Now that the Times Square pedestrian plazas are a permanent fixture, the Department of Transportation has selected a temporary installation for Broadway before the site gets a major makeover in 2012. Molly Dilworth, a Brooklyn-based artist known by many for her rooftop paintings, was chosen out of 150 entries for her proposal entitled “Cool Water, Hot Island,” set to be installed in mid-July. Based off of NASA’s infrared data of Manhattan, the project brings attention to the urban heat-island effect, while hopefully lessening the impact. By using cool blues and other lighter colors for the painted river, it will absorb less heat and reflect more light than typical pavement, making the plazas a more comfortable place for tourists and workers alike this summer.

Fast Trash! captured the curiosity of many Omnibus readers, but for those of you who missed our Roosevelt Island meet-up and never made it out to see the exhibition, you can at least get a taste of the history and operation of the pneumatic trash system in the video below:

Nature Abhors a Vacuum from greg whitmore on Vimeo.

We’ve heard about SCAPE studio’s plans for oyster flupsies along the Gowanus as one of the Rising Currents proposals, but now it seems that another threatened ecosystem will experiment with the natural cleansing power of the bivalve for real: oysters just might save Jamaica Bay.

Last fall we told you about the Design Trust’s Call for Fellows for Made in Midtown, their study of the Garment District and its impact on the fashion industry. Now, to celebrate the launch of their website, there will be a series of public events in a pop-up space at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on June 3rd. And if you happen to be free and willing to help out, volunteers will get an invite to their cocktail reception.

We’ve talked about the importance of the census and the inherent difficulties of counting urban populations, but some still wonder how answering those 10 questions will really impact them and their community. Our friends at Next American City can help you out – check out this podcast interview with the Brookings Institution’s Andrew Reamer tackling those very issues.

Part of why developers refused to accede to the demands of a well-organized living wage campaign for its proposed Kingsbridge Armory Project was that retailers would simply take their business elsewhere if the living wage were only mandated in a small section of the Bronx. But now two Bronx politicians are taking the fight citywide. The proposed bill – Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act – would require all public projects that receive more than $100,000 in city funds to provide living wage jobs, or $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without.

With the next round of subway service changes starting at the end of June, the MTA has decided to update the NYC subway map (again). Changes this time include making Manhattan taller and wider, eliminating the service schedule, and improving the visual contrast. Or, if this new map still isn’t clear enough for you, take a cue from the folks at Kick Map and take the cartographic challenge that is the NYC subway system in their own hands.

The first official weekend of summer is here, and recently opened city parks — Hudson River Park, the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, to name a few — are sure to be packed with visitors. But the Observer looks at the funding crises faced by these public spaces once  ribbons have been cut. Long-term maintenance plans are ill- or undefined, and city officials are noted as simply “betting that some unspecified solution will indeed materialize at some future date.”

If you are sticking around in the city for the holiday weekend, take your camera with you on Sunday evening for this spring’s Manhattanhenge.

Top image from the NYC Department of Transportation. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Calling all architects, designers and artists! Now that the city has made the Times Square pedestrian plazas permanent, the Department of Transportation is launching a design competition to “refresh” the existing temporary treatments while the longer, separate process begins to design the permanent plazas and undergo a capital street reconstruction project. The updated temporary plazas are expected to be in use for approximately eight months and will be installed by mid-July. We’ve been keeping our eye on the Green Light for Midtown program since its inception and are excited to see the responses to this RFP. Check out the competition info below and contribute your ideas.

The DOT press release states:

By refreshing the temporary treatments now in place on Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets with a series of economical, temporary surface treatments, the City will ensure these places remain vibrant, inviting and dynamic as the longer design process moves forward to transform these spaces permanently. Professional artists and designers may submit designs. Simultaneously, the capital process will begin to design world-class plazas with ample seating, new paving and underground infrastructure able to accommodate and enhance the signature events that are staged at Times Square throughout the year. The project will also completely reconstruct the roadways in Times Square, which have not been structurally repaired in decades.

“New York City is the world’s greatest stage for urban design and streetscape innovation, and no place offers as much energy and character as Times Square,” said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “As we lay the groundwork for permanent changes, we invite artists and designers to put their own mark on an area that 350,000 pedestrians walk through daily.”

The Request for Proposal (RFP), titled “reNEWable Times Square,” challenges artists and designers living and working in New York City to think boldly about their vision for the temporary plazas, carefully weighing design components along with factors that will enhance pedestrians’ experiences and improve the setting for the many trademark events Times Square houses annually, such as serving as the anchor for New Year’s Eve celebrations around the country. Designs also must accommodate different “use zones” such as fire lanes, crosswalks, seating areas and pedestrian zones.

The deadline to submit proposals is April 16, 2010. The competition is open to professional artists and designers living and working in New York City. For more information, check in with the DOT website — the formal Request for Proposals will be posted by 5pm.


Image: Detail of a photograph by Flickr user m:k.

Midtown loungers and lunchers rejoice!  Despite rumors last week that the Broadway pedestrian plazas had not met expectations, this week city officials announced that the partial closure of seven city blocks to autos will be permanent. Traffic congestion goals were only met partially, with 7% overall faster traffic flow on average on 6th and 7th Avenue, but it looks like significant improvements in both pedestrian and motorist/passenger safety and positive feedback from locals outweighed traffic questinos.  For the official lowdown, see the DOT’s official report here. Plaza pedestrians will have something new to see this weekend — Moorhead & Moorhead have designed The Ice Heart, a project commissioned by the Times Square Alliance for Valentine’s Day, installed at 46th St. and Broadway. The 10 foot tall ephemeral valentine is constructed entirely of masonry scaled blocks of ice and will remain in place until it melts away.

In Omnibus-related news, we see that we aren’t the only ones enthralled by The East Harlem School at Exodus House. Suzanne LaBarre also took an in depth look at the school and the design of its new building for Metropolis’ January issue. For those of you who enjoyed Leni Schwendinger’s account of her underground tour of the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, make sure you check out more of her pics in the photo essay published on her blog. And if you were intrigued by Travis Eby’s review of the Myrtle Avenue Pedestrian Plaza pop-up exhibit, it’s not too late to attend the follow-up workshop hosted by the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership tomorrow, Saturday, February 13th, from 12-5pm. Streetsblog offers its own review of the pedestrian plaza proposals and includes images of a plethora of the submissions, from Aaron Follett’s bus shelter to Christopher Pell’s tent-like open air structures.

Also on Streetsblog, the renovation of the High Bridge restoration is finally moving after a year and a half of delays. The bridge will offer a welcome link between the Bronx and Manhattan as the only bridge that is exclusive to pedestrian and bicycles between the two boroughs. Built in 1848 as a part of the Croton Aqueduct, the bridge helped deliver New York City’s water supply from upstate until it was taken out of service in 1958.

There’s a new bus in town, the Novabus LFS, and it has three doors, low floors, a clean diesel engine and a rear window! The first of the ninety new articulated vehicles that will eventually hit the roads can be found on the Bx12 Select Bus Service (SBS) route which runs between the Bronx’s Bay Plaza/Co-op City and 207th St. in Manhattan. The new design, in conjunction with off-board fare collection and enforcement of bus-only lanes, is expected to significantly reduce wait and travel time along the route, and the advanced technology implemented in the vehicles will keep maintenance and operating costs low. The MTA calls it the bus of the future. Bronx riders, hop on and let us know if you agree. (via Planetizen)

Stage-enthusiasts, take note: The New York Times reports that the Royal Shakespeare Company is constructing a theater inside the Wade Thompson Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory for a six-week, five play run as part of the Lincoln Center festival.  The theater is a near exact replica of the company’s home theater in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-on-Avon. The performances are scheduled to run between July 6 and August 14 in the summer of 2011.

As you watch tonight’s opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, check out the venues and facilities behind the events and festivities. Olympic host cities are challenged with the tremendous task of planning, designing, upgrading and constructing a wide range of venues, facilities and infrastructure to support and house the games and their participants, all the while being sure that the new developments can be repurposed for civic and community use after the games end. Check out Nate Berg’s Places interview with Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian about all of these challenges, the Vancouver model of city building, and the choice to focus on sustainability over architectural exuberance. Then flip through The Infrastructurist’s slideshow of Vancouver’s Olympic construction. Arenas are up first, but stay tuned for looks at the visitor and athlete complexes and the city’s transportation improvements, coming soon.

Despite some new construction and renovation projects that are moving forward in the city, not everything is going so well. The New York Times looks at the financing and control struggles throwing our city’s parks into limbo. As the city’s coffers have become depleted by the recession, city parks are increasingly looking to private options to help finance construction and maintenance. Brooklyn Bridge Park is looking to concession stands and even fees from adjacent housing developments to help raise cash. The problem isn’t limited to New York City — parks nationwide are tackling similar problems.

Stalled construction sites have been one of the most visible indicators of economic woes. Last year the DOB created a task force to address the problem of stalled sites, and last summer started releasing regular reports on dormant projects around the city. Now Councilman Brad Lander has created a website highlighting stalled development in his Brooklyn district, which ranges from Windsor Terrace to Gowanus to Cobble Hill, in an effort to highlight the plight of neighborhoods when developers pull out of construction projects, leaving holes in the urban fabric. If you live in his district, click through and notify him of the conditions of the neighborhood.

Now we send you into the holiday weekend with two of the more unusual items that came across our desks this week — a pirate museum and liquid glass:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Canadian developer Jerry Shefsky is hoping to begin construction on a $100 million aquarium / pirate museum in Times Square if all goes according to plan. As it’s slated to be located inside a seven-story skyscraper at 11 Times Square, the attraction will largely be made up by educational exhibitions and the swashbuckling museum instead of the heavy water tanks you typically find in aquariums.

Physorg.com published an article with a hyperbolic title that we’re tempted to believe — “Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything.” Applications for the product are being researched at the Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, Germany and it is already being tested in the wider world by organizations as varied as a hospital, a train company and even a German burger joint. (via kottke)

Images, top-bottom: Times Square, courtesy of Flickr user Jack Amick. Novabus LFS, courtesy of the MTA. A stalled development at 333 Carroll Street, referred to by neighborhood residents as “The Hell Building,” via stalleddevelopment.com. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

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.

The subway grate Conrad and Walshe performed on top of is a permanent public sound installation, entitled Times Square, created by Max Neuhaus in 1977. The sound work continues to be heard 24 hours a day, seven days a week thanks to the support of the DIA Arts Foundation, the MTA’s Arts for Transit, and the Times Square Alliance. The Neuhaus work underscored the performance. And while it is hard to compete with a naked cowboy, a bald eagle, and a famous actress (all of which were present during the performance), most of the people passing through Times Square were drawn to the harmony that Conrad and Walshe created between the howling and chirping of the intonarumori and the Neuhaus installation. While we normally think of musical performances around subway stations as busking rather than an intentional intervention in public space, perhaps this performance, and the crowd assembled to hear it, supports Neuhaus’ theory that, “Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as what we see.” Perhaps it might provoke us to rethink our relationship to the urban environment, and the senses that define that relationship.

Besides, it is still impressive that the futurist sound – developed a century ago – can still emerge above the rest in one of the most raucous intersections in the world. The contemporary wooden sound machines that Conrad and Walshe played are based on the original intonarumori, invented in 1913 by the Italian futurist and sound artist Luigi Russolo, and arguably the first analog synthesizer. Russolo’s intent was to produce beautiful industrial noise (try to imagine the sound of a skyscraper being dragged across Manhattan—that is its desired effect). These instruments were destroyed during WWII, but as Conrad stated in a conversation after the performance, “They were found in Italian graves…still bearing the stains of the vegetables thrown at them during the first Futurist performances.”  Replicas were designed under the specialized supervision of Luciano Chessa.

The Futurist Manifesto celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year. Making sense of it today feels a bit backwards but we do it, among other reasons, because it informs our current culture of noise music, performance, and public art intervention. This brief high-profile buskers’ performance/birthday party was planned in conjunction with the Performa 09 Biennial “to sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt.”  What better way to do it than with noise music, a form that helps people make sense out of the chaos around them?

After the show, Conrad offered an affectation of the manifesto.  “We dont like WAR,” he roared and turned to refer to the absent military recruitment station.  “It used to be there…” he trailed as though he didn’t know what to make of the disappeared prop. Naturally he lost his momentum: “Are you my organizers?” he asked us in a playful, defeated tone. “No, we are your spectators!”  we responded for fear he’d start ordering us around. Then he turned his personal video camera away from himself and angled it on us, announcing, “You are the organizers of the future! Tell everyone!”

Photos and video excerpt by Veronica Kavass.

Veronica Kavass is a curator based in New York.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Between the gushing reviews of a new urban space and glorious pictures of pedestrian packed streets, it’s easy to forget that the city’s “Greenlight for Midtown” program was primarily billed as a way to reduce traffic congestion throughout Manhattan by the most counter-intuitive means: taking away space from cars.

Although induced demand and its inverse, sometimes called “traffic shrinkage,” have become pretty well accepted in transportation-planning circles, to have a concrete (and beach chair-filled) example of it at the crossroads of the world is an obvious boon for those who wish to make the case that closing streets to cars, rationalizing intersections and improving the pedestrian environment can be a sensible solution to vehicle congestion.

Broadway’s angular scramble from 72nd Street to Union Square has been an ink stain on the crisp, angular and pen filled breast pocket of Manhattan traffic engineers for decades. It cuts across the Avenues making odd intersections and forcing strange signal patterns, as well as drawing peripheral traffic into the city’s core. Nowhere was this more obvious than Herald Square and Times Square, precisely where the City has redesigned Broadway.

Although the Transportation Department won’t release a comprehensive traffic analysis for sometime, anecdotal evidence suggests that the redesign has been a success, not only in its much-lauded efforts to give pedestrians a bit more breathing room, but also as a counter-intuitive traffic curative for all the world to see.


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.

Graham T. Beck is a writer and a critic based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He rides a bike to work.

New York City’s plan to close Times Square to vehicles looks like a triumph. The chaise-lounges [or chaises-longues, depending on whom you ask - Ed.] the city dropped at the Crossroads of the World on May 24th have stayed popular throughout the week, like day-glo brigadiers in a battle against delivery trucks. (I saw two tourists taking pictures of their feet on the pavement on May 26.) At the same time, the luxuriant plans that Gehry Partners concocted for developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project are failing to keep the project financially credible – and the latest rumor is that a no-fuss plan from Ellerbe Becket for the project’s focal basketball arena may bump Gehry’s bundle of crumples.

So: plastic chaise-lounges win a wave of rear ends, while titanium arenas leave the court with a hobble and nary an ovation. What’s the takeaway for urban design? I say it’s an axiom: people want to be together. If they come together under a roof shaped like a hoopoe bird, fine. But in an era of lean government budgets, the plan that gets people together quickly and cheaply should guide policymaking.

A New York that depends on fickle corporations, part-time residents and private partners for big chunks of its tax base should make itself a fun place to be. Happily, fun translates intuitively to ‘free of car fumes,’ ‘planned with clear sight lines,’ and ‘open to the public.’ Most of the city will necessarily remain a web of conduits for goods, executives en route to wherever, and musicians looking for a gig. By bracketing parts of the city as pure public space, the Bloomberg administration has made a pithy argument about why global corporations and jetsetters should stay here. They should stay here, the chaise-lounges say, because they can tinker with what “here” is. That’s a more democratic premise than the ones driving light-rail in Denver or ersatz Mayberry in Florida. It’s also a more replicable strategy than the one behind Atlantic Yards.

Mind you, the Times Square project also succeeds for having a narrow writ. Nobody will blame the chaise-lounges for failing to trigger consumer confidence or to inspire a rush of mixed-income housing. But they do reinforce an urban-design principle we can see shining through all the stunted construction sites: if you reconnect people without obliging them to shop or watch jocks, you can make a convincing start toward reinventing a 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.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.