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A handful of Steven Holl-designed buildings will be popping up in the next few years, with the groundbreaking of the Maggie's Centre Barts in London last month and construction of the Queens Library already underway in New York. Steven Holl Architects recently announced the groundbreaking of... View full entry
Santiago Calatrava said the roof would open.
And evidently it will.
On Friday morning, a 5,700-pound glass panel was hoisted into place as a 355-foot-long operable skylight took final form in the Oculus pavilion of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, designed by Mr. Calatrava. Another panel went up in the afternoon.
Those are among the last of 996 pieces of blast-resistant glass to have been installed at the Oculus since March 15. The glazing should be finished on Monday [...].
— nytimes.com
Here are some more photos of the skylight's construction progress in the past few weeks (courtesy of WTC Progress).More about the WTC Transportation Hub in the Archinect news:NYMag talks to Santiago Calatrava about his WTC Station, budget, reputationHow Cost of Train Station at World Trade Center... View full entry
As long as the City of New York has owned Rikers Island, since the 1880s, it has been a place for the unwanted. For a time, pigs were raised for slaughter there. [...] was converted to a partial landfill, full of horse manure and garbage. The odor repelled its neighbors in the boroughs, and the refuse attracted a sizable rat population, which the city tried to contain by releasing wild dogs. [...] It took poison gas to kill off the rodents. Next the city moved humans to Rikers. — nymag.com
Related:The NYT on prison architecture and ethicsFrom a "clean version of hell" to blabaerskogHow Prison Architecture Can Transform Inmates' LivesShould Architects Design for Solitary Confinement? View full entry
Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the focal point of Rockefeller Center and home to the NBC television network, has changed its name to the Comcast Building.
Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal will illuminate a sign with the new name and NBC logo atop the 850-foot (259-meter) building [...].
Comcast Building is the third official name for the landmark property, completed in 1933.
— bloomberg.com
“We can now get back to doing the public’s business and return a functioning Government Center to Goshen,” the Orange County executive, Steven M. Neuhaus, said in a statement. “It is my hope that this delay will not impact the bid prices.” — artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
As of this past April, the fate of New York's Orange County Government Center, a boxy brutalist designed by Paul Rudolph, was pretty much sealed. Preservationist had previously fought to restore the structure in the face of much-needed updates to the Center, but their proposals were dismissed... View full entry
Pritzker Prize-winner Álvaro Siza has been selected to design an "ultra-luxury condominium" in Manhattan, his first U.S. project. Deemed 611 West 56th Street by developers Sumaida + Khurana and LENY, the structure will rise 35-storeys in New York's Hell's Kitchen, enough for approximately... View full entry
Flying above New York City in a helicopter can be a beautiful thing, until you look down and see that someone has stolen and is living your dream life in a bucolic cabin on a rooftop in the West Village. Is there anything more enviable in the real estate racket of NYC than a house on a regular old apartment building's roof?
[...] the porch is basically a glorified bulkhead over a hole punched in the ceiling of the family’s loft to make way for a nautical stairway that rises to a landing [...].
— gothamist.com
Require a little more luxury for your Manhattan rooftop abode? A mere $250 million could buy you this. View full entry
Vornado's super luxury tower at 220 Central Park South isn't even out of the ground yet, but billionaire buyers seemingly can't wait to stash their stacks of cash in the 950-foot-tall tower. The Real Deal hears rumblings that a Qatari investor is eyeing a monstrous spread that would cost around $250 million, making it easily the most expensive home in New York City. It would completely obliterate the current record, the $100 million sale at One57. — ny.curbed.com
Robert A.M. Stern's NYC condo towers have a habit of attracting record bids (previously: NYC’s Most Expensive Condo to Be Listed at $130 Million). View full entry
According to legend, the Statue of Liberty came to sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a vision: sailing into New York Harbor in 1870, the French artist suddenly imaged the persona of liberty welcoming him. He sketched out his idea and immediately began pitching it...
It was 130 years ago today, on June 17, 1885, that the ship and its precious cargo reached New York—and another year before reassembly was complete and the finished product could be unveiled.
— time.com
Tadao Ando's first ever NYC building — the brutalist condo tower project 152 Elizabeth Street — is kicking into high gear with the release of new renderings, photos of the completed sales gallery, floorplans for the first residences coming on the market, the launch of a new website for the... View full entry
It was a matter of hours from when the resignations of five Cooper Union trustees rolled in until their names were erased from the college’s website.
And it was a day later that the President Jamshed Bharucha announced he too would resign, more than a year before his employment contract expires.
Yet the upheaval that led to the acrimonious departures has been years in the making.
— Inside Higher Ed
Events are unfolding very quickly in Cooper Union's leadership right now: Just hours after five members of the 23-member Board of Trustees resigned yesterday, Jamshed Bharucha, the school's embattled President, publicly announced his resignation in an email to the Cooper Union community.Following... View full entry
Last night five members of the Cooper Union’s board of trustees resigned: real estate mogul Mark Epstein (the board’s former chairman), Vassar College president Catharine Bond Hill, architects Daniel Libeskind and Francois de Menil (the board’s vice chairman), and investment banker Monica Vachher. Three of the departing trustees — Epstein, Libeskind, and Vachher — have written public resignation letters [...]. — hyperallergic.com
Following are the three resignation letters by Epstein, Vachher, and Libeskind — all widely claimed as strong tuition supporters and loyal to hotly contested Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha — in full length as published on the Committee to Save Cooper Union from the Committee to Save... View full entry
Each year, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) bestows its Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award to a federal agency with the best model practice that can be adopted government-wide. Today, ACUS announced that the 2015 Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award is being presented to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Rebuild by Design Competition. — US Department of Housing and Development
There's something of a mise-en-abyme quality to a competition winning an award, but it's a good occasion to remember the Rebuild by Design was, after all, not quite your regular competition. Organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and funded primarily by the US Department of Housing and... View full entry
Say what you want about One World Trade Center (and much has already been said here on Archinect), but it sure is a heck of a construction project.From the laying of the symbolic cornerstone on July 4, 2004 to the recent opening of One World Observatory on May 29, 2015, it took the tower eleven... View full entry
Walking in New York can at times feel a little too smooth: the rationality of the grid and subtle grade changes conspire to hide the natural terrain beneath all that asphalt and concrete. That’s not the case in the Bronx, the city’s mainland toehold, where topography is at play like nowhere else in this archipelago metropolis. [...]
It was with this conspicuous role of the Bronx’s topography in mind that we approached Kris Graves, a New York-based photographer [...].
— urbanomnibus.net
