With help from volunteers, we took pictures of dozens of buildings and found that on average, blinds or shades covered about 59 percent of the window area. And over 75 percent of buildings had more than half of their window area covered. As the study puts it, “Tenants are moving into these rooms with a view, but more often than not, can’t see out the window.” — blog.urbangreencouncil.org

"It looks like a prison to be honest with you," said Lynda Johnson, an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and editor and founder of KidStyleSource.com who has owned a townhouse on St. Nicholas Place for 20 years and is a member of the Hamilton Heights Homeowners Association.

Some feel the design does not fit into the context of the nearby Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill Historic District, which is filled with Beaux Arts and Queen Anne-style 19th-century row houses. — dnainfo.com

Holm Architecture Office was recently commissioned for an idea proposal to revive the existing buildings of the Domino Sugar Factory in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The factory opened in 1856 and was once the sugar processing center of the U.S. before it shut down in 2004. The factory has been empty since then. — bustler.net

“They have taken what could have been a barren rooftop and turned it into much needed public space for the community...Because it’s elevated, it’s out of the flow of the street...There’ll be a sense of calm". - Catherine McVay Hughes, chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan — NYT

"The building, designed to be the New York City Pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, is a long, barrel-vaulted shed, with austere colonnades on both long sides and a few luxury touches, like the limestone and the scalloping on the columns. It was never a wonderful building, but it troubles me that the shorthand for a renovation is to slap a layer of glass on the side facing the road and call it new". - Justin Davidson — NY Magazine

The creaky staircase was covered in plastic, as was the living room furniture, but the bones were still there: pressed paper wainscoting in the hall, thickly painted moldings. We often got in trouble for walking too loudly in our clompy shoes up to the top floor at night. — Alexandra Lange

Last week Alex Calderwood, cofounder and creative force behind the Ace Hotel, was found dead. He was 47. The first Ace Hotel opened in Seattle in 1999, under Calderwood's direction... When Calderwood and his team took the company east, to New York, Calderwood brought his friends, design duo Roman & Williams, on board to design the space. Here, Robin Standefer of Roman & Williams remembers Calderwood's design legacy. — fastcodesign.com

... instead of letting engineers design the plant, as often happens at an industrial site, Sims hired Selldorf Architects, a glamorous New York firm known for doing Chelsea art galleries and cultural institutions. — nytimes.com

Five finalists were selected this week for the MoMA PS1 2014 Young Architects Program. The annual program gives young emerging architects the chance to develop an innovative, temporary urban installation for the MoMA PS1 courtyard in Long Island City, New York in summer 2014. — bustler.net

Kate Orff wants to grow oysters in New York’s Jamaica Bay. Not for you to eat, but to save the shore from mighty storms. Great piles of mollusks will diffuse the energy of 10-to-15-foot waves, like those from Sandy that shattered boardwalks and beach homes and shot like missiles up city streets. — bloomberg.com

The artists behind New York’s graffiti haven 5 Pointz have learned that their last-ditch legal effort to save the outdoor gallery will likely fail.

“The building, unfortunately, is going to have to come down,” federal judge Frederic Block said in New York’s eastern district court on Friday. [...]

“I’m getting the sense that the traditional academic way of looking at things needs to be updated,” Block said. — The Guardian