Featuring work by 2013 League Prize Winners:
Luis Callejas, Lcla Office; Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee, Matter Design;
Marc Fornes, MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY; Rafael Luna and Dongwoo Yim, PRAUD; Skylar J.E. Tibbits, SJET; and Bryan Young, Young Projects.
On view: June 25 — August 1, 2013

On view at:
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
Parsons The New School for Design
66 Fifth Avenue

The exhibition will be open daily 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and late Thursday evenings until 8:00 p.m. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of the lectures. Admission is free.

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

For more information about the winning offices and their work, as well as this year’s program theme, Range, click here.

Support
The Architectural League Prize is made possible with corporate support from Dornbracht, Microsol Resources, Monadnock Construction, Inc., Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn; and by the Next Generation Fund of the Architectural League.

Architectural League programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

“tree wood,” a project by Toshihiro Oki architect with team members Toshihiro Oki, Jen Wood and Jared Diganci
On view: May 12 — August, 4, 2013
Opening reception: May 12, 2013, 2pm – 6pm

On view at
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Boulevard at Broadway
Long Island City
The park is open 365 days a year from 10am until sunset. Admission is free.
For more information about visiting, click here.

The Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park present “tree wood,” a new project by Toshihiro Oki architect with team members Toshihiro Oki, Jen Wood and Jared Diganci. “tree wood” is the winning entry in Folly, a competition co-sponsored by the League and Socrates that invited emerging architects and designers to propose contemporary interpretations of the architectural folly, traditionally a fanciful, small-scale building or pavilion sited in a garden or landscape to frame a view or serve as conversation piece. Folly was established by Socrates, in partnership with the League, to explore the intersections between architecture and sculpture and the increasing overlaps in references, materials, and building techniques between the two disciplines.

“tree wood” is a rigid yet airy geometrical wooden structure to be placed within a grove of trees — a lush and dense area at Socrates Sculpture Park. A formal, ornate chandelier will be suspended inside the structure, which visitors peer into through the floor beams. The installation will create a dialogue between built structures and systems and the irregular and organic.

“tree wood” was selected by a jury that included: Michael Arad, Partner, Handel Architects; Orly Genger, Visual Artist; John Hatfield, Socrates Sculpture Park; Granger Moorhead, Principal, Moorhead & Moorhead; and Billie Tsien, Principal, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

For more information about the competition, including a feature on this year’s finalists and exemplary submissions, click here.

About the Designers
Toshihiro Oki established his office in 2009 after working at Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA. Jen Wood and Jared Diganci joined the office in 2012.
http://toshihiro-oki.com/

About Socrates Sculpture Park
Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of sculptor Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of free public programs. Socrates Sculpture Park is the only site in the New York Metropolitan area specifically dedicated to providing artists with opportunities to create and exhibit large-scale sculpture and multi-media installations in a unique outdoor environment that encourages strong interaction between artists, artworks and the public. The Park’s existence is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity andimprovement of our urban environment.
www.socratessculpturepark.org

Support
Socrates Sculpture Park’s spring exhibitions are supported by the generosity of Agnes Gund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, Henry Luce Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Mark di Suvero, and Spacetime C.C.

Folly is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

April 4 – September 1, 2013
On view and available for use at locations across the East Village and Lower East Side. Download a PDF of the map.
After September 1, 2013, the installations will be evaluated to determine their longevity into the fall.

Little Free Library/NYC is a joint project of PEN World Voices Festival and The Architectural League of New York, and is realized in collaboration with Little Free Library, LTD.

The Little Free Library movement places small book shelters in neighborhoods and is based on the premise of “take a book, return a book.” Established less than three years ago, Little Free Libraries now sponsors over 5,000 libraries worldwide.

PEN World Voices Festival and The Architectural League of New York partnered to bring Little Free Library to New York City. A jury of Laurie Anderson, Andy Bernheimer, A.M. Homes, Scott Marble, Shannon Mattern, and Peter Mullan selected 10 architecture teams to each design and install a Little Free Library in collaboration with a host community organization. The libraries were installed during the IDEAS CITY festival, for which the League was a partner organization.

For more information about Little Free Library / NYC, click here.

Little Free Library/NYC
“Take a book, return a book”

Little Free Library/NYC is a joint project of PEN World Voices Festival and The Architectural League of New York, and is realized in collaboration with Little Free Library, LTD.

The Little Free Library movement places small book shelters in neighborhoods and is based on the premise of “take a book, return a book.” Established less than three years ago, Little Free Libraries now sponsors over 5,000 libraries worldwide.

PEN World Voices Festival and The Architectural League of New York partnered to bring Little Free Library to New York City. A jury of Laurie Anderson, Andy Bernheimer, A.M. Homes, Scott Marble, Shannon Mattern, and Peter Mullan selected 10 architecture teams to each design and install a Little Free Library in collaboration with a host community organization. The libraries will be installed during the upcoming IDEAS CITY festival, for which the League is a partner organization, and will be in use through September 1, 2013, when they will be evaluated to determine their longevity into the fall.

Below, the chosen design teams present concept renderings and short statements about the libraries they plan to install during the IDEAS CITY StreetFest, on Saturday, May 4, 2013. These renderings present initial conceptual illustrations of the final designs.

As part of the PEN World Voices and IDEAS CITY festivals, a walking tour of the libraries will take place on Saturday, May 4, 2013. For more information on the Architectural League’s other events held as part of the IDEAS CITY festival, click here.

UPDATE: The IDEAS CITY Festival has passed. The Little Free Library installations will be on view through September 1, 2013, and can be visited at any time. For a map of the sites, click here.

•••

Designer: Cevan Castle
Community Partner: The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center

Libraries are shelters for people, as well as books. Children, especially, rely on libraries as a safe destination outside of home or school. Books are not the only attraction. The activities that congregate in and around the library collection—such as storytelling, tutoring, clubs—allow children to connect with each other and share in a safe place. New York City is not particularly friendly to children. The presence of a neighborhood library gives our smaller residents a destination and means of connection. I propose that Little Free Libraries could help children find an anchor in an otherwise adult-sized landscape.

Cevan Castle graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in May 2012 with a Master of Architecture. Castle is currently an Artist Teacher at the Joan Mitchell Foundation and works independently as a sculpture and fabricator.

•••

Design Team: The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture’s Design III studio with Maja Hjertén Knutson and Christopher Taleff, design leaders; Michael Young, David Allin and Lydia Kallipoliti, faculty team
Community Partner: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Architecture

Over the past year, the Third Year Design Studio at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union has been engaged in the study of the library as a building type. The Fall semester had the students embroiled in intensive analysis of library precedents (15 projects from Michelangelo’s 1532 Laurentian Library to Fujimoto’s 2010 Musashino Art University Library). The spring semester finds the students deep into the design of their own library proposals, developing some startling re-imaginations of the library condition. Our proposal is to have the entire studio work on a charrette to propose and debate, with a selected design fabricated and installed by the studio as a whole.

We propose siting the project at The Cooper Union. One of Peter Cooper’s original programs for his “Union” was a free reading room on the first floor of the Foundation Building. At the time it opened, all libraries in New York City were private, requiring membership for entry. The Cooper Union’s reading room was open Monday through Saturday (and Sunday beginning in 1872), from 8 in the morning until 10 at night. It subscribed to over 200 periodicals: 15 domestic and foreign newspapers (twelve from New York alone), 64 domestic and foreign weeklies, 108 magazines, 22 French papers and magazines, and 26 German papers and magazines. Within months, the Reading Room was hosting 3,000 visitors per week, also providing free ink and paper for writing. By 1863, its subscriptions had climbed to over 270 foreign and domestic publications, a reference library boasted 4,000 volumes, and the room received 4,000 visitors per week, more than all other reading rooms and libraries in the city combined.

It is through the inspiration of this first historic reading room at Cooper that the students wish to approach the project, re-emphasizing the book itself, the act of reading, and the potential for a free exchange unconstrained by curatorial oversight. The Little Free Library offers the potential for respite and a moment’s escape from the city, but chance encounter as well. The project echoes Cooper’s own ethos of the exchange of thought, ideas, and knowledge, “as free as air and water.”

•••

Design Team: Davies Tang + Toews
Community Partner: La MaMa

Books are a point of contact, whether recognized or not, between two people and the infinite unseen world, a share across time and space. We feel this when we see someone reading on the train, an exchange now diminished by the introduction of technology.

Our interest in the Little Free Libraries lies in a love of the abandoned beauty and importance of books. We find its counterpart in the desire to reclaim
 lost locations of human exchange: phone booths, postage windows, ticket kiosks that are never open anymore. This project is a chance to re-purpose this infrastructure and remind us of what has been lost, to show two missing things complementing each other, falling in love again.

Davies Tang + Toews is an architecture and design firm based in Brooklyn. Our work includes residential, institutional and commercial projects, small inventions, and teaching. In May 2011, we designed and built Tentstop, in collaboration with the PARC Foundation. Seven custom canvas tents were constructed to describe and simulate camping in the city, housing site models, illustrative dioramas and a children’s working table for the deployment of playful cities within cities.

•••

Design Team: Stereotank
Community Partner: St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral School and The They Co.

It’s been often said that books are threatened by digital books, whereas physical books keep in their materiality the advantage of being power free (other than the embedded energy from their production).

We like thinking of the presence of the book in the urban scenario and dynamics as a place-maker, a spot to stop and take the time to browse.

Envisioning the book ‘container’ as a micro inhabitable bookshelf. Built with repurposed materials and objects.

Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente, trained as architects and founders of Stereotank, hold Master degrees from Columbia University and have participated and been awarded in urban art programs and festivals such as the Kobe Biennale in Japan, ZooArt in Italy and Summer Streets in NYC. Stereotank focuses on the investigation, design and creation of inhabitable / operable installations and music machines for public creative engagement by repurposing and recycling existing resources.

•••

Design Team: Shannon Harvey, Adam Michaels, and Levi Murphy
Community Partner: Hester Street Collaborative

Comprised of an urban designer, a book designer, and a furniture designer, each member of our team focuses on the accessibility of ideas for broad publics and the positive role that designers can have on society. We see physical books as a crucial means of communicating ideas amongst individuals, importantly circumventing the “digital divide” of electronic media. We’re enthusiastic about the prospect of designing a unique distribution point for readers to encounter information that they might not otherwise have access to. Further, with this project we seek to participate in current discourse surrounding distribution models and
 gift economies.

Shannon Harvey is a design strategist and urban and architectural designer living and working in New York City. Shannon is currently working as a design strategist at the Rockwell Group. In 2012, Shannon founded The Colour Store, a project platform from which she explores the role of colour in the built environment and writes about significant colour from the history of architecture. Shannon holds a M.Arch, specializing in Urban Design, from McGill University, as well as a B.Des from Emily Carr Institute.

Adam Michaels is the cofounder of Project Projects, a design studio in New York producing commissioned work and independent curatorial, editorial, and publishing projects. Michaels edits and designs the Inventory Books paperback series (published by Princeton Architectural Press). Michaels holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Levi Murphy is a furniture designer and builder living and working in Brooklyn, NY. In 2013 Levi established Communal Objects, a studio focused on functional modern design. Murphy holds an MFA in Furniture Design and Sculpture, and a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

•••

Design Team: Forrest Jessee and Brigette Borders, studio point 0
Community Partner: Abrons Art Center/Henry Street Settlement

Little Free Libraries not only promotes literacy, but offers the possibility of curated social interaction around learning. Mobile and web-based resources have streamlined the experience of gathering and reading news and literature, yet single platform consumption neuters the content. The sensory experience of reading a printed book can be observed, cherished, envied, and inspire knowledge sharing. A Little Free Library in New York City should emphasize what has been lost in digital platforms by offering a media space to connect readers, harness a microcosm of reading lists and interests, and inspire the immediacy of sharing.

Jessee and Borders graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation with Masters in Architecture in 2009. Jessee is a designer at Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Borders is the Director of Business Development at Flatcut, LLC. Both currently teach at Columbia University and recently co-founded studio point 0.

•••

Design Team: stpmj
Community Partner: Fourth Arts Block

The Little Free Library is an opportunity to engage diverse demographic groups and ages while creating a small place to share books, interests and ideas instantly throughout the city. We are interested in investigating an extremely light intervention for the Little Free Library that focuses on its ability to move and change location. Imagining a volume that could be split and be transported easily, maximum accessibility and adaptability to engage with residual urban infrastructure, light poles, street signages, metro or bus stations, benches and trees, will be explored. From Wall Street to Harlem, the proposal will seek to provide equal access to all while adding new diverse micro communities to the metropolitan city.

Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim founded stpmj in 2009. stpmj’s work ranges from “small installations to urban strategies, tangible practices and utopian ideas with the theme of provocative realism.” Lee and Lim hold Masters degrees in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

•••

Design Team: Matter Practice
Community Partner: New York University 

The public lending library is a repository of knowledge made available to anyone; arguably the concept cannot be separated from the ideals of democratic society. It allows all of us to travel light, keeping what we’ve learned in our heads, yet leaving the tools to be shared with others. The city fosters the chance encounter, unexpected intimacy between strangers, the moment of finding slowness within a place of great speed, an anonymous inheritance, a gift for one unknown.

Our little library for New York would aspire to package these possibilities.

Matter Practice was co-founded in 2002 by Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger. MATTER’s work encompasses exhibition design, installations, furnishings, and proposals for civic engagement within the public environment. Zollinger is also Director of The Design Workshop, the design/build program at Parsons The New School for Design.

•••

Designer: Chat Travieso
Community Partner: Two Bridges Neighborhood Council

My work seeks to restore social bonds that are lacking in our public spaces through critical and poetic urban interventions. That is why The Little Free Libraries movement is especially inspiring for its dedication to the ideals of sharing and trust. In line with the movement’s commitment to sustainability, I am interested in repurposing overlooked objects and spaces in our existing built environment for this project. I believe Little Free Libraries are important because they are a catalyst to get people to think, both through reading and by participating in a system that challenges a culture of over-consumption and privatization.

Chat Travieso received a Master in Architecture from Yale University in 2010. Travieso is currently a set designer for Kwaidan, a multimedia opera installation, and a teaching artist at The Center for Urban Pedagogy.

•••

Design Team: Mark Rakatansky Studio with Aaron White
Community Partner: University Settlement

The library today is the new civic center: to bring that civic mode out into the city — right there on the sidewalk with you — engages new interactions between fellow readers. In 1905, the University Settlement’s collection of 6,500 books inaugurated the collection of the Carnegie “Free to All” Library next door at 61 Rivington Street. In 2013, our Little Free Library returns and redistributes the favor, using what is usually the barrier of the urban fence to keep others out as a way now to be able to reach into and out from, in a civic redistribution of the borders of what is public.

Mark Rakatansky is Principal of Mark Rakatansky Studio and teaches at Columbia University, Pratt Institute, and Parsons The New School for Design. Aaron White is Associate at Mark Rakatansky Studio and teaches at Pratt Institute and Parsons The New School for Design.

•••

Little Free Library / NYC Project Team
Architectural League of New York: Anne Rieselbach, Program Director; Ian Veidenheimer, Program Associate; Daniel Rojo, Assistant Editor, Urban Omnibus; Alexandra Hay and Catherine Bryt, Program Interns.

PEN World Voices Festival : Jakab Orsós, Festival and Public Programs Director; Elizabeth Weinstein, Festival & Public Programs Manager; Charis Holt, Intern

Development Consultant: Jennifer Douglas, Brooklyn Cottage

“Curtain,” a project by Jerome Haferd and K. Brandt Knapp
July 14 – October 21, 2012
EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 31, 2013
Opening reception, July 14, 2-6 pm

On view at
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Boulevard at Broadway
Long Island City
The park is open 365 days a year from 10 a.m. until sunset.  Admission is free.
For more information about visiting, click here.

The Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park are pleased to present “Curtain,” a new project by Jerome Haferd and K. Brandt Knapp. “Curtain” is the winning entry in Folly, a competition co-sponsored by the League and Socrates that invited emerging architects and designers to propose contemporary interpretations of the architectural folly, traditionally a fanciful, small-scale building or pavilion sited in a garden or landscape to frame a view or serve as conversation piece. “Folly” was established by Socrates, in partnership with the League, to explore the intersections between architecture and sculpture and the increasing overlaps in references, materials, and building techniques between the two disciplines.

“Curtain” is a structure composed of a series of frames of slender wood posts, defining a space of 20 feet wide on each side with a triangulated roof canopy varying in height from 8-12 feet. The vertical and horizontal planes of the structure will be articulated with a dense series of suspended white plastic chain. Fixed in some places, hanging free in others, the white chain will create “rooms” that viewers can occupy, offering changing spatial experiences within the outline defined by the wooden framework. The title of the piece alludes to the material quality of the chain as it reacts to breezes off the East River as well as a play on the modernist understanding of “curtain walls” as fixed boundaries.

“Curtain” was selected by a jury that included: Alyson Baker, former Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park (2000–11) and current Executive Director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Yolande Daniels, Studio SUMO; Richard Gluckman, Gluckman Mayner Architects; Christopher Leong, Leong Leong Architecture; and Leo Villareal, artist. The program is directed by Elissa Goldstone, Exhibition Program Manager, Socrates Sculpture Park; and Gregory Wessner, Special Projects Director, The Architectural League of New York.

For more information about the competition, click here.

About the Designers
Brandt Knapp, a Baltimore native, currently works at Richard Meier and Partners in New York. She studied photography as well as architecture and has maintained a strong interest in the arts and teaching. Jerome Haferd is originally from Akron, Ohio. His academic and professional pursuits initially led him to several locales, including the Beijing offices of OMA and Zephyr Architects. He now works under Bernard Tschumi at Bernard Tschumi Architects, New York.

About Socrates Sculpture Park
Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of sculptor Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of free public programs. Socrates Sculpture Park is the only site in the New York Metropolitan area specifically dedicated to providing artists with opportunities to create and exhibit large-scale sculpture and multi-media installations in a unique outdoor environment that encourages strong interaction between artists, artworks and the public. The Park’s existence is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity andimprovement of our urban environment.
www.socratessculpturepark.org

Support
Folly, a partnership of Socrates Sculpture Park and the Architectural League, is made possible through a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Socrates Sculpture Park’s Exhibition Program is also supported by the generosity of Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Mark di Suvero, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and Spacetime C.C. This program is also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and by public funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Special thanks to the City of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, City Councilmembers Jimmy. Van Bramer and Peter F. Vallone Jr., and the Department of Parks & Recreation, Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

Architectural League programs are additionally supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Featuring work by 2012 League Prize Winners:
Jorge Arvizu, Ignacio del Rio, Emmanuel Ramirez, and Diego Ricalde, MMX Studio; Jimenez Lai, Bureau Spectacular; Sean Lally, WEATHERS / Sean Lally; Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim, STPMJ; Michael Szivos, SOFTlab; Koji Tsutsui, Koji Tsutsui & Associates

June 21 — August 3, 2012
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, featuring the winners. 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.

Support
The League Prize is generously supported by Dornbracht, Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn. The program is also supported by the Next Generation Fund of the Architectural League.

Architectural League programs are additionally supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

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.

Featuring work by Jason Austin and Aleksandr Mergold; Marc Frohn and Mario Rojas Toledo; Michael Loverich and Antonio Torres; Emily Abruzzo and Gerald Bodziak; Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu; and Keith VanDerSys.

June 23-August 6, 2010
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 and winners, 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 National Endowment for the Arts.  The program is also supported by the LEF Foundation, and by Dornbracht, Ibex Construction, Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn.

Architectural League programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

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.

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.