Landscape architect Catherine Seavitt, along with her team at the City College of New York, take those approaches to Jamaica Bay a step further as part of the larger Structures of Coastal Resilience study, which includes three other East Coast bays attended to by university-based teams. As Seavitt explains, her studio follows a growing trend in the field of landscape architecture toward experimental and science-based design processes and active participation in policy discussions. — urbanomnibus.net

Why not ask Howard Hughes to abandon its current plan and do something really wonderful and revive the Guggenheim plan for Gehry’s gargantuan palace of titanium ribbons? The residential conversion of so many major office buildings is going, eventually, to create a need for new office buildings. Gehry’s plan could be enlarged gracefully to accommodate both offices and condominiums and rebalance the famous Lower Manhattan skyline... — 6sqft

Mitsui Fudosan Co. (8801), Japan’s biggest developer, is building an office tower on Manhattan’s far west side at a cost of about $1.4 billion [...].

Construction has started on the skyscraper in New York’s Hudson Yards development zone in partnership with Related Cos., the area’s principal developer, and Canadian pension investor Oxford Properties. [...]

The project, known as 55 Hudson Yards, is at the north end of the site, at the southeast corner of 34th Street and 11th Avenue. — bloomberg.com

The idea is always that a building like this in a particular light merges with the sky. The building is on a very small site, and has a very small footprint. There was a requirement from a planning point of view, which we fully supported and were actually happy about, that we had to provide a plaza on the ground floor. And that’s actually why the building toward the base, it pulls in its belly and it slopes so that the urban space is adequate and a required size. — nytimes.com

But all New Yorkers are losing familiar vistas, and some are losing light and air, as supertall buildings sprout like beanstalks in midtown Manhattan. There are a dozen such “supertalls” – buildings of 1,000 feet or higher – in the construction or planning stages. And the buildings are not, as in Dubai or Shanghai’s Pudong district, being constructed where nothing else had stood. They are, instead, crowding into already dense neighbourhoods where light and air are at a premium [...]. — theguardian.com

As a researcher interested in the intersection of urban form and place, Joseph Heathcott set out to explore how one of New York’s borders shapes the lived experience and physical environment of its surroundings. Through historical research, photography, and deep observation, he traces the city’s only major internal land boundary — the Brooklyn-Queens border — and draws out the social and spatial conditions of this largely invisible urban seam. — urbanomnibus.net

Work was halted on a luxury-condominium tower in midtown Manhattan after an 8-foot piece of guardrail from a construction elevator fell from the 81st floor to the street below.

The New York City Department of Buildings ordered all work stopped at 432 Park Ave., the 1,397-foot tower being built by Harry Macklowe and CIM Group [...].

The building, slated for completion this year, is one of the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere, according to the property's website. — crainsnewyork.com

In 2006, the doors of the Hearst Tower were swung open for business. The design of starchitect Norman Foster, the building was one of the most cutting-edge of its time, lauded for its diagrid form, its green construction, and the then-radical approach of marrying the old with the new... Now, a decade later, Foster has returned to the Hearst Tower to mark its anniversary and reflect on his creation. — 6sqft