New York: The Latest Architecture and News

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.

This workshop is a two-day intensive parametric design workshop by Studio Mode / modeLab to be held in Brooklyn during the weekend of April 07-08, 2012. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, this workshop will engage both the conceptual as well as technical domains of applied parametric design.

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?

Tonight in Brooklyn, New York – Architect, alumnus and longtime Pratt Architecture Professor Theoharis David, FAIA, will deliver a lecture which will be introduced by visionary architect Lebbeus Woods reflecting on David’s 43 years as a teacher through the work of his former students, many of whom have gone on to become accomplished architects and teachers. The lecture will be followed by an opening reception for “Built Ideas: A Life of Teaching, Learning, and Action,” an exhibition of models, photos, and concept drawings by David that will be on view at The School of Architecture through March 30. The Pratt’s Department of Exhibitions are also presenting “An Architect Drawing,” an exhibition of drawings and texts from David’s architectural experiences through September 28.

Tonight’s lecture is open to the public; however please note that seating priority is reserved for members of the Pratt community at 5:30PM and members of the public will be admitted at 5:50PM. Continue reading for more information.

+ 8

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 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. Ibañez Kim Studio (Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim) proposed a Mechanical Garden that enjoyed a unique partnership with artists and engineers in Philadelphia.

+ 10

CityVision magazine recently announced their CityVision New York competition, which invites architects, designers, students, artists and creatives to develop urban and visionary proposals with the aim of stimulating new ideas for the contemporary city. Globalization, environmental concerns, new economic and cultural politics, adaptability to the existing context combined with the use of vibrant ideas, original technologies and new softwares for representation are some of the key elements that should be taken into account to formulate the most original project proposal. The submission deadline is June 11. For more information, please visit here.

The Emerging New York Architects Competition proposal, ‘The Greenhouse Transformer’, which received an honorable mention, is a typology for urban farming with the purpose of creating environments for learning year round within the community of West Harlem. PRAUD‘s main goal is to integrate life cycle components of food production into a building that is also a catalyst for activity in the area and allows visitors to engage in the program in a more efficient way. More images and architects’ description after the break.

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.

Are you an avid lover of the High Line? If you’ve been keeping up with our coverage of the project by James Corner Field Operations and DS+R, then you have been following the development of the High Line’s different sections – such as the early stages for a the design of the Gansevoort entrance and elevated street ampitheater of Stage One, and the picture frame and tree fly over of Stage Two. And, yet the amazing public space is still developing further. Friends of the High Line are presenting initial design concepts for the rail yards section of the High Line, which requires new zoning that would preserve the entire rail yards section, including the Spur, as public open space. At a community input meeting on Monday, March 12, the High Line design team will share their visions and answer questions about the soon-to-be newest part of the project.

More information about the meeting after the break.

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).

+ 9

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.

+ 19

Globally recognized for its distinguished academic reputation and one of the world’s most prestigious independent colleges, Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture will present their spring 2012 lecture series from February 13 through April 9, 2012 at the Institute’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses. The lectures are free and open to the public; however, seating priority will be given to current students with Pratt identification. More information on the event after the break.

Check out Great Spaces’ clip on the Brooklyn Bridge, one of New York’s amazing infrastructure feats. The construction of the bridge was a family affair as it was designed by John Roebling in the late 1860s and then completed by his son and daughter-in-law. One must imagine New York’s “skyline” of the 1800s to fully understand the innovation and the magnitude of such a massive project. For more about Roebling’s bridge, be sure to view our AD Classics coverage.