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The effort to convert the old Penn Central rail yard on the Far West Side of Manhattan into high-rises has bumped along since being proposed in the mid-1970s by a developer named Donald J. Trump.
What was proposed for the area often rankled neighbors, who found the buildings to be too tall, too close together and too pricey. But, after welcoming its first residents in the late 1990s, the controversial mega-project is entering its homestretch.
— The New York Times
The site includes buildings by architects like Richard Meier and the soon-too-be-completed Three Waterline Square by Rafael Viñoly. While Donald Trump is no longer the landlord, his name still appears on façades. View full entry
President Trump has reportedly appointed a longtime Trump family supporter and event planner with no housing experience to oversee federal housing programs in New York.
Lynne Patton will lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) region that oversees New York and New Jersey, the New York Daily News reported Thursday.
— The Hill
Appointed on Wednesday, Lynne Patton, has zero experience in housing, and is now in charge of running the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York. Patton falsely claims to have a law degree from Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut. Yale University is also listed... View full entry
Just a few hours ago, President Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the non-binding Paris Agreement intended to mitigate climate change. The President of the American Institute of Architects Thomas Vonier, FAIA has issued a statement in response, reaffirming its... View full entry
Jared Kushner and his real estate partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.
There was just one problem: The program was designed to benefit projects in poor, job-starved areas.
So the project’s consultants got creative, records show.
— The Washington Post
Basically, the tactic is gerrymandering for real estate. Kushner and co. worked with state officials to demarcate the area around the site, 65 Bay Street in Jersey City, as including some of the city's poorest neighborhoods rather than the wealthy neighborhoods just blocks away. So the project... View full entry
The U.S.A. is barely 100 days into the Trump presidency, and a sure hell of a lot has happened in the last few months, huh? No doubt, the design community has reacted strongly to Trump's rambunctious power-mongering, including a revival of the debate on complicity and defiance in architecture. — Bustler
In response, competition organizer Archistophanes/Reality Cues — who previously created the cheeky “Good Walls Make Good Neighbors, Mr. Trump” competition — launched the Complicity and Defiance in Architecture charrette, wherein entrants had to create “a provocative message of critique... View full entry
Wasteful, inefficient, and pointlessly expensive to operate: most of Donald Trump's namesake properties, as well as his son-in-law Jared Kushner's new "666" edifice, are oozing energy by virtue of their poor design and indifference toward conservation. A report by the IBTimes noted that:As of... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Reality Cues. Architecture is historically complicit with the policies of those in power, both symbolically and functionally. It offers not only representations of power, but also vehicles for enacting power in its most grandiose, oppressive, and physically enduring... View full entry
The Hill has penned an obituary for the National Endowment of the Arts, following its defunding at the hands of the Trump administration and the current Republican-controlled government. As the obit notes, the NEA has been threatened many times before, notably in the 80’s and 90’s following a... View full entry
Rael writes that one of the most devastating consequences of the wall is “the division of communities, cities, neighborhoods and families, resulting in the erosion of social infrastructure.” When we talked, he wondered how we might create something positive from something so horrible: “Can reform happen through borderland investment? If you build 150 libraries along the border, you’d get a very different outcome.” — The New York Times
The RFP for the border wall is out, but the conscience-bearing architectural community is staying in (and trying to imagine alternatives to this xenophobic concrete smear job). In particular, in this New York Times article they're suggesting building anything but walls, suggesting that perhaps... View full entry
Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallels... — Politico
The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style. View full entry
What if the border wall proposed by Trump didn’t have to be built in concrete, but rather out of that ubiquitous staple of BArch theses and “pop-up” urbanism, shipping containers? That’s the twee take of DOMO Design Studio, who propose a “softer, gentler” version of the wall, wherein... View full entry
In LA, Trump bragged he was going to spend a billion dollars on what he claimed would become the world’s tallest building. His architect Bill Fain delivered a gilded 125-storey office tower etched in a diamond-patterned exoskeleton...David Martin also devised a skyscraper: ‘When I told Ivana [Trump] the basis of the idea was to put two diamonds together, she lit up,’ Martin said. ‘I think they were divorced a week later.’ — The Guardian
Whether you've been following the tumultuous life of proposed architecture projects in Los Angeles or not (a stretch of Grand Avenue, for example, has been undergoing elaborate proposals designed in part by Frank Gehry for almost forty years) "Never Built Los Angeles," a book by architectural... View full entry
Christo's proposed silver-fabric-panel draped "Over the River" project has been in the making for about 25 years, after he started hunting for a natural host site in 1992 and then gradually garnered the neccessary official approvals and permits over the following decades for a 42-mile stretch... View full entry
According to a report published by the Hill, President-elect Trump is planning significant cuts to federal programs, including the departments of Transportation, Commerce and Energy. What else is on the chopping block? The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the... View full entry
Donald Trump has chosen Richard LeFrak and Steve Roth, “two of the wealthiest men in real estate” according to Forbes, to head a “council of builders and engineers”. This new council will be tasked with overseeing Trump’s plan to invest $1 trillion in infrastructure. As Archinect... View full entry
