Tags: infrastructure

Inspired by the success of the High Line, proposals to reimagine abandoned rail lines have popped up all over the country.

• Faced with the replacement of a section of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, Rael San Fratello Architects have proposed the creation of the Bay Line, a hanging neighborhood complete with housing, cultural and commercial buildings and bike and pedestrian paths. 

Wednesday the 28th, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) will host a discussion called The Infrastructure of Urban Ecologies.  Speakers will include William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons, and Kazys Varnelis, Director of Network Architecture Lab at GSAPP. 

Four giant coal gasometers, built as part of Vienna’s municipal gas works in the late 1800s, have been refashioned into a complex of residential, commercial and municipal facilities.  Formerly Europe’s largest gas plant, the gasometers now house 800 apartments, a student dormitory, a music hall, over 70 shops, restaurants, bars and cafes, a movie theater and the city’s municipal archive.

A volunteer coordinator from Transportation Alternatives and Staten Island bike advocates will be leading a ride around the borough tomorrow morning, October 10th, ending at Lee’s Tavern in Dongan Hills.  The group will be “discussing the current challenges facing cyclist, pedestrian and mass transit users in Staten Island, and developing some advocacy plans for the future.” 

A master plan by Grant Associates of the UK has been selected from an international competition for the design of Singapore’s largest garden project to date, Marina South Gardens.  The architecture and landscape for the ambitious plan are inspired by orchid anatomy and include a series of micro-ecosystem conservatories to house plants from Mediterranean, temperate and tropical climates.  

Pruned’s three-part “Under Spaces” survey (Parts 1, 2 and 3) explores the problems cities face when planning under and around elevated infrastructure like rail lines and highways.  Recent projects have converted these typically neglected landscapes into urban public centers, mountain biking and skating parks and waterfront green spaces.

The Hudson River Park Trust has selected a winning design for its reimagining of Pier 57, near Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.  LOT-EK‘s design makes use of disused shipping containers in the construction of a mixed-use community facility on the 375,000 square-foot pier. 

Among Treehugger’s 10 greenest colleges in the US is the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the first college in the country to run primarily on landfill gas.  85% of electricity and gas needs on the 5 million square foot campus are met by methane produced at a private, nearby landfill operated by Waste Management and piped to the school from a cogeneration plant. 

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

The WRT/Marpillero Pollak-designed infrastructure and public space project that we wrote about in June has broken ground in Long Island City, Queens.

A quiet and handsome set of photographs by Nathan Kensinger showcases the decommissioned Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.  The station was closed along with the Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001 and is currently unoccupied.  Its rehabilitation has recently been put out to bid to private waste management companies for use in barge export of waste, in accordance with the city’s 2006 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan. 

Researchers at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have just launched Trash Track, a project that attaches tags to various pieces of garbage to electronically track their real-time movement through the city.  The goal is to “reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects and waste, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today’s recycling and sanitation systems.” 

Metropolis Magazine‘s 2009 Next Generation design competition asked entrants to “fix our energy addiction” at any scale and through any design specialty.  From 197 ent­ries, the winner was a proposal to integrate wind turbines into existing power transmission towers. 

Next Friday, we’ll be taking a field trip to visit the green roof at the Parks Department’s Five Borough Technical Services Complex on Randall’s Island.  This is no ordinary green roof–it’s the fourth largest in New York City (at over 15,000 sq ft) and uses 13 different green roof systems.  

Another constructed wetland system, this time at the Sidwell Friend’s School in Washington D.C.  The Wetland Machine by Andropogon Associates, Kieran Timberlake Associates and Natural Systems International incorporates two self-contained systems to recycle water, one for wastewater and one for stormwater. 

Urban Omnibus interviews designers Margie Ruddick, Sandro Marpillero and Linda Pollak about the Queens Plaza Bicycle and Pedestrian Landscape Improvement Project.  Some good discussion about the potential of the urban park, salvaging industrial history in the making of green spaces and the question of “How can something hard, urban and harsh operate ecologically?” 

CityLAB, part of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, is conducting an open design competition, WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture, calling for “innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery.”

Monday evening, we’ll be holding a public hearing on the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) for the roads system that is to connect across Freshkills Park.  The Supplemental EIS is a document that analyzes the potential environmental impacts of the proposed road alignment, construction and phasing, particularly in the East Park section of Freshkills Park, as well as the impacts of alternatives to the proposed alignment.