Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the first model of "Urban Umbrella," a beautiful new design for the city's scaffolding structures, in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday.

The design was the winner of the urbanSHED competition which sought to revamp the city's current scaffolding designed more than 60 years ago. Project Engineer Sarrah Khan, Architect Andres Cortes, and Designer Young Hwan Choi who all helped bring the structure to life were also present for Wednesday's unveiling. — huffingtonpost.com

... the proposed park would be underground, in a dank former trolley terminal under Delancey Street that is controlled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Though its promoters call it the “Delancey Underground,” another nickname has already been coined: the Low Line. — nytimes.com

The 2002 [sic] finalists are: AEDS Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio, Ammar Eloueini, principal, of Paris and New Orleans, LA; Hollwich Kushner, Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner, principals, of New York; I|K Studio, Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim, principals, of Cambridge, MA; UrbanLab, Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn, principals, of Chicago; and Cameron Wu of Cambridge, MA. — blog.archpaper.com

Tribeca Citizen noticed a curious high/low architecture marketing campaign this weekend while on a stroll around the neighborhood: a gumball machine from local firm KUSHNERstudios that dispenses a piece of candy and an architecture comic strip.

We checked in with KUSHNERstudios about the guerilla marketing campaign, and apparently the machine has been up since January (whoops?) and at first dispensed flash drives with the firm's portfolio. — ny.curbed.com

It’s like a body brace with a backpack and gizmos that resemble shotguns near the knees. A physical therapist operates a remote control that makes the patient step when their body is properly aligned. — nydailynews.com

When, in June 2009, the High Line Park opened to the public, it was declared an almost unqualified success. Some architecture critics nit-picked the design, but basically they endorsed it, and ordinary folk (I include myself in that category), less fastidious, greeted it with enthusiasm. — Phillip Lopate, via places.designobserver.com

d3 and Transportation Alternatives have announce the winners of the “Close The Gap” design competition, which invited architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers and students worldwide to envision the completion of New York City's East River Greenway. Submissions from pla.net Architects and the design team of James Stokoe & Madeline Stokoe were selected by the jurors for a shared first prize. — bustler.net

Cities are very complex, and what the best designers illustrate is how to give form to sometimes very simple ideas. Good design involves bringing not just a fresh eye to problems but, most of all, listening to the people who live in those communities. We’re talking about a billion people living in informal settlements today — New York Times

Designed by 1100 Architect with an interior by Lee H. Skolnick Architecture & Design Partnership, the Children’s Library Discovery Center, as it’s called, is part of a quiet revolution reshaping the city’s public architecture. Piecemeal across the five boroughs, New York is gradually being remade. — nytimes.com

“Design with the Other 90%: Cities,” the second in a series of themed exhibitions by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum that demonstrate how design can address the world’s most critical issues, opens October 15 at the United Nations and runs through January 9, 2012. — bustler.net

An unprecedented architectural public education event is going to take place in New York. After Rome, Moscow, Terni, and St. Petersburg, VELONIGHT, the unique project by professor Sergey Nikitin, founding director of Moskultprog, is inviting to explore the postwar cultural and architectural history of New York City on bicycles in the night between October 1 and 2. — VELONIGHT

In 1972, Massimo Vignelli designed a diagrammatic map for the New York City subway. It was a radical departure. He replaced the serpentine maze of geographically accurate train routes with simple, bold bands of color that turned at 45- and 90-degree angles. [...] Its abstract representation of the routes was elegant but flawed. To make the map function effectively, a few geographic liberties were taken, something that didn’t sit well with New Yorkers. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com

Piranha was commissioned by Silverstein Properties to create a short film depicting the completion of The New World Trade Center site. Piranha wrote, produced, art directed, filmed, and finished all vfx for this inspiring piece marking the 10th year anniversary of 9/11. — Vimeo

It’s official — the Empire State Building has been awarded LEED Gold certification. Thanks to a massive green overhaul that took more than two years, the landmark is now the tallest building in the United States to receive LEED certification. — Inhabitat