The Architectural League created the juried lecture series New York Designs to provide a forum for the presentation of innovative and accomplished built work in New York City. The 2008 New York Designs committee, comprised of Sunil Bald, Markus Dochantschi, Lynn Gaffney, Victoria Meyers, and Adam Yarinsky, asked entrants to consider what limits, opportunities, and compromises shape thresholds in the city. A threshold, as outlined in the call for entries, might be understood literally as a transitional space – that interfaces public and private; that bridges inside and outside; that connects nature and the city – or as a conceptual space of overlap between materials, disciplines, cultures, the client and architect, the past and future.

Update: To view podcasts of the New York Designs 2008 presentations, click here.

THIS YEAR’S WINNERS AND LECTURE DATES ARE:

This program was part of the 2007-08 program calendar. Click here for information about our current season.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

7:00 p.m.

West Harlem Piers Park

Archipelago

Presented by Barbara Wilks and Johannes Feder

Best Pedestrian Route

Gro Architects

Presented by Richard Garber and Nicole Robertson

Slide Library, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

Marble Fairbanks

Presented by Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks

Bridge Underpass Light Installation, Brooklyn

KT3D and Tillett Lighting Design

Presented by Karin Tehve and Linnaea Tillett

Thursday, June 5, 2008

7:00 p.m.

The New School/Sheila C. Johnson Design Center

Lyn Rice Architects

Presented by Lyn Rice and Astrid Lipka

Switch Building

nARCHITECTS

Presented by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang

Luminaire Celebrates Public Space

Rogers Marvel Architects

Presented by Rob Rogers and Jonathan Marvel

322 Hicks Street

Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects with Douglas Korves, Architect

Presented by Henry Smith-Miller

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Thursday, May 29, 2008 – 7:00 p.m.

Described by the architects as a threshold between land and water, the urban and the natural, and the past and the present, Archipelago’s West Harlem Piers Waterfront Park redevelops a forgotten industrial strip of land along the Hudson. The revitalized park serves as a new focal point for the surrounding neighborhood, providing bike and foot paths, grassy areas for get-togethers and relaxation, and new walkways integrating the park with 125th Street. The park’s angled piers follow the lines of the natural landscape rather than the old industrial piers, connecting land and water, thereby evoking the overlapping ecologies of both, while commissioned artwork and the reuse of urban materials for the park’s infrastructure remind visitors of the park’s industrial past.

GRO Architects’ award winning design Best Pedestrian Route was commissioned through the Construction 2007 Competition sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Serving as an actual construction site walkway in downtown Manhattan, the project exploits the concept of construction as a liminal activity: between plan, digital technology, and construction; construction and finished building; or simply between the graphic symbol and diagrammatic pattern. The slanted and skewed temporary walkway’s cantilevered form expresses not only the volatility of the construction site, but the ongoing instability of Lower Manhattan.

Designed by Marble Fairbanks, the Slide Library of Columbia University’s Department of Art and Archaeology can be conceived as a threshold between disciplines and uses. Forming an alliance between the university clients, facilities department, and architecture schools, the project offered to the client department a unique design—milled and sandwiched one inch thick undulating ultralight, embedded with glass pieces, illuminated by natural light—at a significant value, while providing the architecture school a venue to explore and test new fabrication processes. Further enhancing value, the facilities department had an opportunity to support innovative design, while the university used the project to foster interdepartmental collaboration.

Tillett Lighting Design and KT3D’s Underpass Light Installation, Brooklyn is a permanent work commissioned by the City of New York, Percent for Art Program and the DUMBO Business Improvement District. Along the underpass’ ceiling and walls and around the roadway’s pedestrian walkways and stairs, washes of blue light create a locus and fiber-optic arrays establish direction. Taking a formerly dour site of banal urban infrastructure, which proved a navigational hazard for the surrounding community, the project enlivens the space, providing directional help, turning what was an oppressive piece of steel and concrete into a piece of public art.

Thursday, June 5

7:00 p.m.

Lyn Rice Architects’ Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is a 32,000 square foot academic building. The project organizes a range of shared spaces around a new urban quad, uniting the four historic buildings of Parsons, The New School for Design. The renovation includes new entries on Fifth Avenue and West 13th Street, an auditorium, archives center, galleries, meeting rooms, and a student critique area. The façade – the threshold between street and building, neighborhood and school – becomes an occupiable space as steel windowsills punch through the walls to create seating. Galleries and pedagogical billboards open to the street, further connecting the building to its surroundings. The interior’s new urban quad serves as a transitional space between the building’s floors and various programs, creating an internal point of access and meeting.

Switch Building is a seven-storey apartment and art gallery building in New York’s Lower East Side. Designed by nARCHITECTS, the building consists of four floor-through apartments, a duplex penthouse, and a double height art gallery on the ground and cellar levels. Interpreting threshold as a productive space between various demands, the project’s design mediates and exploits the limits imposed by zoning and development. The angled front facade “switches” back and forth, allowing each apartment unique views up and down Norfolk Street. To maximize height, the architects alternated the balconies in the rear of the building to create double-high outdoor spaces for each apartment. The Switch Gallery has a black hot-rolled steel and glass storefront, which opens to the sidewalk, so events can flow out into the neighborhood. Mediating the tight lot conditions of building in downtown New York, the Switch Building inventively capitalizes on such constraints to enhance design.

Rogers Marvel Architects’ project, Luminaire Celebrates Public Space, considers threshold in the most familiar and pervasive of ways, as an entry condition. Forming the Metropolitan Tower Lobby’s desk as a Luminaire or illuminated feature, the architects employed light and the object’s sculptural form to animate and engage the building’s entrance. The glowing lobby desk broadcasts to the street, connecting interior and exterior. The Luminaire’s changing colors create a constantly shifting identity for the space. At a smaller-scale, a 200-foot long door-to-door LED strip at eye level focuses the experience to the scale of the sole pedestrian.

Situated on an open two block site in a historic, residential section of Brooklyn Heights, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects (along with Douglas Korves, as architect of record), designed an apartment building, which mediates historical context and new building – a threshold between past and present. 322 Hicks Street’s angled and inflected brick façade breaks the building’s mass to remain constant with the neighborhood’s scale. The building stretches from lot line to lot line, continuing the nature of the block. Oriel windows punctuate the façade and recall the iconography of the brownstone bay window. The rear of the building opens up in a more traditionally modernist glass and steel facade, allowing views to New York harbor. The building’s carefully composed envelope allows for a complementary insertion of new building into the neighborhood’s historic fabric.

Architectural League programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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