Urban Omnibus BlockParty 2012
Tuesday, February 28
A cocktail reception, art auction and benefactors’ dinner to support Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League’s online publication dedicated to defining the culture of citymaking.
Buy tickets here.

Party and Auction
St. Patrick’s Youth Center
268 Mulberry Street
6:30-8:30pm
Tickets start at $40

Benefactors’ Dinner
City Grit
38 Prince Street
8:30-10:30pm
Tickets start at $250
Dinner ticket availability is very limited.

Benefit Committee
Maya Hernandez, co-chair
Peter Mullan, co-chair
Alanna Bailey
Jake Barton
Vishaan Chakrabarti
Alyson Dick
Kim Dowdell
Dana Esposito
Carolyn Gallagher
Robert Hammond
Penny Hardy & Granger Moorhead
Paul Haydon
Andrew Hollweck
Susan Lowance
Elizabeth Lusskin
Deborah Marton
Nadia Meratla
Scott Metzner
Diana Murphy
Patricia Ornst
Neysa Pranger
Paul Proulx
Dana Sandberg
Joe Smith
Margaret Sullivan
Paul Wolf
Karen Wong
Douglas Woodward

Sponsors (list in formation)
Bernsohn & Fetner, LLC
Buro Happold
Denham Wolf
Hunter Roberts Construction Group
James Lima Planning + Development
Robert Kliment and Frances Halsband
Levien & Company
The New York Building Congress
Newmark Knight Frank
Sciame Construction  

Stay tuned for a preview of the items up for auction, coming soon…

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After a two week hiatus, we’re back to wish you a happy new year — and to toast the beginning of the fourth year of Urban Omnibus!

A lot has happened in the past year, and there is a lot more coming. Our features have allowed us to explore the sweet shops and courtyard homes of Jackson Heights, the plazas of Midtown, and the public art of the subway system and Times Square. They have introduced us to the strategic assessment of urban agricultural activity across the city and the first undergraduate degree program in urban design. And they have exposed us to a wide range of urban art, ecology, infrastructure and, of course, design. In the weeks to come, look out for features that reveal original perspectives on urbanism from photographers, acoustic engineers, sociologists and more.

2011 was also a year full of special projects: our 50 Ideas for the New City (posters are still available as a gift with donation!), our series of videos on complex urban systems, and our partnership with the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council on a project about housing regulations in New York.

Our first special project of 2012 is a competition for original, evocative writing inspired by the Manhattan street grid. The deadline is less than a month away, so get cracking! Also coming up, we are planning more live events and field trips, starting with our second annual party and art auction — now christened The Urban Omnibus BlockParty 2012 — on February 28th. Like last year’s shindig, this event will be a fundraiser for Urban Omnibus, but it’s also a chance for our local readers to connect with us and with each other, to hang out with other creative people for whom the physical city is a passion.

That passion is why Urban Omnibus exists: to bring together insights from the wide range of perspectives on interpreting or improving the built environment of New York. But passion alone can’t sustain the hard work that makes this publication possible. Now, more than ever, we rely on the support of readers like you to keep us going.

In addition to donating, there are other ways to participate in helping us shed light on good ideas for the future of cities, conceived in the public interest, executed across disciplines, and tested in the five boroughs. We are always on the lookout for new projects and perspectives; get in touch here if you are up to something and you think we should know about it. And even if you don’t have a specific project in mind, we also want to hear from you about topics that you’d like to read more about. Our goal has always been to bring original thinking from across disciplines and neighborhoods together into a common conversation about urban architecture, infrastructure and environment. And in order to do that, we need to hear from you about projects and perspectives that you think present a new way of looking at the city around us.

It has been an extraordinary first three years. We look forward to 2012, sharing more of the projects, insights, ideas and voices redefining the culture of citymaking today.

Tickets are now on sale for the Architectural League’s 2011 Beaux Arts Ball! The Ball, an annual benefit for the programs of the League (that includes Urban Omnibus), is an event not to be missed. Each year, the event is held in an architecturally-significant space that is re-invented and re-imagined, for one night only, by a team of creative young designers. Check out photos from past events here to get a taste of the unforgettable environments and spaces that have played host to the party in recent years. Buy your tickets today, and come dance, eat, drink and chat with us on September 17th at the Brooklyn Army Terminal!

Beaux Arts Ball 2011: Transport
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Brooklyn Army Terminal
140 58th Street
Brooklyn, New York
9pm to 1am

Environment by Leong Leong with Jiminie Ha
Music by A R P and Jon Santos
Drinks and light fare
Dress: Loading Dock Chic

Tickets
$75 Contributor
$150 Patron
To purchase tickets or for more information, click here.
UPDATE: SOLD OUT! Tickets are no longer available for the Beaux Arts Ball.

About the Brooklyn Army Terminal
Designed by Cass Gilbert (one of the founders, in 1881, of the Architectural League), the Brooklyn Army Terminal opened in September 1919 and was the largest military supply base in the United States through World War II. Set on 95 acres on the waterfront in Sunset Park, the complex of buildings was built using girderless, steel-reinforced, concrete slabs. At the time of its construction, its system of 96 centrally-controlled elevators was the largest of its kind in the country. The atrium, a soaring volume of 4 million cubic feet bisected by railroad tracks that carried soldiers in and out of the building, is lined with staggered concrete balconies from which supplies were loaded and unloaded by mobile cranes that ran along the roofline. The Brooklyn Army Terminal reached the pinnacle of its fame in 1958 when Elvis Presley was deployed to Germany from there, an event that attracted thousands of fans and photojournalists. In 1981, the City of New York bought the Brooklyn Army Terminal from the federal government. Today it is home to a diverse mix of high tech, cultural, and financial services companies.

Image: Brooklyn Army Terminal as photographed in October 1949 by Andreas Feininger. (Courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

In April 2011, we decided to spotlight some of the ideas that have appeared on Urban Omnibus — 50 Ideas for the New City — and broadcast them online, in person and on the walls and surfaces of New York. A series of six “Idea Posters” appeared on fences, scaffolds and storefronts from Jamaica, Queens to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and many places in between (check out some photos below).

And now we are offering them to you, as a thank you gift when you donate to Urban Omnibus. Urban Omnibus is a project of the Architectural League of New York, a non-profit organization, and is supported in part by contributions from readers like you. Reader support lets us continue to bring you ideas and strategies for greener, smarter and fairer cities.

With a donation of $25, you will receive one poster of your choosing. With a donation of $60, you may choose any three of the six posters. Donate $100 or more and you will receive a complete set of Omnibus Idea Posters. Click here to learn about more ways to support Urban Omnibus, or click here to make a donation now.

These beautiful posters were designed by Civic Center, a New Orleans-based firm whose principals, James Reeves and Candy Chang, were part of the team that designed UrbanOmnibus.net and have each contributed features and forum posts to the site.

Posters are 24″×36″. Please note that some of the photographs below show larger versions of the posters.

Last month, we told you about the upcoming Architectural League/Museum of the City of New York exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan when we posted information about the League’s Call for Ideas (still open — deadline September 26!). Now, League Exhibitions Director Gregory Wessner is looking for an intern to assist him in the coordination and production of the show:

The Architectural League of New York, one of the leading forums in the country for the presentation of new work and ideas in contemporary architecture, seeks an Exhibitions Intern to assist in the coordination and production of an upcoming exhibition celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Commissioners Plan for New York, the foundational document that established the Manhattan street grid above Houston Street.

In December 2011, the Architectural League, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York, will present an exhibition of projects and proposals that use the use the Manhattan street grid as a creative and intellectual framework for thinking about the future of New York. Up to ten projects will be chosen through an international Call for Ideas (co-sponsored with Architizer). The League seeks an intern to help manage the planning and production of this exhibition, which will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York.

Interns will gain valuable experience in the day-to-day tasks of organizing and producing a major museum exhibition in the context of a small but active non-profit arts organization. Responsibilities will include research, content coordination, publicity, documentation and archiving, as well as hands-on production, among others. Interns will also work closely with the architects in the exhibition, coordinating the production and delivery of material for display.

Preference will be given to candidates with a background in architecture, architectural history, or urbanism, although artists, art historians, filmmakers, and individuals in other creative disciplines are welcome to apply.  Candidates may be undergraduate or graduate students.  Candidates must display strong attention to detail; the ability to manage and prioritize multiple responsibilities and tasks simultaneously; a willingness to work with various personalities and perform a variety of tasks; and an ability to perform well under deadlines.

The internship is uncompensated but a travel stipend will be provided and course credit is available if granted by the intern’s academic department.

To apply, email a resume and cover letter to Gregory Wessner, Exhibitions Director, at wessner@archleague.org with “Exhibitions Intern” in the subject line. For more information about The Greatest Grid, click here. For the complete internship listing, click here.

The Omnibus is all about ideas. From the beginning, Urban Omnibus has been a showcase of good ideas for the future of cities, conceived in the public interest and tried and tested in the five boroughs of New York. Our ongoing commitment to that is part of why we jumped at the chance to participate in and help organize the Festival of Ideas for the New City, coming up soon from May 4-8. The Festival aims to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. It’s a perfect fit. So, to coincide with the event, we have decided to surface some of the ideas that have appeared on Urban Omnibus over the past two years and broadcast them around the city.

Starting early next week, look out for a series of Idea Posters on fences, scaffolds and storefronts from Jamaica, Queens to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This Saturday, April 23, get a first look at them in person at Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, where Urban Omnibus Editor Cassim Shepard will be hanging out all day, discussing the future of the urban landscape with whoever will listen. Come on down and say hi!

These fantastic posters (seen below) are designed by Civic Center, a New Orleans-based firm whose principals, James Reeves and Candy Chang, were part of the team that designed UrbanOmnibus.net and have each contributed features and forum posts to the site. These days they can be found engaging with a range of inspiring projects in public art, civic engagement and contemplation of the American landscape.

With this poster campaign, we want to turn the language of ubiquitous marketing — in which every bus, taxi or construction barrier is a canvas for advertising anything and everything — on its head by using a similar language to share examples of creativity and innovation in the urban realm. We want to spread these ideas to the whole city. And we want to hear your new ideas too. So starting next week, (now live!) at UrbanOmnibus.net/Ideas you will find 50 ideas for New York already explored on Urban Omnibus and a space for you to share one of your own. We hope, in some small way, we can help re-enchant the urban environment as a landscape of possibility, a realm of action and intention, and a place that represents — and deserves — a long and evolving history of creative ideas.

UPDATE August 2011: These posters are now being offered as a thank you gift when you donate to Urban Omnibus! Find more information here.

Obscura Day Poster | Image by Oliver Munday

Happy April Fool’s Day! For a little urban planning humor, be sure to check out Planetizen’s April 1st Edition — who knew those guys were so funny?
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INTERNATIONAL OBSCURA DAY
For its second annual International Obscura Day, Atlas Obscura offers excursions into unexpected corners of world cities — New York, of course, included. On April 9th, you have the chance to explore the inside of the Catacombs at the Greenwood Cemetery, tour the Ghost ships of Coney Island Creek (with promised tales of rum-runners, whalers and a home-made submarine), or grab a beer and hop on a bike for a bike tour through the historic breweries of Brooklyn and Queens, among other urban adventures.
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BRINGING MANUFACTURING BACK TO THE CITY
The Times reports on the place-based future of manufacturing in an opinion piece that heralds a field often assumed outsourced for good as an opportunity to create jobs and strengthen urban communities. The piece profiles the organizations SF Made and Made in NYC, which serve as networks for local manufacturing businesses, provide resources for small start-ups and connect consumers to locally-sourced products. This reinvigoration of the manufacturing sector and the press it’s getting suggest that people are increasingly turning to independently-owned, small-scale enterprises to boost the economy, perhaps hoping that acting local can accomplish the financial resuscitation larger corporations have been slow to spur. It also demonstrates a demand to integrate production with community in what Mike Dwight, founder of SFMade, calls “geographic ingredient branding,” which he defines as “a way to ‘brand’ the history, culture, personality and natural beauty of [a] city as a means to uniquely differentiate local manufacturers.” .

A BIG NIGHT FOR APPS
Redefining the “networked city,” urban apps are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous way to connect with a city and its citizens. Last night a committee of technology innovators and municipal leaders announced the winners of the 2011 NYC BigApps2.0 competition, selecting applications that alert users about important urban information ranging from nearby public art to restaurants in violation of health code. Architizer reports on the event, with a run down of some of the winning apps. Roadify, the Grand Prize winner last night, was profiled recently on Transportation Nation. This handy app fuses the urban trends of crowd-sourcing, smart phone navigating and MTA updates, allowing subway riders to update one another on the conditions of their commute and thus provide more immediate transit news than the MTA’s site. While the subway may not be wired, the creators of Roadify hope info from users entering and exiting the station will piece together an accurate picture of whats going on underground.
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STATES AND THE METRO ECONOMY
Over on The Avenue (a collaborative blog from Brookings and The New Republic), Jennifer Bradley asks when states will finally recognize their dependence on metropolitan economies. Her piece summarizes a longer article, co-written with metro-area evangelist Bruce Katz, in Democracy Journal and posits that the reflection prompted by the Great Recession should lead to a restructuring of state government, one that prioritizes the needs of metro areas. The argument is not new, but the historical overview, which reaches back to the pivotal ceding of states’ rights during the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution, is helpful and refreshingly well informed.
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TURNING TRAFFIC INTO ELECTRICITY
Feeling good vibrations in California, State Assemblyman Mike Gatto proposed a bill that will test the use of vibrational energy emitted by automobile traffic to harness electricity. Employing piezoelectricity – a technology that converts the work of physical motion into electricity (which Omnibus readers may recall from Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin’s fluxxlab project) — and following the design of similar systems in Italy and Israel, California’s plan will place sensors under roadways and then convert the strain placed on them by cars into an electric charge, which is then channeled into the grid. According to Gatto, a one-lane highway is able to produce 44 megawatts over the course of a year. As a post on the Freshkills Blog points out, piezoelectricity has been used to capture energy in wind, walking and even dancing, so lets hope more permutations of its technology travel to this city.
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Eduardo Souto de Moura's Braga Stadium | photo by Luis Ferreira Alves via Architectural Record

PRITZKER PRIZE WINNER ANNOUNCED
On Monday, the Pritzker Prize Committee announced Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Mora as its 2011 winner. De Mora’s designs, mostly built in Portugal, are softly modernist, employing smooth geometries and a design lexicon that reflects local heritage and a sense of place. As an article in Architectural Record points out, his attention of scale and subtlety affirms a trend among the Pritzker jury in recent years to favor “craft, local scale, and sensibility over architectural extravagance” – welcome values that preserve longevity and strong aesthetics in a time when we need to re-evaluate the impact of hasty, ostentatious building.
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
High-speed rail has been a hot topic for discussion of late, after the Obama administration committed $53 billion to the construction of a high-speed rail network and set a goal to connect 80% of Americans to its service by 2050. This project will undoubtedly transform the American landscape, and the Van Alen Institute is asking architects, planners and artists to envision what our high-speed future may look like. The Life at the Speed of Rail competition seeks design projects and imagined narratives that will address the impacts of new infrastructure, aiming to better inform the design decisions for the construction of the network. The deadline is May 21st, 2011.
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EVENTS
Over the next month, the downtown landscape will be transformed by a host of artists and cultural institutions – Urban Omnibus among them – leading up to the Festival of Ideas for the New City. Held from May 4-8, the festival is a collaboration between the New Museum, the Architectural League and a long list other cultural institutions, that will host an array of discussions, events and urban interventions to explore the themes of the Heterogeneous City, the Networked City, the Reconfigured City and the Sustainable City. Stay tuned for many more updates from us, including more details about Urban Omnibus’ own contribution to the event.

Next Wednesday, Omnibus Editor Cassim Shepard will be discussing some of the ideas behind and projects presented on Urban Omnibus in the context of other work he’s done at the intersection of urbanism and creative media-making. The lecture, at noon at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (20 Cooper Square at 5th Street), is free and open to the public.

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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.

Take a look at a selection of photos from the event below. You can see more on our Flickr page and on Trespa’s. Additional thanks goes to Trespa Design Centre for generously donating the use of their space for the event and helping us put it all together; to Brooklyn Brewery for donating the beer for the party; to everyone who donated artwork for the silent auction; and to our readers and supporters who make this project possible.

Caitlin Blanchfield and Will Martin

Rob Goodwin, John Cary and Mary Rowe

Nathan Smith, donating artist Heather L. Johnson and Naomi Szto

Charles McKinney and Jeanne Giordano

Donating artist Stanley Greenberg and Susan Chin

Todd Shalom and Carlos Solis

Donating artist Linda Pollak and Mary Rowe

Celeste Layne, Kristin LaBuz and Katie Elevitch

Jonathan Kirschenfeld and Paul Gates

Kyle McEneaney

Anthony Moon (left), Katie Stapleton (center)

Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch

Jessie Henson and Andres Pastoriza

Susan Morris, Calvin Tsao and Susan Rodriguez

Todd Kimmel, Trespa

Rosalie Genevro, Architectural League Executive Director, addresses the crowd

Cassim Shepard, Urban Omnibus Editor

Photos by Reid Bingham and Zach Brewster.