From yesterday's announcement of the Rebuild By Design winners by the U.S. Department of HUD, we've got more details behind "The BIG U" by the BIG Team, who had one of the six winning propoals. The BIG-led consortium was awarded $335 million to implement their proposal for New York's Lower Manhattan, with the goal to increase the neighborhood's resiliency to future storm disasters. And with a name like "The BIG U", one can only be curious to find out more. — bustler.net

The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews. [...]

But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million [...]. — nytimes.com

Despite its distance from the center of New York City, Co-op City’s site and scale make it prominent on the landscape [...]. Critics, historians, and even the Supreme Court have noticed as well, weighing in since construction began in 1966 on what the complex signifies for housing finance, site planning, cooperative ownership, ethnic and racial diversity, and tenants’ rights. [...] But it is far from prototypical. — urbanomnibus.net

The owners of the tallest tower at the World Trade Center are cutting office rents just months before it opens because of slow leasing activity.

Only one private tenant has signed a lease at One World Trade Center in nearly three years: a one-floor deal with advertising firm Kids Creative that was signed last week. The 3.1-million-square-foot skyscraper, formerly named the Freedom Tower, is 55% leased. — online.wsj.com

By most measures, the museum, designed by Davis Brody Bond and Snøhetta, has met the difficult challenge of telling the emotionally charged story of 9/11 at Ground Zero. The gift shop, however, has detracted from the achievement, with tabloids and blogs lambasting the “darkness” hoodies, toy firetrucks, “survivor tree” earrings, and 9/11 cheese plate for sale in the gift shop. — businessweek.com

Many New Yorkers, still trying to make sense of the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, have had a single question as a museum was being built at ground zero: Too soon?

Now that the 9/11 Memorial Museum, as it's officially called, has opened to the public, they and others may find themselves asking something else: Too much?

The museum is an overstuffed answer to the appealing minimalism of the 9/11 memorial and its cascading pools, which opened in 2011. — latimes.com

Various recent innovations in secondary education in New York have used the city itself as an organizing theme for curricular experimentation. Urban Assembly schools like the School of Design and Construction or the New York Harbor School focus students’ attention on the built and natural environment around them. [...] John Surico takes a closer look at CTE programs in New York City. — urbanomnibus.net

At a larger scale, the metropolitan regions of Paris and New York City both show significant pedestrian mode shares. New York City has a pedestrian mode share of 34% for all trips citywide ahead of car (33%) and transit (30%)[4] when the Ile-de-France region has a weekday pedestrian mode share of 32%, a car mode share of 43%, and a public transport one up to 21%[5].

[...] How do they support this large pedestrian population and decrease auto-dominance in public space? — pps.org

City mayors across the world are about to take delivery of some searching, angry and occasionally very funny letters from leading international architects, academics and critics at the culmination of an exhibition curated by New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture.

“Letters to the Mayor” generated 50 fascinating and varied missives [...]. The project was conceived to remind politicians and the wider public – including architects themselves – of the political side of their profession. — theguardian.com

After success in Oslo and Tokyo, the Norwegian Icons: Important Norwegian Design exhibition is ready to make its U.S. debut in New York's Openhouse Gallery starting May 23.

Highlighting Norway's contribution to mid-century Scandinavian design, the selling exhibition will showcase over 500 high-end designer objects created by 44 Norwegian designers between 1940-1975. — bustler.net

After a decade marked by deep grief, partisan rancor, war, financial boondoggles and inundation from Hurricane Sandy, the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero is finally opening ceremonially on Thursday, with President Obama present, and officially to the public next Wednesday. It delivers a gut-punch experience — though if ever a new museum had looked, right along, like a disaster in the making, this one did, beginning with its trifurcated identity. — nytimes.com

In the third article in our Typecast series, writer Brad Fox travels to Todt Hill Houses on Staten Island. Safe, suburban, and well-maintained, Todt Hill defies many of the stereotypes of New York City housing projects. Unlike the Lower East Side’s Smith Houses, which were constructed in the place of demolished tenements, Todt Hill predates most of the single-family homes in its surrounding neighborhood. — urbanomnibus.net

Several factors contributed to the library’s decision: a study that showed the cost of renovating the 42d Street building to be more than expected (the project had originally been estimated at about $300 million); a change in city government; and input from the public, several trustees said. (Four lawsuits have been filed against the project.) — nytimes.com

Among the most pressing issues facing New York’s new mayor is how his administration will pick up the mantle of the ambitious agenda established by Michael Bloomberg. How will the de Blasio administration address climate change and increase the resilience of those areas of the city most severely impacted by Superstorm Sandy? [...] The Rockaway peninsula, in particular, has been a veritable laboratory for designers exploring the implications of “resilience.” — urbanomnibus.net

Affordable housing is on New York City’s mind. A critical mass of civic organizations, academic institutions, city agencies, advocacy groups, and others are pondering the essential and perennial issue of how to ensure that the city becomes affordable for the extraordinarily diverse population that makes it work. [...]

At the same time, a decades-old strategy to maintain housing affordability is finding a groundswell of support from an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders. — urbanomnibus.net