App-lovers take note: the NYC Economic Development Corporation has presented the winners of its NYC BigApps contest. The winners, who received cash prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000, include the grand prize-winning WayFinder NYC, an augmented reality application that helps users find the nearest subway station, Taxihack, which allows users to share reviews of their taxi drivers, and the Popular Choice Award winner NYC Way, which combines over 30 iPhone applications that sort, by proximity, information about nearby swimming pools, wifi hotspots, post offices, emergency rooms, street vendors, and more.

The pedestrian plazas in Midtown have people buzzing once again, and this time not about the chaise-longues. The New York Times got word from an unidentified city official that the anticipated traffic flow reduction has not met the DOT’s expectations. It is not clear whether the experimental project will be made permanent, but in the meantime both supporters and detractors are eager to see the data made public. Streetsblog reminds us that traffic flow is not the only indicator of success for this project, noting a significant reduction in pedestrian deaths in the area and the support of local businesses and such groups as the Times Square Alliance.

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Double Down on Density has sparked quite a bit of conversation this week, both here on the Omnibus and around the web. Questions are being asked and comments are being made about the Northeast Corridor, how regional configurations come into play, how infrastructure spending is often cast as “debt and pork,” and our nation’s consistent cultural tendency towards highways and sprawl. The discussion, with Chakrabarti’s responses, continues — join in. There is plenty more to talk about.

Also garnering some attention lately is Vanessa Keith’s recent feature Clip-on Architecture. Fans take note: her piece was adapted from a more extensive article that is now available for download here (PDF). And in other climate-aware news, a panel of experts this week presented over 100 recommendations for how to make New York City’s building codes greener. The measures are referred to as “suggestions” for now, and the panel acknowledged the need for financing and incentives for developers, but Bloomberg sees this as a key advancement in his goal to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2030. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.

In other transportation news, consulting firm Frost and Sullivan released a report last week that car sharing is up 117% since 2007 (via TreeHugger). Additionally, Streetsblog reports that the Seward Park Houses foray into community-specific car sharing has been wildly popular. The program is run by Hertz and makes use of two of Seward Park’s parking spaces, with claims that each shared car replaces 14 personal cars. Lower East Side residents take note: The program is now open to the general public.

We’ll end this roundup with some fun with maps, photos and archi-art for your weekend perusal. Map lovers, expect to waste some serious time exploring both the New York Public Library’s brand new georectification (!) maps site (via Gothamist) and the 1924 aerial map on NYCityMap (via Curbed) — though Omnibus readers might remember (as Steven Romalewski mentioned in the Curbed comments) that OASIS offers a look back as far as 1609 and explorations of more recent development, in greater detail, from 1996 to the present. For an alternately angled New York City view, WNYC has posted two photo slideshows by Stephen Nessen of underground happenings: one of Grand Central from one hundred feet below and one of the tunnels for the 7 train extension (via The Infrastructurist). Finally, we recently discovered the blog butdoesitfloat and its architecture-centric art eye candy. We highly recommend perusing the archive for a stunning collection of images ranging from a David Maisel photography series on mining to an unearthed LIFE magazine photoessay on Le Corbusier in his studio:

Top image: 100 feet below Grand Central Station, photo by Stephen Nessen, via WNYC. Bottom image: Photo by David Maisel, via butdoesitfloat.com. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

There’s a new, bright green poster that will be making an appearance around the city in the near future, encouraging people to take the stairs and ”Burn Calories, not Electricity.” In addition to reducing our carbon footprints, the city is offering us another way to help the environment and to help ourselves; reducing body fat.

Or maybe the city simply wants to “promote physical activity and health through design”- the subtitle to the Active Design Guidelines, a new publication and policy initiative released last Wednesday at the Center for Architecture. The commissioners of five city departments gathered for the public launch to make brief remarks about the guidelines and to underscore their importance in tackling the problem of obesity and chronic diseases resulting from lack of physical activity.

Four of the departments, represented by Janette Sadik-Khan of Transportation, David Burney of Design and Construction, Amanda Burden of City Planning, and Adrian Benepe of Parks & Recreation, have each been implementing policy and initiatives to create a greener and more livable city over the last few years. The Active Design Guidelines are an overlay to these initiatives, which adds the dimension of public health to the definition of a sustainable city. Originally conceived during the Fit City Challenge in 2006, a conference organized by the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter and the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, it grew into an inter-agency project of the city. The guidelines are a joint effort of all these agencies as well as other professional and academic institutions to raise awareness about the public health crisis of chronic disease, and to set down a clear, simple set of recommendations about how to address it in the built environment.

The fifth commissioner, Thomas Farley of Health and Mental Hygiene, acted as a client of sorts for the guidelines, and provided the context for the effort. He began his comments by listing the medical benefits of increased physical activity. These include reduced risks for a number of chronic diseases as well as reduced depression, and a reduced rate of cognitive decline in the elderly. These health issues are the most prevalent and most expensive to treat in our society, and something as simple as walking ten blocks a day might be one of the most effective prescriptions for them out there. He likened the current health crisis of chronic disease and obesity to the epidemics of infectious diseases in the 1800’s. Those diseases were defeated through design and infrastructural changes to the city, such as zoning regulations, light and air requirements, and clean water delivery. Similarly, Farley believes that it is through design that chronic disease and obesity will be controlled or defeated. He delivered the most striking comment of the evening, stating that in our current urban environments, we have engineered out physical activity. According to him, these guidelines represent the re-engineering of the choice for physical activity back into the city.

When reading through the actual text, I was struck by its common sense. The guidelines are organized by scale of design intervention, from urban planning down to architectural details, and can be implemented with the aid of checklists. On the whole, there was nothing very new, nothing very radical. From the perspective of a design professional, they seem almost obvious. These guidelines, however, are meant for a wider audience. The entire publication was designed to be accessible to the general public in order to raise awareness of design’s role in public health. The recommendations rely heavily on evidence-based research in order to make the connection between the design of our environment and health clear to all audiences. It may not be obvious to the residents of neighborhoods without grocery stores that a lack of dietary choice has a direct correlation to high incidences of diabetes. There are many cities in this country with no sidewalks, bike lanes, or public transit, and the health benefits of providing transportation alternatives may not be obvious. It may not be obvious to us New Yorkers, who pride ourselves on the walkability of our city, that 43% of our city’s schoolchildren are overweight or obese. The potential importance and impact of the guidelines becomes clearer from this perspective, because good planning and design as well as public awareness and pressure are required to implement them. The recommendations are not just good for the environment or good design moves. They create a city whose infrastructure is designed to keep us fit, active, and healthy. They address pressing social problems through fairly innocuous and inoffensive measures that are understandable by everyone and can be implemented at all scales. If such seemingly intransigent and difficult problems such as the rate of type II diabetes or cognitive decline in the elderly can be addressed by such simple, common sense recommendations, then we have a real chance to solve them. In the process, we can take a few steps towards creating an environmentally sustainable city that is also socially sustainable.

A few hours after the public launch of the Active Design Guidelines here in New York, President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address. In an aside which drew the evening’s loudest applause, the President took a moment to acknowledge the First Lady’s new public health campaign to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity. Was it coincidence that the city chose this date to launch the guidelines? Probably not. Just as other municipalities and regions in this country have looked to New York in the past for answers on issues of zoning and historic preservation, for example, New York City is poised to lead in this new initiative as well. And as the debate about how to provide better, more efficient healthcare continues, perhaps designers here in New York City have an answer; a prescription that requires no doctor and no insurance coverage – just a livable, efficient, sustainable city.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C., a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.

This week brought news that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty are handing over Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village to creditors to avoid bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal lists the estimated value of the properties at $1.8 billion, just three and a half years after the $5.4 billion deal to purchase the site in 2006, and lists a few of the investors facing losses, ranging from the California Public Employee’s Retirement System to the Church of England. The New York Times explains why this is “a big black eye…but it’s not the end for Tishman” and investigates what this all means for the tenants. And the Post takes a look at who is thinking about buying the property now.

In waterfront news, $8.9 million in grants is being awarded by New York’s Department of State to waterfront revitalization projects in New York City. The Waterfront Alliance summarizes what projects will receiving funding — including the installation of MWA Eco-Docks, the implementation of the Bronx’s Shoelace Park Master Plan, Brooklyn Navy Yard improvements, climate change education programs, $1.5 million for the Randall’s Island Living Shoreline, two Jamaica Bay projects, and a seed farm and tree nursery at Freshkills — and points out that the announcement is also noteworthy for demonstrating “a major commitment to urban waterfront access” by the State. Check out the complete list with more details on MWA’s Waterwire.

The Make a Difference in Two Days lovers out there will appreciate this DIY intervention in Astoria that helps pedestrians cross a filthy pool of water that has submerged a heavily-trafficked sidewalk. An artist who goes by “Posterchild” constructed the “Astoria Scum River Bridge” out of an old work bench found on a curb as a gift to the neighborhood and was recently awarded a commendation from the office of Councilman Peter F. Vallone, Jr. (which came with a promise to help get the leaking pipe fixed).

Downtown Brooklyn residents: plan ahead. In 2019 your stretch of the BQE will be closing for a complete reconstruction. While it’s a bit early to start planning alternate routes, this announcement gives us occasion to think about the challenges of tackling significant infrastructure reconstruction projects in the middle of densely populated and highly-traveled neighborhoods. Streetsblog attended the stakeholder advisory council meeting for the project where the discussion often focused on how to balance neighborhood quality of life with the need to address the existing hazardous roadway conditions.

Outside of New York, high-speed rail is the hot transportation topic of the week now that details have been released about where the $8 billion of stimulus money allotted for HSR is headed. Much of the money is going to California, Florida and Illinois, with the Northeast receiving just $485 million to upgrade 7 major corridors in the region. The Infrastructurist points us to a post by Robert Puentes at the Brookings Institute that explains why prioritizing the Tampa-Orlando route makes sense and how this program is “nothing short of a sea change for how Washington thinks about infrastructure investments.” Meanwhile Wired digests it all in their feature about the history and future of “superfast bullet trains” in the U.S.

Finally we send you off into the weekend with a little toe-tapping video we’re calling “Me and Julio Down by the PS1 Pavilion” (aka SO-IL’s winning entry for the 2010 MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program):

SO-IL PS1 Pole Dance from SO-IL on Vimeo.

(Side note: Also on SO-IL’s Vimeo page you can see two quick clips of their installations for the League’s 2007 Beaux Arts Ball, Smoke and Mirrors.)


Image: Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village by Flickr user Carly Hoskins. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The value of conceiving criticism in this way, it seems to me, is that it allows for and acknowledges that certain buildings and projects may be perfectly elegant or beautiful solutions to perfectly trivial questions (think Meier’s tower on Grand Army Plaza) and, conversely, that there may be difficult or unsuccessful designs which nevertheless engage questions that have much greater relevance or significance to the values the critic prizes. Because criticism is perforce a statement of values; it is in that sense that criticism is at root a utopian venture and a bully pulpit. If we weren’t interested in remaking the world it wouldn’t matter much what we said about it.

In this vein, it is also important, from time to time, to write about bad buildings and failed projects, to use them as counter-exemplars and to explicate what it is in their design and realization that makes them a negative standard. This is difficult for a profession bred on the false politesse of ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything’. We need to understand what makes bad buildings bad, and what the steady accretion of poorly conceived, boring, venal and badly built projects does to our cities and our souls. We need to name names. Or else, give up altogether.

There is also an element of time in all this; Henry A. Millon, one of the best critical historians of his generation, used to say that history could not be written before 50 years had passed, the implication being that the circumstances which frame a project’s gestation could not themselves be looked at historically until a certain contemporaneous reverberation had dissipated. The prerequisite of history is distance and a consequent lack of immediate familiarity; context must become strange again, or more precisely, we must become estranged from it, for the methods of historical analysis to be deployed. By this standard we are only just able to begin to analyze the projects of the 1960’s, to look seriously at Saarinen’s TWA terminal for example. And, in fact, this is exactly what is happening, the Museum of the City of New York’s revisionist Saarinen exhibition and the current reappraisals of Rudolph and Stone following by a few years the welter of texts and exhibitions that had us look afresh at the icons of the previous decade, Lever House and the Seagram Building, etc. (to look only within the limits of Manhattan for examples).

Criticism of course is but the first draft of history, not the thing itself. It is journalistic in the original Latin/Francophone sense of the word — ‘of today.’ Its historical aspirations, such as they are, can only be to serve as the raw material of some future, more dispassionate, analysis. But in exchange criticism can — must — make full claim to passion, to the convictions, enthusiasms and biases that animate discussion today, now, in full understanding that once our passions are spent they too will become the subject of more broadly contextual and quieter historical methods. Deprived of any pretense to history, criticism has nothing left but bias: without bias criticism is worthless.

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of posts that ponder the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections.  An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

Tuesday night at Metropolitan Exchange, John McLaughlin, Director of Environmental Services for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, presented the lecture “Restoring Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania and Fountain Landfills” as part of the Freshkills Park Talks lecture series. The landfills – on Jamaica Bay, near JFK – were opened in the ’50s, closed in the ’80s, and capped and rehabilitated in the ’00s.  While they look like pristine parkland today, they represent a dark chapter in New York’s environmental history: both sites are listed as Class 2 Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites, which means that beneath their surfaces lie unknown quantities of toxins like benzene and dioxin.

Much of McLaughlin’s talk was Landfill 101: he described the type of membrane used to cap the toxins (40mm plastic), the varieties of topsoil chosen to cover the cap, and the plant species used to repopulate the site. He described the difference between landfills receiving municipal solid waste (like Freshkills), and those receiving more insidious toxins, like Pennsylvania and Fountain.  What lies inside a landfill determines its capping and effluent strategies, but interestingly, it also determines the site’s potential for eventual reintegration into larger sociological and political networks. For instance, public access to the sites is currently a flashpoint between DEP and representatives of East New York. The former want to make sure the site is absolutely safe before opening to the public; the latter want to secure open space for one of Brooklyn’s most park-deprived communities.

I found McLaughlin’s definition of ecological restoration salient: “the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded.” I couldn’t help but think of the parallel to urban ‘ecosystems’ like Detroit or the South Bronx – different kinds of sites where designers’ efforts are similarly needed to restore damaged ecologies, via a delicate intervention strategy like that described by McLaughlin. Landfills are simply the most egregious of past misdeeds, and therefore symbolize the daunting scale of our challenges.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Seems you can’t go anywhere these days without hearing mention of urban agriculture. Urban agriculture is where the politics of food production, the sustainability of food distribution, the use of public space, and the health of both our bodies and our communities all come together. So when it’s done right, what’s not to love? When we launched this website last year, our pilot feature was a five-part video documentary that profiled different characters and processes in the story of East New York’s agricultural renaissance. We did this because the story of urban agriculture rarely includes its very urban complexity: land use laws, community organizing, geographic analysis, not to mention farming know-how. But its complexity and local specificity shouldn’t preclude comprehensive planning. Which is one of the reasons the Design Trust for Public Space is partnering with one of the city’s most successful urban farms, Red Hook’s Added Value, and with its biggest landowner, the city itself, to create the country’s first urban-scale plan for urban agriculture. And they need your help. Apply for one of these two prestigious fellowships in the fields of metrics/evaluation and policy/sustainable development for the chance to play a part. The Fellows will work closely with each other, and with Design Trust staff, who will manage the project.  The plan is to “inventory existing agricultural activity in the five boroughs and assess underutilized arable land in order to identify opportunities for City agencies to support urban agriculture.” The anticipated timeframe for the project is 12 months, beginning in March 2010. Hurry up and apply, applications are due February 3rd.

The Fellows’ work is outlined in the pdf attached; visit the Design Trust’s site for more information.