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The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan

Gregory Wessner — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:21:34 +0000

The Unfinished Grid:
Design Speculations for Manhattan

An exhibition of eight visionary proposals for the future of Manhattan’s street grid
Organized by the Architectural League in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York

On view at the
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue
December 6, 2011–April 15, 2012

For information about visiting the Museum of the City of New York, click here.

See related programming here.

For information on the Urban Omnibus Call for Essays, and the winning entries, click here.

2011 marks the 200th anniversary of the Commissioners’ Plan for New York, the foundational document that established Manhattan’s legendary street grid. Adopted by the New York’s State Legislature in 1811, the Commissioners’ Plan laid out a network of 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets that would fundamentally shape the future of New York and become an emblem of the city itself.

The Manhattan grid that is so familiar to us today, though, is a work in progress, an evolving creation that began with a bold vision by the 1811 commissioners, but which was afterwards altered and amended by generations of planners, builders, and advocates. As little room for change as there may seem, it is important to remember that Manhattan’s grid has been reimagined and reinvented many times, in large ways and small, over the past two centuries. What mark will future architects, private developers, and city officials leave on the grid? What new kinds of buildings will they build within its blocks, what new ways will they devise for organizing its streets?

To answer these questions, the Architectural League, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued a Call for Ideas inviting architects and urban designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattan’s grid might be adapted, extended, or transformed in the future. It asked them to consider issues such as how the grid might be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation infrastructures; how new digital technologies might affect the form and function of the buildings in which we live and work and the impact they might have on the city’s streets and public spaces; what the most pressing issues are facing the city today and into the future; and what solutions might emerge out of (and in turn modify) the street grid.

More than 120 teams from 22 countries submitted proposals in response to the Call for Ideas. A jury of architects and curators selected eight of those proposals, on display in this exhibition, as offering the most insightful and provocative ideas for Manhattan’s grid. The proposals address a range of issues, from extending Manhattan’s edge, to reconfiguring its streets, to amending preservation and zoning regulations to foster alternative possibilities for development. They are presented not as literal recommendations, but as design speculations for how we might shape the city’s future. In that sense, they celebrate a long and vibrant history in which New Yorkers imagine new possibilities for how we might live and work and then find ways for amending the grid to make them real.

The Unfinished Grid is a companion exhibition to The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan for Manhattan, 1811-2011, a major exhibition curated by Hilary Ballon, which examines the grid’s design, implementation, and evolution over the course of two centuries.

Projects in The Unfinished Grid
(Images above, clockwise from top left)

The Informal Grid
Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle

The Plaid
Architecture Commons: Eric Ho, Rick Lam

Tabula Fluxus
Group Han Associates New York: Myung Kweon Park, Yikyu Choe, Michael Chaveriat

Flow My Tears, The Commissioners Said
GHILARDI +HELLSTEN ARKITEKTER: Franco Ghilardi, Ellen Hellsten, Espen Vatn, Erik Stenman, Einar Rodhe

6 1/4 Avenue
Ksestudio: Kyriakos Kyriakou, Sofia Krimizi, assisted byYubi Park, Jennifer Endozo, Inti Rojanasopondist and Pauline Caubel

NYCity2
Fotis Sagonas, Ioannis Oikonomou

Dissociative New York
Joshua Mackley, Mathew Ford

Projective Exceptions
Grant Alford, assisted by Spencer Lindstrom

CREDITS AND FUNDING
The Unfinished Grid was curated by Gregory Wessner and organized by the Architectural League and the Museum of the City of New York.

The jury for the Call for Ideas included Amale Andraos, Hilary Ballon, Rosalie Genevro, Sarah Henry, Wendy Evans Joseph, Marc Kushner, Mark Robbins, Gregory Wessner, Sarah Whiting.

Exhibition Design: Cooper/Joseph Studio
Exhibition Graphics: Thumb Projects

The Unfinished Grid was made possible by the J. Clawson Mills Fund of the Architectural League. Additional support was provided by Walter and Judy Hunt. Media sponsorship for The Unfinished Grid was provided by Architizer.

Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers 2011:It’s Different

admin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:46:39 +0000

Featuring work by Ajmal Aqtash, Richard Sarrach, and Tamaki Uchikawa; Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno; Kiel Moe; Unchung Na and Sorae Yoo; Catie Newell; William O’Brien Jr.

June 15-July 29, 2011
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue
New York City

The gallery is open daily from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and late Thursday evenings until 8:00 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of the lectures. For more information on the lectures, click here. For more information on this year’s competition, click here.

The League thanks the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design for co-sponsoring the exhibition and lecture series.

The Architectural League Prize is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. The program is also supported by Dornbracht, Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn.

The City We Imagined/The City We Made

Varick Shute — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:08:16 +0000

Click above for more images of the exhibition installation at 250 Hudson Street.

The Architectural League presents
The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010
An exhibition about architecture, planning, and development in New York since 2001

July 2–August 15, 2010
Governors Island Building 110
Exhibition hours: Friday, 10-5 pm; Saturday-Sunday, 10-7 pm
Free admission
This exhibition is no longer on view.

Click here for the exhibition website.

The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City. This installment takes as its subject the design, planning, and building of New York in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning in 2001, an array of powerful forces converged to dramatically transform large portions of the city. The events of September 11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatile ups and downs of the global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in leading edge architecture all combined to reshape New York in ways that we may not fully grasp for decades to come. The City We Imagined/The City We Made documents this recent chapter in the city’s history, providing an overview of the most notable projects and proposals, plans and initiatives, so that New Yorkers can begin to shape an overall understanding of the decade and consider what the cumulative impact of this era of planning and building might be.

The exhibition includes:
•The City We Imagined: A timeline of the major architecture and planning events of the past ten years
•The City We Made: 1000 photographs taken by the New New York Photography Corps, a volunteer group of nearly one hundred architects and design professionals who spent more six months beginning in October 2009 documenting the city
•Archipelago: A video production of Urban Omnibus, exploring a day in the life of five New York neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea. Click here to watch.
•Observations on the Changing City: Video interviews with leading New Yorkers including, William Aguado, former Executive Director, Bronx Council on the Arts; Tom Angotti, Director, Hunter College Center for Community Planning; Andrew Berman, Executive Director, Greenwich Village Historic Preservation Society; Jonathan Bowles, Director, Center for an Urban Future; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Director, Real Estate Program, Columbia University GSAPP; Barbara Corcoran, former president, The Cocoran Group; Elizabeth Egbert, President/CEO, Staten Island Museum; Omar Freilla, Founder, Green Worker Cooperatives; Thelma Golden, Director, Studio Museum in Harlem; Richard Kahan, Executive Director, Urban Assembly; Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, Executive Director, Queens Council on the Arts; Jerilyn Perine, Executive Director, Citizens Housing and Planning Council; Rosemary Wakeman, Director, Urban Studies Program, Fordham University; and Paul Steely White, Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives

Curator: Gregory Wessner
Exhibition Design: Moorhead & Moorhead
Graphic Design: PS New York
Photo Advisor: Esto

New New York 2001-2010 is generously supported by
Lead Sponsor Sciame Construction Corp.
Associate Sponsor Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

Additional support has been provided by Jack Resnick & Sons; the Bernheimer Family; NRI: National Reprographics Inc; and the J. Clawson Mills Fund of the Architectural League. League programs are also made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

From May 7 through June 26, The City We Imagined/The City We Made was on view in a pop-up space at 250 Hudson Street. The League thanks Renee Schoonbeek of the Hudson Square Connection and Jonathan Dean and James Cosentino of Jack Resnick & Sons for their assistance in arranging that venue for the exhibition.

Toward the Sentient City

admin — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:22:24 +0000

Curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League
September 17–November 7, 2009
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue

Exhibition Design: Thumb Projects

Exhibition website

Toward the Sentient City is made possible with support from the J. Clawson Mills Fund of the Architectural League and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support has been provided by the University at Buffalo.

A major exhibition of five newly commissioned projects and installations by teams of architects, artists and technologists that imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it.

Toward the Sentient City is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Young Architects Forum 2009: Foresight

Gregory Wessner — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:31:09 +0000

Featuring work by Aziza Chaouni and Takako Tajima; Frida Escobedo Lopez; Ivan Juarez and Patricia Meneses; Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau; Phu Hoang; and Sung Goo Yang

May 14-July 29, 2009
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Foresight is the twenty-eighth annual exhibition of work by winners of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Competition. The portfolio competition is open to architects and designers who are ten years or less out of undergraduate or graduate school. In addition to creating a site-specific installation of their work, winners present lectures for the League’s Young Architects Forum, are the subject of video podcasts, and subsequently edit their work and text for an annual catalogue.

The theme for the competition, developed by the Young Architects Committee, changes every year to reflect current issues in architectural design and theory. The committee, a group selected each year from past participants in the Young Architects Forum, also asks prominent members of the design community to serve with them on the jury. In addition to committee members Mark Gage, Ana Miljacki, and Julia Salcedo, jurors for 2009 were Paola Antonelli, Teddy Cruz, Nader Tehrani, and Calvin Tsao.

This year’s theme defined foresight as an ability that “relies on the surveying, researching, and engaging [of] the present towards particular, desired outcomes in the future.” Given today’s economic, socio-political, and climatic flux, entrants were asked to show work that relies on foresight to imagine an effective role for architecture now and in the future.

The ‘call for entries’ posed a series of challenges: What problems can architecture solve? What problems can it not? Is architecture a vehicle to be used to address our most pressing problems and challenges? Or is it something else? Architects have the ability to concretize information—translating into physical form what might otherwise seem abstract. Whether through theoretical speculations, or pragmatic designs, the winning work demonstrates new ways to illuminate questions and envision solutions. Some of the projects provide commentaries on contemporary socio-economic problems, others take on design solutions for environmental challenges, while others create structures to respond sensitively to particular places. All of the work employs architects’ analytic and design tools to respond to the present with an eye to the future.

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.

13: 100 | Thirteen New York Architects Design for Ordos

Gregory Wessner — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:23:08 +0000

13:100 | Thirteen New York Architects Design for Ordos
October 11 – November 26, 2008
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

The Ordos 100 is a residential development proposed for the city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China. One hundred emerging architects from around the world were invited to design a nearly 11,000 square foot villa on lots ranging from a quarter to a half acre. With a master plan by artist Ai Weiwei and architect selection by Herzog & de Meuron, the Ordos 100 challenges conventional ideas about urban design, placemaking, and context. Criticized by some for its scale and environmental impact, applauded by others as a form of art practice, Ordos underscores and intensifies the complexities of contemporary architectural practice. This exhibition of the designs by the thirteen New York-based firms working in Ordos explored the unique process of the undertaking and provoked a conversation about the role that design played in the development.

Curator: Gregory Wessner
Exhibition Design: Project_ (Ana Miljacki, Lee Moreau)

Projects by:
Barker Freeman Design Office
Keller Easterling
Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis
Lyn Rice Architects
Multiplicities
nARCHITECTS
Normal Architecture Office
OBRA Architects
rsvp architects
SINGLE speed DESIGN
Slade Architecture
Josh Uhl/Toshiko Mori Architect
WORK Architecture Company

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.

Young Architects Forum 2008:Resonance

Gregory Wessner — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:28:01 +0000

Featuring work by Xu Tiantian; Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün; Lonn Combs; Ben Pell and Tate Overton; Mark Foster Gage; and Ana Miljacki and Lee Moreau

May 8-July 11, 2008
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Resonance is the twenty-seventh annual exhibition of work by winners of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Competition. The portfolio competition is open to architects and designers who are ten years or less out of undergraduate or graduate school. In addition to creating a site-specific installation of their work, winners present lectures at the Urban Center, are the subject of video podcast interviews, and subsequently edit their work and text for an annual catalogue.

The theme for the competition, developed by the Young Architects Committee, changes every year to reflect current issues in architectural design and theory. The committee, a group selected each year from past participants in the Young Architects Forum, also asks prominent members of the design community to serve with them on the jury. In addition to committee members Julie Beckman, Chris Lasch, and Jonathan Lott, jurors for 2008 were architects Karen Fairbanks, Jesse Reiser, Mark Robbins, and Calvin Tsao.

Entrants were asked to consider the increased productivity enabled by technological advances in building methodologies, expanded communications networks, and cross-fertilization from other disciplines, and challenged to demonstrate whether there is a corresponding increase in the ability of architectural ideas to resonate with issues and concerns outside the discipline.

All of the six winners have created interdisciplinary practices that, in various combinations, synthetically engage communication, collaboration, education, as well as programmatic and technological means of making architecture and place. The resulting work “resonates” beyond traditional architectural practice in different ways. From innovative modes of construction and repurposed building materials, to new definitions—virtual and real— of site, to new ways to visualize information, the winning firms have expanded traditional geographic and methodological boundaries of practice. Exhibitions give architects the opportunity to isolate and explicate the ideas underlying the formal composition of their designs. Not surprisingly, this year’s winners have taken divergent routes to convey the character and impact of their work. In their creative hands, the interpretive possibilities inherent in visualizing process, representation, and documentation amplify the resonance of their work.

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.

Studio as Muse

Gregory Wessner — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:42:59 +0000

Herzog & de Meuron’s Design for the New Parrish Art Museum
March 12–May 2, 2008
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

The Architectural League of New York presented an exhibition of Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron’s plans for the new Parrish Art Museum from March 12 to May 2, 2008 at the League, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City. Curated and installed by Herzog & de Meuron and first presented at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY, in summer 2007, the exhibition displayed one hundred thirty study models, material samples, and short videos detailing the firm’s design process for this innovative new museum building.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the League has produced a set of video interviews with key individuals related to the project. Click here to view these podcasts.

Studio as Muse: Herzog & de Meuron’s Design for the New Parrish was presented as part of an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions that investigate the design process of a single significant building. In revealing the different steps that architects take to arrive at a completed design, the exhibitions demystify for the public the way buildings are designed while simultaneously serving as important learning tools for design professionals and students.

The new Parrish Art Museum will comprise 64,000 square feet of new construction in the village of Water Mill on the East End of Long Island and will be Herzog & de Meuron’s first public building on the East Coast. The firm’s design concept reinterprets the artist’s studio, formulating a network of separate but connected galleries in which the Parrish Art Museum’s permanent collection will be installed. The exhibition space is anchored by four galleries inspired by the basic architectural elements of the actual artists’ studios, each of which will examine in depth the work of seminal East End artists: William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, and Roy Lichtenstein. The new building will make extensive use of natural light through a combination of north-facing skylights in the galleries and large expanses of glass throughout, creating a sense of transparency and connection to the remarkable surrounding landscape. In addition to gallery space for the permanent collection and special exhibitions, the new museum will also contain educational facilities, a cafe and an auditorium.

Pritzker-Prize winning architects Herzog & de Meuron are internationally recognized for provocative buildings that consistently explore the boundaries of material experimentation. Informed by sources ranging from fashion to art to landscape, the firm’s work transcends stylistic categorization in its emphasis on process and invention. In addition to the design for the new Parrish Art Museum, recent and current projects of Herzog & de Meuron include 40 Bond Street, New York City; the National Stadium Beijing for the 2008 Olympics; the M.H. DeYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco. Additional projects include the new development of the Tate Modern, London, projected completion in 2012, as well as the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, Hamburg, projected for completion in 2010.

The presentation of Studio as Muse: Herzog & de Meuron’s Design for the New Parrish Art Museum at the Architectural League was made possible by Ian Schrager Company. League exhibitions and programs are also made possible 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. Additional support is provided by contributions from foundations, corporations, and members of the Architectural League.

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.

Douglas Reed

Young Architects Forum 2007: Proof

Gregory Wessner — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:37:43 +0000

Featuring work by Jinhee Park; Carlos Bedoya, Wonne Ickx, Victor Jaime, and Abel Perles; Dominic Leong, Jonathan Lott, and Brian Price; Chaewon Kim and Beat Schenk; Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch; and Ivan Hernandez Quintela

May 17-August 31, 2007
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Proof is the twenty-sixth annual exhibition of work by winners of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Competition. The portfolio competition is open to architects and designers who are ten years or less out of undergraduate or graduate school. In addition to creating a site-specific installation of their work, winners present lectures for the League’s Young Architects Forum, are the subject of video podcast interviews, and subsequently edit their work and text for an annual catalogue.

The theme for the competition, developed by the Young Architects Committee, changes every year to reflect current issues in architectural design and theory. The committee, a group selected each year from past participants in the Young Architects Forum, also asks prominent members of the design community to serve with them on the jury. In addition to committee members David Benjamin, Daniel D’Oca, and Lisa Hsieh, jurors for 2007 were Michael Bell, Toshiko Mori, Calvin Tsao, and Sarah Whiting.

This year’s theme challenged entrants to consider how the conceptual processes and empirical methods inherent in the term ‘proof’ shape their own architectural projects, specifically what happens to the development of their design when “work meets world.” Within this realm of conceptual testing, the committee defined “architectural projects” as trial sheets subject to constant review and change, transcripts of dialogues among multiple parties that record our forward, backward, and lateral movement across the territory of the proof.

Entrants were encouraged to consider how they carried out a design proof. They were to consider sources, variables, and ways of interpreting. More specific to design were the questions: How do we tackle sub-proofs such as conceptual proof, material proof, technological proof, and structural proof? How do we balance innovation and independence with partnership and consensus? How do we anticipate an unknown future? As the work is open-ended, how do we know when to stop? When do we consider a project finished? The ways in which the competition winners have chosen to display their work are telling, emphasizing process and product. In some cases, the choices pose open-ended questions that point more towards new experiments than resolutions, while others evidence an ordering of wildly different variables to create singular form.

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.

New New York: Fast Forward

Gregory Wessner — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:56:46 +0000

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New New York: Fast Forward
March 29–May 7, 2007
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Exhibition design: Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis

New New York: Fast Forward was the fifth in the New New York exhibition series, organized by the League to explore significant new developments in architecture and planning in New York City. Fast Forward was a snapshot of the city in the midst of an explosion of building and construction in spring 2007. The exhibition mapped more than six hundred new building and planning projects from small multi-family residences to neighborhood-scale master plans, that were then under construction or in planning, in order to provide a glimpse of the big picture: what was being proposed, where new building was concentrated, what the buildings under construction would look like when completed. In addition, video interviews with thirty New York-based architects, from emerging to established, were included in the exhibition to survey their thoughts on issues from the level of design quality of new construction to the relative planning merits of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The interviews can be viewed on the exhibition website.

Above: Exhibition installation. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto.