Marc Norman has been the director of UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate at the Syracuse University School of Architecture since 2012. The program was created by former dean Mark Robbins to, in Norman’s words, “tie faculty and students to real-world projects in the city and the region.” Norman studied political economics at Berkeley and urban planning at UCLA and spent four years as a project manager for Skid Row Housing Trust, a community development corporation in Los Angeles, before moving to New York. There, he worked for Lehman Brothers, financing affordable housing, and for Deutsche Bank,
The Rotterdam-based firm West 8 has transformed 30 acres on Governors Island into parkland. Buildings have been leveled and parking spaces have been eliminated on the 172-acre island, leaving plenty of open space. When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc around New York Harbor, Governors Island was largely spared, in large part because construction of a new park had involved both adding elevation and installing proper drainage. “I’m glad my landscape architect is Dutch,” says Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island, referring to Adriaan Geuze, the principal of Rotterdam-based West 8. That firm, chosen in a 2007 competition (as
Edited by Kevin Bone. Monacelli Press, May 2014, 224 pages, $40. When Less is More Earth-friendly By reducing green design to a set of checklists that are then used as shopping lists, LEED and similar environmental rating systems may actually increase consumption. And by turning sustainability into the province of consultants, such systems take the responsibility for making buildings ecologically sound out of the hands of architects. It didn’t have to be that way, Kevin Bone makes clear in this important new book. The outgrowth of a 2013 exhibition at New York’s Cooper Union, where Bone is the director of
Photo courtesy Landmarks Illinois The Farnsworth House flooded in September 2008 and remained closed for the rest of the year while repairs were made. Plans to protect Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House by placing it on a hydraulic lift that can be deployed in case of flooding are proceeding at a rate that has taken even the plans’ supporters by surprise. The lift will cost as much as $3 million, according to Robert Silman, a structural engineer whose firm has done preliminary design work on the system. But Silman says that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns
Karim Rashid's residential building on Pleasant Avenue in Manhattan, called HAP 5, broke ground in April. If New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants affordable housing that isn’t cookie-cutter, perhaps he should consult Karim Rashid. At 53, Rashid is best known for designing household products. But now he wants to design households for those products, and he is getting his wish: among his current projects are four Manhattan condo buildings, the first of which is already under construction. Though they are recognizably Rashid’s—with ample curves and Kool-Aid colors—they are also economical, with construction costs of about $250 per square foot.
New York architect James Biber is working with Andrea Grassi of the Milan firm Genius Loci and Susannah Drake of Brooklyn’s dlandstudioon the design of the U.S. pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015. The State Department has chosen a group to design, build, and operate the U.S. pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015. The theme of the Expo is "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”; the U.S. pavilion will focus on American food production, says its architect, James Biber, who runs a small firm in Manhattan’s Woolworth Building. Biber, who has designed several restaurants, including New York’s venerable Gotham Bar
It’s typical for a public institution to announce a big building project with fanfare. But when the same project is dropped, the institution may invoke its right to remain silent.