Trust to New York State Supreme Court where a settlement was reached.

Read on for more details on the settlement and continuing efforts to protect endangered monuments.

Tonight, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) Studio-X NYC welcomes Fast Company’s Greg Lindsay and the Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend for the first of a new series of events focused on the “smart city”.

“Lindsay and Townsend are calling the series “X-Cities,” where X marks the spot at which information technology and mega-urbanization converge. In this first session, the pair will lay out their respective cases for the top-down, intelligent design of “smart cities” versus the bottom-up evolution of crowd-sourced “civic laboratories.” Is information technology a real tool for city-building? And, if so, what is its bright and/or scary future?”

This event will begin at 6:30PM at 180 Varick Street in New York. It is free and open to the public. No RSVP is required. Continue reading for more information.

ArchDaily announced the winning proposal for the 2012 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) earlier this month. In order to bring you full coverage of the annual competition, we are featuring the other four creative designs that competed against HWKN’s Wendy. Virtual Water, a collaborative design brought to you by UrbanLab, endrestudio and Method Design, formally manifests what is hidden in plain sight: RAIN. The project reveals and plays with thousands of gallons of summertime rainwater that would otherwise be discarded from the PS1 courtyard.

Virtual Water refers to water hidden in everyday products. A pair of jeans, for example, has a 3000 gallon Virtual Water footprint because 3000 gallons of water are consumed in the various steps of its production chain (growing the cotton, dyeing the fabric, etc).

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Starting today, through July 30, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will be running an exhibit featuring the proposals of five interdisciplinary studios that were asked to re-think and re-invent the future of housing in the midst of the foreclosure crisis that remains a threat to many Americans and their homes. Over the Summer of 2011, WORKac, MOS Architects, Visible Weather, Zago Architecture and Studio Gang Architects selected five “megaregions” across the country on which to speculate the form that housing could take: physically, socially and economically. Late this summer, ArchDaily has provided coverage while the work was in progress. Opening today, the results of those speculative efforts will be presented at the MoMA as part of an exhibit called Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. The Open Studios exercise was organized by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, with Reinhold Martin, Director of Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Read on for more on the proposals and details about the exhibit.

Together, BIG + Times Square Alliance + Flatcut + Local Projects and Zumtobel celebrates Valentines Day with a BIG red pulsating heart in the middle of Times Square, New York. The 10-foot-tall heart pulsates as the 400 transparent, LED lit, acrylic tubes sway in the wind. Once people touch the heart-shaped sensor, the light grows brighter and the pulse beats faster. Joining hands with more people will increase the intensity of the heart.

“The heart reflects what Times Square is made of: people and light – the more people, the stronger the light,” Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Partner, BIG.

See the love with the video above and more images after the break.

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN’s “The Next List” features the bold and innovative ideas of Bjarke Ingels, focusing on the West 57th project that is transforming Manhattan skyline. Ingels states, “In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit the way we want to live our lives.” The video also features comments from Robert A. M. Stern, Dean at Yale School of Architecture, and Douglas Durst, the developer of West 57th. Check it out!

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.

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.