Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does. — NYT
Over the weekend Alan Feuer, took readers along on a tour of the six container terminals belonging to the The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The visit gave him an opportunity to report on how the; infrastructural-logistical pressures of a post-Panamax infrastructure, along with... View full entry
A.UD’s RUMBLE: A film, directed by David Fenster is selected to be included in the 2012 Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York City. Festival features more than twenty-five films from eleven countries including public programs. — archinect.com
It's finally October, and one of New York City's most anticipated event programs has just kicked into full gear again: Archtober, the second annual city-wide festival of architecture activities, programs, and exhibitions is taking place October 1-31, 2012. Presented by the Center for Architecture... View full entry
The new building cost about $26 million to build—70 percent below the previous budget. But is less less? When the new plan was announced, Nicolai Ouroussoff, writing in the Times, thought so, calling it "a major step down in architectural ambition."
Ouroussoff was wrong. True, no one can know what the "cluster of pavilions" would have looked like. I can only report that the rectangular building is a triumph. The materials are gorgeous.
— archrecord.construction.com
Mayor Bloomberg today will unveil plans to transform Staten Island’s waterfront by building the world’s largest Ferris wheel along with a new retail complex and hotel on sites adjacent to Richmond County Bank Ballpark in St. George. The New York Wheel will be built just to the north of the ballpark and be 625 feet tall – 84 feet higher than the Singapore Flyer, currently the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. — mikebloomberg.com
For his latest project, he enclosed Gaetano Russo’s 1892 statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle within a living room on a scaffold more than 70 feet up. Visitors will be admitted into the 810-square-foot space for a carved-marble-eye view of Central Park. — nytimes.com
Displaced residents will be able to move into the new apartments "as if they had just won first prize in a lottery."
The plans also include "Super-Galactic" residences, which will tempt celebrities including (but not limited to) royal families from Europe, CEOs, and "the wealthy."
— curbed.com
If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati. Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft—just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE. — NY Magazine
Mark Jacobson visits New York City’s various housing projects, which are he argues the last of their kind in the country. He also suggests that they may be on their way to extinction. View full entry
Their singular issue is affordable housing, of which there will be some 150-units. The sticking point is that those apartments will only be reserved for low-income tenants for 35 years. The board wants permanent affordability, instead. “As a community board, we are supposed to do the best we can to preserve and maintain our communities and keep them going,” Mr. Nolan said. — observer.com
Mr. Shelton and his longtime design partner, Lee Mindel, were known for a distinctive modernist aesthetic that blended clean lines with references to classical periods to create opulent settings. Their less-is-more sensibility became a hallmark for apartments ringing Central Park.
“Truly they were leaders in their field,” said Margaret Russell, the editor in chief of Architectural Digest. “They won pretty much every award a firm could win.
— nytimes.com
[FLW's] entire archive is moving permanently to New York in an unusual joint partnership between the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, where it will become more accessible to the public for viewing and scholarship.
The collection includes more than 23,000 architectural drawings, about 40 large-scale, architectural models, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence.
— nytimes.com
While the park began as a grass-roots endeavor — albeit a well-heeled one — it quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side. — NYT
Jeremiah Moss ( the pen name of the author of the blog Vanishing New York) penned an editorial on the High Line. Therein he argues the High Line "has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history". View full entry
Among facets that critics may seize upon — and, this being N.Y.U., there will certainly be critics — is that the screens express technology’s new primacy, all but obscuring traditional forms of scholarship behind a cascade of random data. Critics may also discern a feeling of defeat in having to undertake such a fundamental alteration in the hope of saving students’ lives. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
"Hammertone is created from a fabric of woven LED strips and paper squares, networked through a series of sensors which read the aural vibrations created by the artists - responding through light, shadow and geometry." — MocoLoco
On Saturday August 4, 2012, Brooklyn-based design firm The Principals present from 2pm until 9pm, Hammertone will be performing in collaboration with the musicians Lemonade, Pearson Sound and Jamie XX at MoMA PS 1's Summer Warm Up series. View full entry
The architects Peter Samton and Diana Goldstein can tell you exactly where they were a half century ago, at 5 p.m. on Aug. 2, 1962: out on Seventh Avenue, tilting at windmills.
Pennsylvania Station, the McKim, Mead & White masterpiece, was doomed. They knew it. But they weren’t going to let it go down undefended.
— cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
