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From October 13-18, check out 33 films being screened for limited time as part of the Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York City. Taking place at a few select theaters in Chelsea, the Festival will screen films featuring Bjarke Ingels "8 House", London's infamous brutalist Barbican... View full entry
Over 1,000 architects, designers, and artists will gather for a night of festivities at the Architectural League of New York's Beaux Arts Ball 2015: Threshold, taking place on September 18 at the Knockdown Center in Queens, New York City. Since the League revived the event in 1990 to fundraise... View full entry
We suspect the city’s notoriously bad traffic and general “aloofness” of the people contributed to its low ranking, as well as its culinary scene, which was also ranked dead last in this year’s poll. — Travel + Leisure
When Travel + Leisure compiled a survey of the places its readers love to visit, it also collected data on the 30 locales they loathe. While Moscow, Russia tops the list of the world's unfriendliest cities, a significant number of the top 10 are located in the United States (including Los Angeles... View full entry
Lonely Planet made a decision in December that stunned many in the travel industry, even those deeply invested in promoting the borough. It named Queens the No. 1 travel destination in the United States for 2015.
Yes, Queens. Not Miami, the Grand Canyon, Washington, San Francisco or, more to the point, Manhattan, but rather New York City’s equivalent of a flyover state, perhaps most famous for two sitcoms, one featuring a food-fixated deliveryman and the other a xenophobic bigot.
— nytimes.com
According to data from NYC & Company, the city’s tourism marketing agency, the amount of visitors to the outer borough increased around 12 percent in a single year, between 2012 and 2013. Queens is also reported to be in the midst of a major hotel building boom, with five new ones opening... View full entry
New York has seen twenty-first-century buildings in early-twentieth-century drag before, but 30 Park Place stands out, both for its size [...] and for its location—cheek-by-jowl with some of the most ambitious buildings to emerge from the current high-rise boom [...]
“We’re transposing a nineteen-thirties language to lower Manhattan, which has gotten overrun with glass and abstraction,” the architect said in a recent interview. “People want to look at buildings and make connections.”
— newyorker.com
Robert A.M. Stern Architects in the Archinect news: Robert A.M. Stern to step down as Dean of Yale School of ArchitectureThis $250M mega penthouse might become New York's priciest homeNYC’s Most Expensive Condo to Be Listed at $130 Million"Unfashionably Fashionable" - Justin Davidson on Robert... View full entry
If it is possible, financially and technologically, to build a three-acre park in the river west of New York City, then why isn’t it possible to construct an artificial island at a higher elevation than downtown Manhattan that would serve as New York City’s sixth borough? Many of the city’s problems—real estate prices, developers purchasing blocks at a time, the astronomical cost of parking a car, or even a bicycle, even shoreline erosion—are problems of space. So why not just build more space? — theawl.com
Related: Visions of LoLo, a Neighborhood Rising From Landfill View full entry
We all have a pretty good idea which NYC neighborhoods command top dollar, but this incredible 3D map from NeighborhoodX really puts things into perspective by pinning the city’s 325 neighborhoods against one another in a visually jarring side-by-side comparison. Among the most expensive? In Brooklyn... — 6sqft
More on New York real estate:The rise of communal living in New YorkThis $250M mega penthouse might become New York's priciest homeNew York & London ranked highest in 2015 Global Cities IndexNYC's public-housing woes View full entry
The recent debate between Uber and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio over whether the ride-for-hire company was exacerbating Manhattan congestion was fueled by incomplete, misleading data. There was no way of knowing exactly where Uber cars and taxis pick up passengers, and so the city agreed to a study of Uber’s effects last month as part of its detente with the company.
Now, thanks in part to a Freedom of Information Law request, we have data. A lot of data...
— FiveThirtyEight
The folks over at FiveThirtyEight processed a nearly-overwhelming amount of data on Uber usage in New York City and got some pretty interesting (if not entirely surprising) results. At the top of the list, their research verifies the ride-share company's claims that their doing a better job in... View full entry
Museum displays are typically meant to be seen and not touched, but a recent wave of exhibitions is upending those rules. Take DELQA, an interactive music and light installation opening in the New Museum's NEW INC space on August 6. Showcasing the music of Matthew Dear combined with Microsoft's Kinect technology, the project allows participants to touch, push and poke suspended mesh walls to manipulate a musical composition, creating their own unique experience of the space. — core77
If you're on the hunt for weekend plans in NYC, DELQA will be at the New Museum only from August 6-9!More on Archinect:How architecture helped music evolve - David Byrne Frank Gehry: Is Music Liquid Architecture?How an "egalitarian incubator" music venue hopes to revive Brooklyn's art... View full entry
Pure House is among a handful of businesses that are renting rooms at a premium in exchange for access to amenities, a dormlike atmosphere and an instant community. For a certain set of New Yorkers, often new arrivals to the city with an income but no rental history, Pure House offers something of a reprieve. [...]
The arrangement is a commercial outgrowth of co-living, taking life with roommates to a different level.
— nytimes.com
More news from the New York City residential market:NYC's public-housing woesMarried Couples Take on Roomies to Adapt to Sky-High NY Rents111 West 57th Street: The World’s Skinniest Tower Will Also Be the Hemisphere’s Tallest Residential BuildingThis New "Steampunk" Luxury Apartment Building... View full entry
After occupying a lower-level space in one of Pratt Institute's athletic buildings, prospects are looking bright and shiny for Pratt's Film/Video Department as it settles into its new home on 550 Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. The 15,000 square-foot facility was fully gutted and redesigned by... View full entry
This week, we dip into the swamp of whether so-called "poor doors" (separate entrances for affordable and market-rate housing tenants) are discriminatory, highlighting discussion points made in the wake of New York's decision to make them illegal. We also follow up on the investigation into a... View full entry
Since the capping and closure of Fresh Kills’ five mounds, this 2,200-acre expanse of wetlands, marshlands, dry lowlands, forests, and grasslands has evolved into an unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty. — urbanomnibus.net
Originally a patch of creeks and marshland on the western shore of Staten Island, the area now known as Fresh Kills became a major landfill for New York City in 1948, once Robert Moses bought the land for housing development. His plan was to solidify the marshland with waste for a few years, and... View full entry
The separate entrances for the rich and poor came about due to a loophole in the Inclusionary Housing program enacted in 2009 that allowed developers to get subsidies if they provided affordable housing either on or off-site. — theguardian.com
Last year, a luxury NYC high-rise had its request for separate entrances – one for its affordable housing-unit tenants, another for its market-rate tenants – approved, fanning the fires of discriminatory design debates here on Archinect. Now, the loophole in a NY-rent stabilization law that... View full entry
Lots of summer blockbuster news to discuss on this week's podcast. The winner of the Helsinki Guggenheim competition was announced (a young husband-wife firm from Paris took the cake), SelgasCano's "psychedelic chrysalis" Serpentine Pavilion opened, and Andres Jaque's COSMO for MoMA PS1's "Warm... View full entry
