New York: The Latest Architecture and News

If you are considering turning your designs and business practices into a more eco-friendly, deeper shade of green, then we strongly encourage you to attend the ‘Implementing Green Practices in Your Designs’ free event as part of the How to Make it series. Hosted by UncommonGoods, a brooklyn-based online retailer of unique gifts and creative designs, the event includes a panel of design professionals sharing their advice on how to source more eco-friendly materials and how to set up a studio or workspace with little environmental impact. Taking place October 29th from 6:30pm-9:00pm, attendees will also have the opportunity to discuss their product ideas and designs with the buyers and panelists. For more information on the event, please visit here.

Co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union as part of the program put on by the Architectural League, Mike Taylor of Hopkins Architects will be delivering a lecture on his current work at the Cooper Union in New York. Taking place on Tuesday, October 30th, the leader of the design team for the London 2012 Velodrome, and a senior partner at Hopkins Architects is “guided by deeply-rooted architectural, environmental, and social convictions.” Widely lauded for its elegant carefully engineered form, the Velodrome’s sustainable and flexible design has won awards for its architecture and engineering, as well as its civic presence from the RIBA, the Architects Journal, and the BCI, among others. For more information, please visit here.

As an entry for the Land Art Generator Initiative Competition 2012 – Freshkill Park New York, ‘Wind Fountain’ is based on an adaptation of the piezoelectric effect – a well known property of certain materials to produce electrical power when they undergo strain and stress. Designed by Gembong Reksa Kawula, the project is shaped as an artificial tree, with each unit consist of 450 flexible thread 30 meters high made of carbon fiber reinforced resin pole that will sway in the wind. More images and architects’ description after the break.

ArchDaily’s previous coverage of Herzog & de Meuron‘s 56 Leonard Street was around the time when construction was just about to begin. Now four years later, construction seems about ready to restart, according to bdOnline. Join us after the break for more details.

In their second prize winning design in the international competition, ZA Architects aimed at developing a few new principles of hotel organization. Instead of separating visitors from the environment, the architects intends to embed peoples’ lives in local city life. For this reason, there is no hotel building itself, instead they propose hotel rooms placed in existing buildings (offices, residential) connected with web of hung pathways. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Municipal Art Society of New York is preparing for their third annual Summit which will feature nearly 100 talks pertaining to architecture and urbanism. Beginning October 18th, the two day event at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall will bring together elected officials, designers and innovators to share their thoughts on how New York can maintain its global-leadership position while remaining a livable environment for all its inhabitants.

More after the break. 

To celebrate the start of a seven-month land use review process, Cornell has released preliminary renderings of the first academic building planned for Cornell Tech – the new world-class technology and entrepreneurship campus in New York City that was masterplanned by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM).

The modern campus strives to rethink academic workspace, prioritize environmental performance, and exploit the unique urban condition of Roosevelt Island. In May, Pritzker Prize laureate Thom Mayne, founder of Morphosis, was appointed as architect of the first landmark building, which will set the stage for the carbon positive campus.

Continue after the break to learn more.

Foster + Partners is about to break the mold of New York’s static Park Avenue skyline, as they have been announced as winner of the highly publicized competition to replace the aging tower of 425 Park Avenue with a new world-class, sustainable office tower.

Lord Foster said: “I have a personal connection with New York, which has been a source of inspiration since my time at Yale, when the new towers on Park Avenue and its neighborhoods were a magnet for every young architect. Seeing first-hand the works of Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson was tremendously exciting then – I am delighted to have this very special opportunity to design a contemporary tower to stand alongside them. Our aim is to create an exceptional building, both of its time and timeless, as well as being respectful of this context – a tower that is for the City and for the people that will work in it, setting a new standard for office design and providing an enduring landmark that befits its world-famous location.”

Continue after the break to learn more about Foster’s winning proposal and to review the existing condition of 425 Park Ave.

Taking place October 20-21, modeLab is putting on Simulation Lab, a two-day workshop on the topic of simulation with processing. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, they will cover technical programming concepts such as syntax, control, and modularity. Utilizing a suite of libraries to extend processing’s functionality, they will explore and incrementally develop force-based, physics-based, and agent-based simulations. Additionally, they will examine strategies for visualizing the dynamic nature, unexpected tendencies, and behavioral effects present in our simulations. For more information, please visit here.

Visionary architect, MacArthur Fellow and National Academician Jeanne Gang joins Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and architecture critic Paul Goldberger as part of the Academy’s annual Architects in Conversation series. Together they will discuss Studio Gang’s past, present, and future projects, as well as Gang’s role within the important architectural tradition of Chicago. The talk will be on Wednesday, October 3, 2012, at 6:30pm at the National Academy Museum. For tickets and for more information, please visit here.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition 2012: Draw Up A Chair is a unique open call to design students and design professionals living in the North America, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Design an iconic, movable outdoor seating element for NYC’s 25-acre historic Battery Park, AKA The Battery. The winning design will be fabricated for use in The Battery, which annually welcomes six million visitors. They are offering an earlybird registration rate for all who register by this Sunday, Sept. 30. All design entries are due October 30. To register and for more information, please visit here.

Since it’s founding in 1986, Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture P.C. has become a widely published, internationally recognized practice with a diverse collection of projects ranging in scale. On multiple occasions, the firm has been awarded for their contributions to architectural practice and theory – the most recent being The Cooper Union’s 2008 Presidential Citation and the 2011 John Hejduk Award – as they treat “each project as the continuation of an ongoing inquiry, delving into relationships among architecture, territory and systems of distribution.”

With last year’s opening of the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero and the near-completion of the World Trade Center One, Daniel Libeskind’s vision for the World Trade Center site is close to presenting the future of NYC’s downtown financial center, 11 years after the attacks. Studio Daniel Libeskind was selected to develop the master plan for the site in 2003, and since has been coordinating with NYC’s numerous agencies and individual architects to rebuild the site. The project, in Libeskind’s words, is a “healing of New York”, a “site of memory” and “a space to witness the resilience of America”.

Follow us after the break for more on the elements and progress of the master plan.

Our friends at Design Observer’s Places Journal have shared with us two fascinating articles, written by architects Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder, that explore the physical and virtual evolution of Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) as it transformed from the privately owned public space of Zuccotti Park into the bustling micro-city of Liberty Plaza sustained by online media.

To learn how OWS has influenced architecture and urbanism, Massey and Snyder asks the following questions: What’s the layout of this place? What are its rules, and who owns it? How does its design shape possibilities for individual and collective action?

Storefront for Art and Architecture is opening up its fall exhibition season starting September 25th with ‘Past Futures, Present, Futures’. The exhibition, which will be up until November 17th, presents 101 unrealized proposals for New York City, with 101 reenactments by invited artists, architects, writers, and policy-makers to create alternative visions for the present and future of the city. The exhibition is curated by Eva Franch and designed by Leong Leong. An opening reception will take place on September 25, 2012 from 7pm to 9pm. For more information, please visit here.