Since former Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the far west side is the city’s new Gold Coast and Manhattan’s last frontier, a necklace of ravishing projects have been announced along the Hudson River waterfront. The latest reveal is for a new 12-story, 88-unit condominium coming from Herzog & de Meuron Architects. The Hudson Square site at 156 Leroy Street will replace a handful of low-slung buildings that include two auto-body shops, a gentleman’s club and the former Lunchbox Diner. — 6sqft

The New York City Design Commission presented its annual awards for excellence in public design on 7 July—and among the winners is a company run by the commission’s president. Signe Nielsen, who has been the government agency’s president since 2012, is also a principal at Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. [...]

This is not the first time that Nielsen’s firm has been recognised by the Design Commission while she has been at the head of the award-giving body. — theartnewspaper.com

But building the $2.25 million steel-and-glass structure he had in mind presented a number of challenges on Fire Island.

For starters, they had to dig 10 feet below sea level to bury the wood piles. Then they had to put a steel frame on top that could support 25 tons of glass.

Sam Wood, the contractor, had been working on Fire Island for 30 years and had never seen anything like it. “It’s built like a mini-skyscraper,” he said. — nytimes.com

225 West 57th Street‘s facade will top-out 1,479′ above street level, while a surprise spire on top will cap the tower at 1,775 feet. Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill are designing the building.

The new height details will result in several superlatives: Manhattan will finally retake the ‘tallest roof’ in the United States from Chicago’s Willis Tower, which stands 1,451′, and 225 West 57th Street will become the tallest residential building in the entire world [...]. — newyorkyimby.com

When the American architect Louis Kahn collapsed from a heart attack in the toilets of New York's Penn Station in 1974, he left behind a lot of loose ends. There were three children, by three different women [...]. There was his dwindling practice, which he left $500,000 in debt. And, tucked away in his sketchbooks, was a complete set of drawings for an unrealised project – one that would lie dormant in his archive for almost 40 years. — theguardian.com

If you're on the hunt for some Fourth of July plans, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will celebrate the opening of its "Conceptions of Space: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Architecture" exhibition tomorrow. Featuring recently acquired projects from international and emerging architects and artists, the exhibition highlights the evolving role of space through the context of architecture as an art form, and how it serves as a response to broader cultural issues. — bustler.net

According to data compiled by the firm PropertyShark, since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in large-scale Manhattan developments have been to purchasers who either listed an overseas address or bought through an entity like a limited-liability corporation, a tactic rarely employed by local homebuyers but favored by foreign investors [...] “The global elite,” says developer Michael Stern, “is basically looking for a safe-deposit box.” — New York Magazine

"[...] In this project, we're using a living organism as a factory. So the living organism of mycellium, or hyphae, which is basically a mushroom root, basically makes our bricks for us. It grows our bricks in about five days with no energy required, almost no carbon emissions, and it's using basically waste— agricultural byproducts, chopped up cornstalks. This mushroom root fuses together this biomass and makes solid bricks which we can kind of tune to be different properties." — The Creators Project

The Municipal Art Society of New York has developed a new tool that shows where development could bring the most change across the city's five boroughs. This resource is a continuation of the group's "Accidental Skyline" initiative, an effort to curb the "as-of-right" development (which allows developers to bypass some regulatory hurdles) that has resulted in some of New York's tallest and skinniest new skyscrapers. — citylab.com

U.S. disaster rebuilding has traditionally focused on merely replacing what has been lost. But a little-noticed federal design competition, Rebuild by Design, has done something different: engage communities to develop a more porous relationship between land and water that recognizes the dynamism of rising seas and more violent storms... — Al Jazeera

Following Apple's success, many companies are finally starting to recognize the crucial role design plays in building a desirable (and profitable) product. Yet very few companies are actually founded and led by designers. Here to change that is 30 Weeks, a new program by a powerhouse team of New York design schools--Parsons, Pratt, School of Visual Arts, and The Cooper Union--in collaboration with the education company Hyper Island and Google. — fastcodesign.com

Workers are digging the foundation for a twin-towered apartment building that will obscure the great flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Preservationists, neighbors and architects are justly up in arms. [...] Even the developer laments how the approval process for new buildings in New York spews out too many projects that nobody really likes. — nytimes.com