New York: The Latest Architecture and News

The Architectural League of New York recently announced its Fall 2011 Lecture Series. Jeanne Gang, recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, will give the annual Ulrich Franzen Lecture on Architecture and the Environment, delivered by an international figure whose work has significant implications for understanding and reconceiving the relationship between architecture and the environment. Past Franzen lectures have been delivered by Renzo Piano, Shigeru Ban, and Werner Sobek.

The League’s Current Work series annually presents prominent architects and designers, who help to shape current architectural discourse with their work and ideas. This year’s series includes Michael Van Valkenburgh, designer of the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge Park; Francine Houben of the Dutch firm Mecanoo; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, the recent winners of the major international competition to design the Kaohsiung Port Terminal; Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles; and Bernard Khoury of Beirut. More information on the lecture series after the break.

WTC: Street Installation and Exhibition is a 4×28 foot montage comprised of closeups of the facades of the former Twin Towers- located on East 4th Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue. There will also be nine accompanying prints exhibited in the FAB Cafe across the street.

Though primarily known as Wiliamsburg’s only first-run movie house, this project is in actuality an expansive 23,000 square foot mixed-use building with three floors of residential apartments above the cinemas, bar, café commercial kitchen housed in the retrofitted brick warehouse below. All of the apartments have access to outdoor space in the form of private roof decks at the penthouse level and shared courtyard access for the floors below. Caliper Studio designed all phases of the project from the earliest design studies through the construction process. More images and architects’ description after the break.

NEW YORK–Although the American Folk Art Museum has avoided dissolution thanks to a cash infusion from trustees and the Ford Foundation, the institution’s ongoing financial troubles raise difficult questions about the relationship between signature architecture and cultural capital.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently announced the speakers for their fall 2011 lecture series which kicked off on September 7th with Joel Sanders and ends with Stephan Kieran on November 30th. Admission to all lectures is free and will begin at 6pm. The location is in the EMPAC / The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media + Performing Arts Center. More information on the events after the break.

This weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Open Studio event at MoMA’s PS1. As we mentioned earlier, this project posed the daunting question of how to re-think, re-organize and re-energize the concept of an American suburb in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. As MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll explains, “Projects will aim to challenge cultural assumptions concerning home ownership and associated settlement patterns, such as suburban sprawl, and assist the public in contemplating a potentially different future for housing and cities. The workshop and exhibition are premised on reframing the current crisis as an opportunity, an approach that is in keeping with the fundamental American ethos where challenging circumstances engender innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It is our hope that new paradigms of architecture and regional and transportation planning become the silver lining in the crisis of home ownership.” The five multidisciplinary teams chose five different American suburbs to explore, and this Saturday, we jumped from Oregon to Florida, to Illinois, to California and New Jersey, to observe their five quite different solutions.

Check out our preview of the teams’ work-in-progress projects which will be exhibited at the MoMA this February.

Storefront for Art and Architecture is pleased to present Manifesto Series 06: Finding Formless curated by Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 from 6:30 to 9pm.

Impulses toward the formless, alternately understood as struggles to escape form as a manifestation of various norms and constraints, are as old as architecture itself. But the formless is also increasingly in the air today, whether explicitly as in discussions of the “formless” quality of the city, or implicitly in talk of atmospheric buildings, randomized structures, and the dematerialization (or increased mediation) of architecture. No doubt part of its appeal lies in the fact that the formless is frequently found at the intersections between architecture and other fields, those intriguing moments when architecture unravels and can perhaps be woven into other practices, from art to ecology or engineering. Nevertheless, the formless has not yet been theorized rigorously in architecture. More information on the event after the break.

Gowanus Lowline Competition: Connections will be exhibiting winning entries from the Open Ideas Competition on Thursday, September 15th, 6:00 – 9:00 pm at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Check out the winners here: Gowanus Lowline Competition Winners. The competition was framed with the goal of inspiring projects that questions and confronted urban development in postindustrial sites. The open-ended program asked for a “pedestrian-oriented architecture” that engaged the canal and the watershed, long neglected as an industrial and manufacturing zone. This competition is a first of a series that focuses on the connections in and around the canal. As it is right now, the Gowanus Canal is just out of reach, and with its levels of contamination – which the EPA is begining to address – it may be for the best.

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the next installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. As a follow-up workshop to the coLab workshop held in January 2011, Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of September 24-25, 2011.

Ten years since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the National September 11 Memorial was dedicated in a private ceremony with the victims’ families. It was officially opened to the public as of today, September 12th. The opening of the 9/11 Memorial is a first step towards the closing of a long chapter of construction at the World Trade Center site.

Storefront for Art and Architecture will be host to Matilde Cassani’s Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings, an archive and exhibition that unveils the secret sacred territory throughout New York. The exhibition will run from September 14 – November 5th with an opening reception on September 13 at 7pm. Cassani’s work explores the pluralism of religion as it manifests itself in contemporary non-traditional spaces – hidden away in the niches of the contemporary city. This exhibit will have a collection of analytical and speculative works, to be read as a public archive and exhibition.

Continue after the break for more on this exhibit.

Ten years ago the world was jarred at seeing a financial institution of a high urban city destroyed. Maybe at that moment we found ourselves second-guessing the security of our society and our government, of the stability of our ever-expanding cities, of the soundness of our buildings. But a decade later cities are still thriving: growing and rebuilding. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted that our attitudes toward the value of urban development would remain unchanged, and he may have been right. So have we, as law-makers, designers and inhabitants of the urban environment learned from what ten years ago was considered a failure in our cities and government agencies? ArchDaily had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Patrick Phillips, CEO of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), an international organization devoted to the responsible use of land and in creating sustainable thriving communities worldwide.

Read on for the interview after the break.

BMW Guggenheim Lab design architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Co-Principal of Atelier Bow-Wow, discusses the importance of behaviorology and the crucial role that architecture can play in giving back a sense of autonomy of spacial practice to citizens.

The conference is presented in partnership with The Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute, Baruch College, City University of New York, the APA New York Metro Chapter, and the ASLA New York Chapter. The discussions will feature a keynote address at 9:15am by Robert Ivy, FAIA, Executive Vice President and CEO, the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

The conference will draw upon the expertise of recognized leaders to examine the ongoing efforts of government agencies, private enterprise, and civic organizations that have been engaged in the design, creation, and development of the World Trade Center site and the surrounding area of Lower Manhattan. More information after the break.

Pratt Institute School of Architecture and Latin Pratt, a student research organization, will present “Breaking Borders: New Latin American Architecture,” an exhibition highlighting contemporary architecture of the past 10 years from 45 firms representing more than 10 countries in Latin America from September 8 through November 30, 2011, at the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery at 61 Saint James Place in Brooklyn.

The exhibition and opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on September 8 are free and open to the public. It is curated by Ivan Rumenov Shumkov, Ph.D., adjunct associate professor of undergraduate architecture, and Andres Chavez and Julio Martinez, both students in Pratt’s undergraduate architecture program and founders of Latin Pratt. More information on the event after the break.

Last September, we shared the news of Louis Kahn’s memorial park for the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island. Kahn had designed the park in the 70s, but after his sudden death, the plan was forgotten until 1992 when the MoMA featured the scheme in an exhibition. Upon learning of Kahn’s thoughtful and architecturally compelling ideas to commemorate FDR and his Four Freedoms speech, the public quickly advocated its completion. As we reported earlier, at the end of Kahn’s axial tree-lined triangular “Garden”, a 72 sqf “Room” will contain excerpts from the text of President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech. This room, contained by 12 foot high granite columns, is meant for contemplation and remembrance as Kahn’s stoic material palette, clear formal attitude, and forced perspective of the skyline will create, what we imagine will be, a quiet and peaceful atmosphere. With Kahn’s simple gestures, the memorial will preserve a time in American history where FDR’s leadership inspired hope to endure the Great Depression and the second World War. We’re excited for the memorial to be completed and we’ll keep you up to date with its progress.

A great sample of construction photos and renderings after the break.

Gia Wolff’s latest architectural installation features a 25 ft diameter portal suspended above 2 Avenue between 36 and 35 Street in Industry City, Brooklyn. As part of Superfront Public Summer, the site specific piece is a reaction to the existing typological conditions and explores potential scenarios for the future of Industry City. Finnish for ‘portal’, Portaali refers to the Scandinavian dock workers who used to occupy the buildings in the late 1900s.

More about the installation, including a video, after the break.

In the wake of Hurricane Irene it only seemed appropriate to take a second look at Rising Current, an exhibit that was featured at the MoMA just last year. To give you a refresher, the exhibit was a cohesive showcase of five projects tackling the lingering truth that within a few years, the waterfront of the New York harbor will drastically change.

Team Zero, comprised of ARO and dlandstudio, specifically took a look at the lower Manhattan landscape, proposing to develop a new soft and hard infrastructure solution paved with a mesh of cast concrete and engineered soil and salt tolerant plants. This would create greenways that act as absorptive sponges for rainwater. The porous green streets address daily tidal flows and storm surges with 3 interrelated high performance systems (network of parks, wetlands and tidal salt marshes). These systems stop sewage overflow, block higher sea levels and mitigate storm surge.

Rising Current provided an emphasis on how to re-think the city, relevant before, and even more pressing now after the flooding from the hurricane. Let’s hope that the ideas for solutions that were generated from the exhibit can now be considered for implementation. More about Rising Currents and Team Zero’s solution following the break.