Execs of the Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center have officially shelved the starchitect’s design planned for Ground Zero. Gehry drew up plans for the art center over a decade ago and very few moves were made to bring the project to fruition...The snub, which actually wasn’t communicated to the architect directly, seems to not have affected him much, and he had some choice words for the board’s President, Maggie Boepple. — 6sqft

We cannot rely on visionaries and authoritarians to generate more, and better, housing. They might deliver, with enormous risk and perseverance, through personal connections and their willingness to invest their own equity or to defer their developers’ fee, as BHC has done. But visionaries and authoritarians are few and far between. Rather, we need to formalize ways of rethinking and requantifying net-to-gross, studio-to-three-bedrooms, block-and-plank formulas. — urbanomnibus.net

The facades of his 515 Highline, a 12-unit condo at 515 West 29th Street in West Chelsea that will almost touch the elevated park, will be rippled like the surface of a sea.

And Soori High Line, a 27-unit condo across the street at 522 West 29th, will have not only rooftop pools [...]. More than a dozen lower-floor apartments will also come with private pools to allow residents to float above it all while contemplating the brash buildings that increasingly populate the surrounding blocks. — nytimes.com

As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants.

An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...]. — urbanland.uli.org

Big real estate projects sometimes go through name changes, but the announcement August 4th that the Atlantic Yards mega-development near downtown Brooklyn, which has faced steady controversy since it emerged in 2003, would become Pacific Park Brooklyn, was an unusual, strategic and dubious adjustment. — nextcity.org

In collaboration with fifteen poets and community activists from StartUp Box South Bronx, I recently created Memories of the Future, a location-based cinema project viewed on mobile phones. The group experimented with spoken word poetry, site specific performance, and on-site spectatorship to reframe the predominant view of Hunts Point and speak about possibilities for its future from a position of power. — urbanomnibus.net

There has long been a subculture of so-called “urban explorers” who have made a game of accessing off-limits places. [...] Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. — nymag.com

I can’t think of a more fitting a place for an exhibition of art and representation that aims to capture the breadth of the world than the Queens Museum. [...]

The title of Bringing the World into the World, on view through October 12th, is inspired by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti’s assertion that art and the world contain and are contained by each other. As conceived, the exhibition couldn’t happen properly anywhere else. — urbanomnibus.net

Fed up with rising rents, bidding wars and neighborhoods that no longer resemble the low-rise bohemian enclaves they found when they arrived, many Brooklynites are moving out. They include decade-long renters who can no longer keep up with price hikes, qualified buyers who have been outbid one too many times, and young families who simply can’t find the space they want at prices they can afford. — nytimes.com

The hardworking Skyscraper Museum, in the belly of a condo complex on Battery Place, doesn’t have much space or much of a budget, but with admirable frequency its director, Carol Willis, stages smart shows that uncover telling moments of New York skyscraper lore and architecture history. The museum has just opened “Times Square, 1984: The Postmodern Moment,” about the battle 30 years ago for the soul of Times Square and the profession. — nytimes.com

5 Pointz, New York City’s “graffiti mecca,” is being demolished right now. This morning, a backhoe began tearing into the building that has served as a legal spot for aerosol artists for over two decades. In 2011, the property owner announced that he will be developing the site and transforming it into a massive residential condo complex. — animalnewyork.com

A new pipeline called the Rockaway Delivery Lateral Project is under construction in the Rockaways. It will deliver 647,000 dekatherms of natural gas to New York City each day — enough to power 2.5 million homes. Activists ... say the project is inherently dangerous and is just the latest sign of a broken approval and monitoring process for the United States’ energy infrastructure. — Al Jazeera

When Thomas Paino, an architect, decided to remodel a rowhouse he had bought in Long Island City, Queens, his ambitions were nothing short of trying to save the world — at least so far as a two-family home could contribute to the cause. [...]

And he came up with a daring design in the hopes that neighbors, passers-by, perhaps even the world would take notice.

He succeeded beyond all expectations. — nytimes.com

The Brooklyn-based artist couple Adam Frezza and Terri Chiao have constructed a bed & breakfast cabin inside their own house that they rent out on Airbnb. The idea for a A Cabin in a Loft was based on the house-in-a-house concept.

[...] Both micro-houses have a bed, a storage space and a semi-private garden space. The space between the structures contains a kitchen and a table for dining and working, and is further used as a combined living room by the hosts and the guests together. — popupcity.net