Global warming will make New York spectacularly vulnerable to flooding. Some researchers even suggest that in 200 years, Manhattan could look like Venice. Does that mean 8 million people oughta start packing their bags? Of course not. But experts agree the city should do something. Enter Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang. The U Penn students think New York can protect itself the way a guy cracking lobster protects his tie: by strapping on a bib. — fastcodesign.com

I assumed someone would be working to preserve it. I called around and thought the American Institute of Architects or the Municipal Arts Society would be working on this. So many things in New York have preservation groups attached to them. But pretty quickly I found no one was doing anything for the High Line and that it was actually going to be demolished. — dirt.asla.org

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.

To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation. — Michael Kimmelman, nytimes.com

The AIA New York Chapter recently announced seven promising and pioneering new architecture and design firms from the New York area to receive the New Practices New York 2012 awards. The seven selected firms are: Holler Architecture; The Living; Abruzzo Bodziak; SLO Architecture; formlessfinder; Marc Fornes & THEVERYMANY; Christian Wassman. — bustler.net

“You should know that Frank and I had a conversation backstage,” the mayor said at the opening of the Signature Theater today, “and we both committed to each other that we would get 10 more Frank Gehry projects going here—in the next 700 days. If my math is any good, Frank, that is one every 70 days, so we should meet some time later today to get going.” — observer.com

Peter Gluck & Partners’s innovative approach to project delivery, “Architect Led Design Build”, is simple: the New York City-based firm acts as both the architect and the contractor. The client gets two separate contracts with different legal entities but the same people. A typical project goes from schematic design, directly to subcontractors who estimate cost and contribute useful information on alterations or alternatives. — metropolismag.com

The act of memorializing the AIDS epidemic with a physical gesture goes beyond remembering and honoring the dead. AIDS is not a war, nor a disease conquered. There are no definite dates or victims. In our design process, we emphasize the changing and varied ways through which AIDS affects us personally and as a society. It is important to create a space that conveys our sense of solemn respect, remembrance and loss, without resorting to symbolism around a date, image, or names. — aidsmemorialpark.org

Can a building ever be compared to Lady Gaga? Most experts may say no, but they obviously haven't seen the New Museum, one of the best looking museums ever made according to Delaine Isaac. — youtube.com

Having determined what was not the cause of this unique skyline, The Observer thought we had figured out what was, that being the flight of the wealthy north. But it turns out one very influential urban investigator begged to differ: New Yorker architecture critic and Pullitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger. — New York Observer

“It’s just such an awful building that the only reason to keep it would be as a monument to stupidity,” said Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. — nytimes.com

LoLo, which stands for Lower Lower Manhattan, is one of the first proposals from the Center for Urban Real Estate, a new research group at Columbia University. The neighborhood would be created by connecting Lower Manhattan and Governors Island with millions of cubic yards of landfill, similar to how Battery Park City was born in the 1970s. Over 20 to 30 years, the center estimates, LoLo would create 88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city. — nytimes.com

Pedro Gadanho, a 43-year-old Portuguese architect, may represent the future of the profession, in that he doesn’t do much actual building. Instead, he has fashioned a gadfly-like career as a curator, writer, blogger and teacher, while finding time to squeeze in an architecture project or two each year, like Baltasar House, a boldly colored residence he designed in 2007 in Porto, Portugal, and the Torres Vedras house, which he designed in 2010 outside Lisbon. — nytimes.com

Just as last December, the fine folks at Five Star Electric, 1 World Trade Center’s electrical contractor, volunteered their time to affix different colored sconces to the work lights in the tower, creating the seasonal effect. — New York Observer

The philosophy that courses through the institution is that education is a higher good, one that enriches the individual and, in so doing, enriches the human community. In this framework, education has its own value—and this is what makes Cooper Union radical and worth saving, perhaps even worth imitating: It is operating on a fundamentally different idea of what education is, and what it can be. — brooklynrail.org