WHY’S EVERYONE HATING ON CHRIS WARD?
Michael Powell, Gotham columnist for The New York Times, questions the accuracy and consistency of calls for reform at the Port Authority issued by Governors Christie and Cuomo in the face of what Chris Ward, the former head of the bi-state agency, managed to achieve at Ground Zero in his four-year tenure. In the article (but not in regional politics) the final word goes to Mayor Bloomberg, who dismisses the way an audit ordered by the governors characterizes spending under Ward’s leadership, pointing out that the “site is perhaps the most complex construction project in the history of the world, legally, politically, engineering-wise.”

US INTERSTATES, TUBE-MAP STYLE
By systematically compressing distances and limiting all angles to 45 or 90 degrees in his map of the London Underground in 1931, Harry Beck, an engineering draftsman who devised the scheme in his spare time, revolutionized urban cartography and created an icon of modern design. New York’s answer to the diagrammatic Tube map, designed by Massimo Vignelli in 1972, was passed over in favor of more geographic fidelity in the current version, designed by Michael Hertz in 1979. But the influence of Beck’s design still looms large in information graphics, and this week Co.Design highlights a smart and useful take on the US highway system whose clarity benefits from the Tube map’s principles of simplicity and elegance.

WHAT SPELLS ROMANCE BETTER THAN “AN INTERACTIVE, URBAN EMOTICON?”
Times Square has never been high on subtlety, and the architectural installations that appear when Valentine’s day is nigh — part of the robust public art program that we explored with Glenn Weiss last year – are no exception. In years past, designers of the iconic heart have included Gage / Clemenceau and Moorhead & Moorhead. This year, Bjarke Ingels has assembled a heart cube out of 400 special LED-filled tubes to create what Architizer has called “an interactive, urban emoticon.” So for those of you who like a little public art with your romance, bring your valentine through Father Duffy Square. Check out photos on The Observer.

DESIGNING GOVERNMENT SERVICES
When Laura Forlano investigated the emerging field of service design in 2010, the clients cited as the profession’s early adopters were primarily in the private sector: finance, health care, media. But often the services most in need of a design tune-up are those provided by government. This week in The Architects’ Newspaper, Branden Klayko looks at the work of a new non-profit called the Public Policy Lab to “to improve interactions between public services and those served by them through research, advocacy, and technical assistance.” First up, an “out-of-the-box” collaboration with the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and Parsons’ DESIS lab to streamline how the agency interacts with developers, property owners and residents. The Public Policy Lab also has its sight set on improving user experience at the DMV. We wish them luck.

MAKING PLANNING POPULAR
This week we heard from Shin-pei Tsay about how urban planners could intervene directly in neighborhoods, just as artists and architects have increasingly found ways to do in recent years. Meanwhile, BLDGBLOG points to an exhibit that recently closed in London that aims to make planning not only more relevant and responsive to community needs, but also more popular, principled and understood.

"Wendy" HWKN's design for MoMA / PS1 | Image courtesy of HWKN via ArtInfo

WARM-UP 2012 DESIGNERS ANNOUNCED
While the summer may seem impossibly far away, the announcement this week of the winners of MoMA / PS1′s coveted Young Architects commission means we now know what one recurring summer-in-the-city tradition will look like in 2012: HWKN’s design, “a doozy, a mass of fabric spikes christened ‘Wendy,’” has been selected for its innovative merger of green engineering — the structure will literally clean the air — and the exuberant shelter and shade it will provide for summer party-goers. The air cleaning function is accomplished by coating the structure  with Titania nanoparticles, in which sunlight “triggers a catalytic and chemical reaction that neutralizes nitrogen dioxide.” Read a Q&A with the designers, Mark Kushner and Matthias Hollwich, on ArtInfo.

EVENTS and TO DOs

FORECLOSED OPENS
Next Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art’s anticipated new exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, will open to the public. On view will be the work on five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers — led by MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac, and Zago Architecture – who worked in public workshops at MoMA PS1 “to envision new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs.” In advance of that event, Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay, two members of team Studio Gang, authored an op-ed in today’s Times that looks at the under-reported phenomenon of new immigrants in suburban America as an inroad to understanding the role — and responsibility — of design and urban planning in redressing some of the damage wrought by the foreclosure crisis and our country’s extravagant land use patterns that precipitated it.

GRID LOVE CONTINUES…
Many thanks to the 87 people from around the world who submitted to our first essay competition, which urged writers to reflect on the Manhattan street grid as a paradigm, rubric or muse for urban life. We’ll announce the winner(s) early next month, but in the meantime, if your fascination with the grid and its evolution over the past 200 years is not yet sated, you have until April 15th to check out a pair of exhibitions at the Museum of City of New York (organized in collaboration with the Architectural League), and next week, the Museum is hosting a panel discussion with traffic and planning experts called “Gridlock!: Congestion and Flow on New York City Streets” that will look at the reshaping of traffic flows in the city thanks to the introductions of pedestrian malls, bike lanes, bus-only lanes and other traffic engineering innovations. Wednesday, February 15th, 6:30 pm at the Museum of the City of New York. For more information or to book tickets, click here.

LIVE INTERVIEW @ STUDIO_X: STANLEY GREENBERG
When we spoke with Stanley Greenberg about his photographs of infrastructure and construction projects, he mentioned his forthcoming book Time Machines, which chronicles the machinery of large-scale physics experiments around the world. The book is now available, and  he’ll be sharing stories, images and reflections on his process next week. Join him Thursday, February 16th, 6:30pm, at Studio-X New York.

DELANCEY UNDERGROUND / LOWLINE
That same night, the Tenement Museum is hosting Dan Barasch and James Ramsey to discuss the ”history, current state, and potential future of the abandoned trolley terminal below Delancey Street” and to ask if “it can be transformed into a cutting edge subterranean green space for the Lower East Side.” Thursday, February 16th, 6:30pm, at the Tenement Museum.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Modi Research Group / Columbia University | click image to access interactive map

MAPPING ENERGY USE IN THE CITY
In an effort to show the ways in which New York City dwellers consume energy, Vijay Modi, professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University, and his student Bianca Howard have generated an interactive map that demonstrates energy consumption throughout the five boroughs at the block level. The map invites its users to explore the differences in energy consumption patterns throughout the city. It’s no surprise that Midtown Manhattan is the biggest consumer in the city that never sleeps. But it is more than a little alarming when Modi explains that Manhattan uses more energy than Kenya, and that the entirety of New York State consumes more than the whole Sub-Saharan region, a statistic that he hopes will change as awareness grows.

STEVEN SIEGEL’S NEW YORK
For more than thirty years, Steven Siegel has photographed and filmed the changing streetscapes of the five boroughs of New York City. The folks at Gothamist have been diligently mining his photo and film archives and interpret his images as documenting a fundamental shift from “from utter destruction to Disneyfication.” Siegel promises to continue recording these changes, and we promise to keep checking out his body of work as it evolves.

Newtown Creek Digester Eggs: The Art of Human Waste | David Leitner from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

FOCUS / FORWARD
For another series of artful and informative perspectives, check out this collection of short documentaries by leading filmmakers, each one spotlighting innovative people and projects addressing a broad range of challenges — a topic and approach near and dear to the Omnibus’ heart. Gary Hustwit — whom we interviewed about his urban design documentary Urbanized — is among the filmmakers, working with Jessica Edwards on a profile of the Delaware County Landfill in Upstate New York, an extremely efficient facility able to divert 70% of incoming waste through recycling and composting and able to convert the landfill gas it captures into enough electricity to power almost 400 homes. And among the projects featured is the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility, a place we’ve been following since we first visited the Nature Walk designed by George Trakas that rings the facility and provides a generous and beautiful public space as well as access to the water.

AS THE MILLIONTREES PROGRAMS EXPANDS, BURDENS GROW
As one of many PlaNYC initiatives, the MillionTrees program’s goal was to plant and care for more than one million trees across New York City in order to enhance the emotional and physical well being of city dwellers and the health of the urban environment that surrounds them. Although over 500,000 trees have now been planted, severe weather conditions and the challenges of ongoing stewardship have constrained the organization’s budget and plans for the program. Although MillionTrees has been successful in planting, the burden of maintenance has suffered from budget cuts. The New York City administration is preparing to plant another 500,000 and it is relying on many volunteers, community residents and neighborhood non-profit groups to help.

ARCHITECTURE ON SCREEN
This Friday and Saturday, the Center for Architecture in partnership with MUSE Film and Television will be screening international productions on architecture extracted from the 2011 Montreal International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). Be sure to check out these innovative films filled with historical, political and poetic dimensions. For more information about the event, visit the Center for Architecture’s event page.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

Rendering by MIR and Snohetta, courtesy of NYC DOT

TIMES SQUARE PLAZAS MADE PERMANENT
On Tuesday, September 27, Manhattan’s Community Board 5 met with Craig Dykers of Snøhetta to review their plans for the Times Square pedestrian plazas of the not-so-distant future. No more lawn chairs, no more paint as marker for where the car space ends. The plan calls for a leveling of the streets and curbs, to create a continuous pedestrian surface of dark concrete. Inlaid into the pavers will be steel rivets to reflect the bright lights of the big city. Benches and street furniture will provide seating as well as space demarcation to aid pedestrian flow, making the plazas useful as lounge spaces and as thoroughfares. The intent, according to Dykers, is to make the space seem larger and less cluttered. NYC’s Department of Design and Construction hopes to get started next fall with a completion date of 2014. Check out more of the coverage from DNAinfo and the A|N Blog.

WEEKENDS WITH VIGNELLI
The Vignelli map is back. In 1972, graphic designer Massimo Vignelli created a subway map for New York City that was a favorite of designers but, because it eschewed geographic faithfulness for legibility, was deemed too geographically inaccurate by some. With the release of the MTA’s new Weekender website, the MTA has brought the Vignelli map back into use. The Weekender is a website devoted to helping people plan their weekend subway trips with ease despite service changes. The site features a trip planner, so that the MTA can “do the navigating for you – around any service change”, tabs to look up service by station, line or borough, and visual navigation through an interactive version of the iconic map.

fasttrash.org

FASTTRASH.ORG
Fast Trash is now a website! Last year we spoke with architecture, writer and curator Juliette Spertus about the exhibition of Fast Trash, an exploration of Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic trash collection system and her ongoing project to expose and document complex infrastructural systems. Now the exhibition has become a website that gives readers access to Spertus’ research and documentation of the exhibition and provides a space for discussion of larger questions of how we can radically rethink how garbage is moved through our city. Check it out at fasttrash.org.

EVENTS and TO DOs

VELONOTTE NYC
How do you “turn cities into nocturnal open air museums experienced on a bike”? Velonotte! On Saturday, October 1, the Storefront for Art and Architecture will host the kickoff of VELONIGHT NYC. In the early hours of Sunday, October 2, from midnight until 5:30am, a bicycle tour of the urban and cultural history of New York City will take cyclists to 20 planned stops throughout the city. An audio guide led by architects, architectural historians and cultural historians will be broadcast live over a proprietary radio frequency straight into participants’ headphones. Contributors to the tour include Jean Louis Cohen, Peter Eisenman, Ken Jackson, Rem Koolhas and Guy Nordenson, among others. Read more about the kickoff event here, and more about the tour here.

The Archtober Calendar

ARCHTOBER
What day is it tomorrow? Why, it’s Archtober 1st. New York’s Architecture and Design Month — Archtober — is a month-long festival of architectural design activities, programs and exhibitions that kicks off tomorrow. The initiative was spearheaded by the AIA NY Chapter, openhousenewyork and the Architecture & Design Film Festival, and plenty of cultural institutions from across the city are participating, including us here at the Architectural League and familiar faces like the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the Design Trust for Public Space, Friends of the High Line, the Institute for Urban Design, MoMA, Storefront, Van Alen and many more. Find out more about the dozens and dozens of events taking place over the next 31 days here and start planning your month around celebrating all things architecture and design.

Freshkills Park+ in action

FRESHKILLS PARK+
This Sunday, October 2, from 11am to 4pm, Freshkills Park will be open for the second annual Sneak Peak, complete with kayak tours, walking tours, biking, kite flying and making, a craft market, live music, public art, games and food trucks. This year’s event also marks the release of Freshkills Park+, a new augmented reality application. Because of the landfill infrastructure that lies beneath the park, signage can’t be installed. The Freshkills Park+ app allows visitors to learn more about projects under construction, nearby activities or surrounding natural environments and serves as a wayfinding tool throughout the 2,200-acre site.  Read more about the app here, the event here or check out photos of last year’s event here.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

PLACE PULSE
When we familiarize ourselves with new surroundings, we often rely on our instincts more than guidebooks or demographic studies. We feel it out, without consciously asking ourselves the questions of whether a neighborhood seems safe, active, clean, unique. Place Pulse, a new tool from the Macro Connections group out of the MIT Media Lab, wants to tap into these urban perceptions through online crowdsourcing. Place Pulse shows photos from cities all over the world and asks users to rate the pictures (without geographical knowledge) based on a uniqueness, safety and class level. The data from the ratings is then geographically coded, creating a database of crowdsourced gut reactions. Read more at Co.Design.

KEY TO THE (AFFORDABLE) CITY
NYCHA and HPD have recently partnered in a search to find a private developer to retrofit the Randolph Houses on West 114th Street into a mix of 140 new public housing units and at least 155 affordable housing units. The properties are yet another entry in the infamously long and ever deteriorating list of “white flight”-era abandoned housing. Built in the 1890s to house the influx of European immigrants, the tenements today are mostly vacant, with only 109 of 452 units currently occupied.  This project will help to reoccupy an “entire block of historical architectural significance,” and help to repair many units that have been subdivided into arrangements that are dangerous and/or illegal. By cross-subsidizing the project with a private developer, the city is able to get more bang for their buck out of the new developments, despite a net reduction in the number of units in the buildings. For more on what makes this deal innovative and perhaps exemplary (the development marks the first time “affordable and public housing units will be intermixed within the same buildings”), read Matt Chaban’s article in The Observer.

LET’S GET CRITICAL
Let’s Get Critical, a new collection of critical writing curated by Alexandra Lange, debuted this week. The premise of what Lange refers to as a “short-form blog” is to create a centralized location where one can always find enjoyable and interesting cultural commentary. Similar to other quality article aggregators, Lange aims to have each featured piece on the new site “well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky.” For more criticism, check out Lange’s Let’s Get Critical, or revisit our On Criticism series.

CRAINIUM
Crain’s New York, a valuable source for reporting on all things business and industry in New York City, releases an annual report on the city’s economy entitled “CityFacts.” This year, they’re also offering an online resource that allows readers to explore the enormous amount of data they have mined for the issue. CityFacts is devoted to showing, in an attractive and legible way, how New York City is doing financially, educationally, demographically, commercially and transportation-ly. Learn more about this year’s CityFacts from the “This Week in Crain’s” podcast, keep up with Crain’s numbers-based news on their Twitter feed @StatsAndTheCity, or check out the CityFacts mini-site here.

PIN-UP
Everybody knows the red pin that marks locations in Google Maps. It marks the starting point of a trip or an important location. It casts a shadow on the map and, notably, if you just type in the name of a city, it picks a point somewhere within the city that Google Maps has decided is the center of the city, casting that shadow on the surrounding city features. In an effort to show us just how much the digital world is bleeding into the physical, artist Aram Bartholl is installing “life-size” map markers in the Google Maps centers of a handful of cities. Read more at Architizer, or check out an interview with the artist on the Rhizome blog.

IRT RIDES AGAIN
If you are like us, then your favorite part of the MTA Transit Museum is walking through the old trains, looking at the ads, and imagining what life was like in an era when people got to ride on them. In some ways it must have been wonderful (padded seats), in others, less so (no air-conditioning). Well, you’re in luck! The IRT is back! (for the month of September). The team at HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, in an effort to advertise their period piece drama, has retrofitted a 1917 IRT train to run along the 2/3 track in Manhattan from noon to 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays starting September 3rd.

EVENTS & TO-DOs:

GEOLOGIC CITY
Last year, Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth gave Omnibus readers a taste of the “Geologic City Field Reports” they’ve been publishing on their blog Friends of the Pleistocene, to get us thinking about how deep geologic time is connected to the built environment of New York. Now, Kruse and Ellsworth are launching Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York, the result of their research and explorations. Join them along with dynamic urban-systems-and-architecture duo Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography, Foodprint Project, Omnibus contributor) next Thursday, September 8, at Studio-X for the launch of the Field Guide and a related exhibition. Find more information here.

Also during the exhibition, sound artist Kevin Allen will be demoing his exploration of what he calls “the secret lives of material objects” with his ongoing project Sonic Geologic, cataloguing the acoustic conductivity of infrastructure such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway. Other artists and musicians have already tried their hand at similar “Aeolian harp” phenomena, from Alex Metcalf’s Tree Listening to David Byrne’s Playing the Building. Bridges, a new project from sound engineer Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink, asks eight well-known experimental musicians to field recordings or four Dutch bridges. What results is a coherent soundscape; in effect “the bridge becomes an instrument played by the city revealing hidden harmonies within the built environment.” Preview and purchase Bridges here.

BROWN BAG READING SERIES
Part of the Van Alen Institute’s ongoing Brown Bag Reading Series, held every Wednesday at 12:30pm, this week’s talk is on The Power of Pro Bono. John Cary, founder of pioneering nonprofit Public Architecture and a Senior Advisor to Next American City, will discuss the national impact of pro bono work in public-interest design. More info over at VAI.

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Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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High Line Rink | Image via Friends of the High Line and UNIQLO

HIGH LINE ROLLER RINK
What do you with an empty lot that’s the terminal point of an extraordinary, linear park? You build a roller skating rink! At least that’s what James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro have created, in partnership with HWKN and UNIQLO. This temporary 8,000-square-foot roller rink will last through the summer, featuring old-fashioned roller skate rental, themed events and night-time DJs. The High Line Rink will be open from July 28 through September 26. Admission will be $10 for kids, $12 for adults. See more details here.

HUDSON RIVER OUTFALL
Stay out of the Hudson! Due to a massive engine fire at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant yesterday, raw sewage has been redirected to 56 outfall sites which pour directly into open water. Since the plant’s shut-down, 120 million gallons of raw sewage have entered the waterway. Officials have banned canoeing, kayaking, swimming and fishing in the Hudson River, including advisories for Midland, Cedar Grove, Seagate and South Beach today. Harlem’s Riverbank State Park, located next to the plant, was shut down until further notice. See more coverage from The New York Times.

MTA CHIEF RESIGNS
Jay Walder, MTA Chairman since 2009, resigned on Wednesday to take over Hong-Kong based transportation company MTR Corporation. Transportation Alternatives’ Paul Steely White commented on Walder’s contribution to the city: “Facing a daunting fiscal situation brought on by the Governor and State Legislature’s repeated budget raids, Walder kept our trains and buses serving millions of New Yorkers 24 hours every day.” The Wall Street Journal pointed to the dramatic pay bump Walder will receive — in Hong Kong he will earn more than $900,000 as base salary, a 157% increase above his current $350K salary at the MTA. Denise Richardson of General Contractors Association of New York noted that his departure really “says more about our collective unwillingness to properly fund our transportation network than it does about new opportunities for his career.” Benjamin Kabak of Second Ave. Sagas analyzed some of the probable driving forces behind Walder’s departure and continues to post updates on the latest news.

Screengrab of MyBlockNYC.com

BLOCK PARTY
What if you could explore and interact with user-generated video that captures each unique, interesting and sometimes crazy moment around New York City’s 90,000 blocks? That’s the mission of MyBlockNYC.com, a site dedicated to bringing the experience of exploring New York to the Internet. What separates it from other video sharing sites is that MyBlockNYC’s clips are superimposed on a map, infusing the typically static Google Streetview with a certain liveliness. Anyone can contribute content, from residents to tourists to professionals. Co-creator Alex Kalman wants to give users “the most intimate and human way to explore New York City without being here.” The team behind the site was recently invited to set up an interactive exhibition at MoMA’s new exhibition Talk to Me: Design and Communication Between People and Objects. Read more about the site on Design Observer.

EVENTS & TODOs:

ReinventNYC.gov | Courtesy Social Media Week

REINVENTNYC.GOV: As part of the City’s constant efforts towards transparency and abiding interest in crowdsourcing, the NYC Office of Media and Entertainment and the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in partnership with General Assembly have announced the City’s “first ever digital programming event”: Reinvent NYC.gov. Teams of designers, engineers, copywriters, photographers, interface designers, web developers and product managers can enter, by submitting a profile and examples of their work, to participate in a two-day “hackathon” to make NYC.gov more accessible and fun to use. The hackathon will take place from July 30-31, but all entries must be submitted by today, July 22! Find more information here.

MAPPING THE CITYSCAPE: Manhattan has seen many changes since 1811, but one thing that has stayed constant is the grid. It’s the foundation on which the city has evolved and grown– layer by layer. Just as intrepid cartographers explored and documented the island’s landscape in its nascent days, modern mappers are returning to the grid, armed with new technology to compile information about how the contemporary urban landscape has developed and how it can be further utilized. Mapping the Cityscape, the exhibition currently up at the Center for Architecture, celebrates a history of mapping NYC through a graphic examination of, “the ways in which mapping influences our perception of the environment.” Mapping the Cityscape is on view through August 27th.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.