Tags: design

The Imagination Playground opened today in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan. It’s the first permanent site where children can interact with the loose parts—a collection of moveable, stackable, manipulable pieces that can also couple with sand and moving water—that have been designed and developed by architect David Rockwell, who also designed the playground.

Urban Omnibus offers a review of two newly opened New York City skate parks, the 16,000 sq. ft. “street” course in Corona Park and the 15,000 sq. ft. “flow” course at Hudson River Park’s Pier 62.  Designer and skater Buck Jackson gives both parks the thumbs-up as replacements for the recenly closed Brooklyn Banks and Unisphere Fountain skate areas, thought he notes some concerns about early surface wear, need for additional shading and the use of more environmentally responsible construction materials.

Landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations has won the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s 2010 National Design Award for landscape design.  The annual awards aim to build national awareness of design as a tool in a variety of fields (architecture, communication, fashion, interaction, interior, landscape, product) by celebrating “excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement” as represented by a body of work. 

Vulgare runs another eye-popping photo feature, this time on the 200-acre Parque Atlantico (“Atlantic Park”) in Santander, Spain.  Situated in a thalweg called La Vaguada de las Llamas (“The Valley of Flames”), the site was once a marshy estuary fed by a stream from the Atlantic Ocean. 

The Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) is a joint project of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden to generate and test a set of guidelines and benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance, much as LEED ratings are given to buildings. 

The New York City Department of Transportation has announced the winner of its reNEWable Times Square design competition, aimed to temporarily “refresh and revive” the streetscape of newly pedestrianized Times Square while plans for permanent reconstruction proceed (construction is slated for 1012). 

Tatiana Choulika—Project Design Manager at James Corner Field Operations for our upcoming project in the southern portion of the Freshkills Park site—gave a great presentation on that design two weeks back at the Arsenal.  Our thanks go to her and to the large crowd that came out to learn about South Park. 

Quick on the heels of the springtime public opening of Pier 1, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation opened the Pier 6 section of the new park this past weekend.  The $55 million area features a 1.6-acre playground with a water play space, 21 swings, slides, a 6,000-square-foot sandbox, a marsh garden, a dog run and bikeway and pedestrian promenades. 

The University of Buffalo has commissioned landscape architect Walter Hood to design a 5,000-panel solar array to be sited on 6.5 acres of its campus and to function as a signature piece of land art.  The Oakland, CA-based Hood won out over proposals by Vito Acconci and Diana Balmori with his proposal for a fragmented grid, meant to recall DNA, supported on posts and suspended over low-maintenance grasses, crab-apple shrubs, ornamental lindens, trees and an existing creek, all of which will be publicly accessible. 

Quick on the heels of our terrific if rainy lecture this past Tuesday, we’re thrilled to host another lecture in our Freshkills Park Talks series this upcoming Wednesday evening, May 26th—this time at the Arsenal, on Central Park.  We’ll be joined by Tatiana Choulika, Senior Associate at landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations, who will be presenting and discussing the design for the first phase of the Southern quadrant of Freshkills Park. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/9051621]

An illustrative lecture by William Reed AIA, an architect at the Integrative Design Collaborative as well as Regenesis, Inc. and Delving Deeper who is a nati0nally recognized expert on the practice of sustainable design, delivered in March as part of the Boston Society of Architects lecture series. 

Two new discoveries that offer podcasted ruminations on landscape architecture practice and projects: LANDCAST is a collaboration between landscape architect and blogger Christian Barnard and documentarian Adrien Sala and positions itself as “the voice of contemporary landscape culture”—an NPR-like program about emerging topics in landscape issues; Terragrams, hosted by landscape architect Craig Verzone, is a series of long-form interviews with prominent landscape architects about their work and the ideas that inform it. 

Tonight at the Center for Architecture, a panel discussion called Is it Architecture?  The Structure in Landscape.

Recent collaborations between architects, artists and landscape architects have begun to blur the boundaries between architecture, art and site. What does it mean to intervene in the environment with these projects?

Through an agreement with the State, the City of New York now has sole custody of  Governor’s Island and has released its park and public space master plan for the $220 million redevelopment of the 172-acre site.  The tantalizing plan has been prepared by Dutch urban design and landscape architecture firm West 8 in partnership with Rogers Marvel Architects, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, SMWM and Urban Design+ and features a 2.2 mile waterfront promenade, picnic and event lawns, a grove of trees hung with hammocks, man-made marshes and steep, artificial hills that will help to create dramatic overlooks and vistas of lower Manhattan. 

We’re very excited to present our most recent phase of design work, in South Park, tonight at the Jewish Community Center of Staten Island.  The Freshkills Park development team and park designers from James Corner Field Operations will be there to virtually guide the gathered crowd the first phase of South Park, which will host softball fields, hiking and biking paths, play areas, a parking lot and flexible event spaces.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront opens today at the MoMA.  The exhibit features architectural proposals transforming New York City’s harbor and coastline in response to sea level rise.  Last fall’s architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 brought together five interdisciplinary teams to produce plans, models, drawings and analytical models that now make up the show.

Engineers at Solar Roadways, a renewable energy start-up based in Idaho, have completed a prototype for a multi-layered, energy-generating road surface.  The company says that when installed, Solar Roadway would generate and store energy through photovoltaic (PV) cells, each cell capable of managing it’s own electricity generation, storage and distribution.

Now that the City of New York has decided to make the pedestrian plazas in Times Square permanent, the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT), in partnership with the Times Square Alliance, has issued a Request for Proposals for conceptual designs of short-term “refreshes” of the plazas. 

The National Park Service has launched the Designing the Parks Annual Awards Program, aimed at honoring “the role and significance of public parks in community life and the importance of innovative, responsive, high quality planning and design.”  Awards appear to be purely honorary but intended to boost awareness of and support for the NPS’s key principles of park design:

• Reverence for place
• Engagement of all people
• Expansion beyond traditional boundaries
• Advancement of sustainability
• Informed decision making
• An integrated research, planning, design, and review process

The call for submissions is open to built and publicly open parks throughout the world, administered by all levels of government. 

The University of British Columbia is currently in construction of what it claims will be the “greenest building in North America”: its new $37 million Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability.  Making use of fuel cells, solar panels, solar hot water heaters, ground source heat pumps and biomass co-generation, the building will be a net energy producer and serve as a living laboratory for all of these technologies.