architecture

 

John Hill, celebrating New York one building at a time

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John Hill was on a roll. It’s a John Hill roll, which is to say it rolls fairly quietly, and very smoothly. The 38-year-old architect, blogger, and author was in the McNally-Jackson bookstore in Soho on Monday night, treating a small audience to a voyage around the five boroughs by way of a slideshow based on his just-released Guide To Contemporary New York City Architecture (W.W. Norton). The crowd, a good mix of old and young, was predominantly local (evidence the accents during the Q&A session) and distinctly not design-world-looking (viz., dressed normally), and as the slides flipped past each new-built, glass-enclosed edifice, Hill gave a capsule-length taxonomy while listeners nodded and issued satisfied little noises of recognition. The Hearst Building: “Hmph.” 497 Greenwich: “Ahmpf.”

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By Ian Volner

December 9, 2011 11:20 am

 

New York's tallest apartment building, inside and out (and in between)

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The building is made of 280 million pounds of concrete, and supported using a now-familiar "core-and-outrigger" method. The building's core makes up the main structural support, but at each level of the building arms reach out from the core and "grab" pillars near the perimeter of each floorplate.

But there is an important variation in the core-and-outrigger construction method involved here, because the shapes of the floorplates are so jagged, and so different from each other, that there is no straight line near enough the perimeter of the building that can rise consistently for the building's entire height. More

By Katharine Jose

October 20, 2011 11:02 am

 

Introducing The New York Dozen, the anti-movement movement in New York architecture

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Martin Finio of Christoff:Finio Architecture said, “Frank Gehry and Richard Meier, they have to be dead in 12 years." This elicited laughter, and he continued: “They’ve got to be gone by then, no?”

An audience member shouted, “Don’t count on it!”

“Retired,” Finio said, “Let’s call it retired. So that’s all we can hope for in the next 12 years.” More

By Katharine Jose

August 11, 2011 2:33 pm

 

Dr. Yes: With W57, Bjarke Ingels brings the Copenhagen idea to New York's private sector

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If nothing else, it is unusual, and definitely cool; that’s part of why a number of reviews have been sort of ambivalent. It does look like a massive, bottom-heavy pyramid from some angles, but from the street it looks more like a sail. It’s asymmetrical; a pyramid that twists, one that has, seen from the side of the river, a gash that permits more apartments with good lighting. The design is supposed to maximize the building’s potential for Hudson views, including from the courtyard, and to provide most apartments a terrace. The idea is that the building is a hybrid between the European perimeter block, with the buildings surrounding a central courtyard, and a traditional Manhattan high-rise, the tower in the park, with the park not always making it in. More

By Katharine Jose

May 6, 2011 8:08 am

 

What comes after 'postmodern' architecture? Actual architecture! says Rafael Vinoly

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Lots about the advance press for the event seemed to be pressing Viñoly to label everything that's come since the postmodern movement in architecture and explain it; what's not in dispute is that postmodernism is over.

In architecture, unlike in other disciplines, "postmodernism" is identified with a pretty specific period, and a pretty specific and identifiable kind of building, that most architects are happy to agree is behind us. More

By Katharine Jose

April 7, 2011 11:08 am

 

Is the next generation of architects really ready to build?

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Much of the city-building taking place nowadays is subject to and generated from a new ethos about what belongs in the civic sphere. Significant building of architectural importance is dominated by the idea of public-private partnerships and has arguably had its foremost expression in the U.S. in the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg and his deputies, who are rewriting the rules of how the city functions, and how it's built.

These problems and technologies, though, aren't just creating jobs for the new generation of architects&mash;they are shaping the aesthetic these architects are bringing forward. The city of the future will look very different, and these are the people whose vision will shape it. More

By Katharine Jose

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March 10, 2011 12:27 pm

 

Has New York architecture missed its moment?

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New York’s last great period of architectural achievement, during the 1950s and '60s, was bolstered by a massive postwar public works and jobs drive fueled with money from the federal government, which made possible public-facing projects like the United Nations complex and Lincoln Center. It was also a period in which architects like Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius were designing buildings with distinct and memorable profiles, like the Guggenheim Museum, the Seagrams Building, and the Pan Am Building for corporate clients, in those days when expressions of corporate power on such a scale were applauded by the public with an almost jingoistic fervor. More

By Katharine Jose

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October 24, 2010 11:35 pm

 

At MoMA, a test of architecture's 'radical pragmatism'

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Ranging from building a school in Burkina Faso to refurbishing modernist housing projects in Paris, all the plans included are supposed to in some way improve quality of life in the place where they are built; it would be hard to argue that any of the 11 do not.

The "radical pragmatism" of some, like building environmentally sound schools using local materials and labor in underserved regions (two of the 11 projects fit this description) sound like projects the viewer suspects are going on already all over the world at the behest of organizations like The Peace Corps. The majority, however, are innovative—and more likely to teach us something new. More

By Katharine Jose

October 4, 2010 7:12 am

 

PlaNYC guru plays West Village; gig sold out

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Behind Michael Bloomberg’s long-term plan for he city is a Danish professor and urban planner named Jan Gehl, who has been for several years helping to quietly, if not slowly, reshape New York. More

By Katharine Jose

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September 17, 2010 7:06 am

 

Lincoln Center's 'striptease': It's the architecture!

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For Lincoln Center, which had long been an island of culture closed off to its surroundings, the renovation to Alice Tully Hull exposed the building to the street so that, as arhitect Charles Renfro said, "going to the theater becomes theater." The vocabulary that both architects kept using replaced Belluschi's masculine muscularity with a more feminine warmth and transparency—"an architectural striptease," as Renfro put it. More

By Zachary Woolfe

July 30, 2010 7:39 am