50 Ideas for the New City | Photo by Will Martin

THE OMNIBUS BOOTH We hope you’ve caught sight of our 50 Ideas for the New City Posters around town on fences, scaffolds and storefronts from Jamaica, Queens to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Tomorrow, Saturday, May 7th, get an up-close look at them at the Omnibus Booth (Bowery and Rivington) at the Festival of Ideas for the New City StreetFest, where Urban Omnibus staff will be out all day to chat about the future of the urban landscape with whoever will listen. Come on down and say hi, and submit your idea for the new city in person!

FLASHLIGHT: NYC  Check out some of the temporary, site-specific, illuminated art that Flash:Light NYC is bringing to the festival. LET US MAKE CAKE is tapping into the creative potential of recent innovations in light, sound and projection mapping with a three-part installation: On the Street, on Mulberry between Prince and Houston; In the Cathedral, in St. Patrick’s Basilica on Mott St. north of Prince; and On the Museum, on the façade of the New Museum on the Bowery. All three get underway at 8pm and run on a 20-minute loops until 11pm or midnight, location depending. But that’s not all! The projections will be followed by a midnight organ concert in St. Patrick’s! A collaborative project by Nuit Blanche New York, and Light Harvest Studios, participants range from established artists such as Vito Acconci, Jon Kessler and Marilyn Minter, to emerging artists such as SOFTlab, Chris Jordan, Mia Pearlman, Dustin Yellin, Z-Collective and Brooklyn-based street artists.

AUDI URBAN FUTURE Go see the beautiful 50-foot long architectural model of Manhattan: Audi Urban Future – Project New York at Nolita’s OpenHouse Gallery (201 Mulberry Street), curated by Architizer. This long-term project examines how mobility, urban living and the role of transportation will change in the coming years. Based on the award-winning concepts from the inaugural Audi Urban Future Award — hosted at the 2010 Venice Biennale — the model includes the winning entry by J. MAYER H. Architects from Berlin, and five NYC practices (LEONG LEONG, Matter Practice, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, labDORA and THEVERYMANY) who will present their vision for 2030 New York at a roundtable Monday night, 7-10pm.

CRONOCAOS Cronocaos, an exhibition presented by OMA / Rem Koolhaas on the growing urgency of preservationism in architecture, is now on view in the New Museum’s partially-renovated, ground floor space at 231 Bowery. In the exhibition, which debuted at the 2010 Venice Biennale, Koolhaas seeks to find “what the future of our memory will look like, and how our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory.” Check it out to see historic objects and photographs, analysis of the rapid growth of preserved urban and natural territories, and a timeline of OMA projects that have confronted the issue of preservation over 35 years of practice, including the 2001 proposed extension to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the curatorial master plan for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

AFTERHOURS: MURALS ON THE BOWERY  The New Museum is presenting Afterhours: Murals on the Bowery, an installation of 17 international artists’ site-specific paintings on commercial spaces’ security gates along the Bowery between Houston and Grand Streets. In celebration of non-traditional public art, check out these seen-at-night-only murals for yourself, or get a taste of what you’ll find in this NYTimes.com slideshow covering the unique series.

CUP DOWNRIGHT SYSTEMS Join CUP for an evening of videos about the inner workings of NYC’s hidden systems by viewing three of CUP’s hidden infrastructure documentaries at the Anthology Film Archives for the Festival. Films shown include Garbage Problems (2002), The Water Underground (2006), and The Internet is Serious Business (2008). Tickets are $6. Sunday, May 8, 6:30 pm at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue.

——————————-

TAXI OF TOMORROW
The City of New York has selected the design for its future taxi cabs: the Nissan NV200. For some, this is a roomier, more convenient choice. But many others (including some government officials) say the design looks outdated, ugly and is inaccessible for the disabled. Assemblyman Micah Kellner expressed disdain over the new cabs, saying “Who knew that the ‘Taxi of Tomorrow’ was the delivery van of yesterday? Just because you paint a van yellow doesn’t make it a taxi.” His view is representative of several city officials, including NYC Public Advocate Bill De Blasio and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

The result of the design competition ends a 5-year long bid for visions of New York’s taxi cabs of the future initiated by the Design Trust for Public Space. The competition was set to find a design to replace the classic Ford Crown Victoria, the most common taxi sedan seen lumbering up and down the streets of the city. In 2009, the competition was made official by the Bloomberg administration who will offer the winner an exclusive 10-year contract on the city’s taxi design and manufacturing. The competition came down to three designs:

Taxi of Tomorrow Nissan NV200

THE WINNER: Nissan NV200
PROS: Legroom, outlets, anti-bacterial seats, sliding doors to avoid dooring cyclists
CONS: Looks like a minivan, bulky, not handicap accessible

RUNNERS-UP:
Karsan (top)  & Ford Transit Connect (bottom) | Images courtesy of Taxi of Tomorrow

Read more on the cabs of tomorrow at The New Yorker and NY Daily News.

PROJECT NEON IPHONE APP
Want to see a map of all New York’s neon signage on your phone? Project Neon, which you can read more about in Kristen Hively’s recent Omnibus feature, is running a Kickstarter campaign to bring this soon-to-be free app to you. The app will include searchable information about the hundreds of neon signs in the city, a “view signs closest to you” map, and other features for signage junkies out there. Check out the project’s Kickstarter video and consider supporting this awesome future digital guidebook.

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

MTA remains reliable | image via treehugger.com

NYC PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION GOING STRONG
New York is among the top 15 metropolitan areas for transportation, according to an Infrastructurist article on a National Resources Defense Council study. Jersey City and New Haven also make it on the list, reflecting on the good performance of PATH and MetroNorth trains. Keep it up MTA!

And it’s a good thing we have public transport, because…

TAXI DISCRIMINATION ON THE RISE
Apparently snobbery is up among cab drivers. The New York Times reports a 38% jump in cabs refusing requested destinations in the last half of 2010. Though it is illegal, cab drivers notoriously deny fares going outside Manhattan, particularly late at night (when a cab ride is most coveted) or to a destination were they are unlikely to pick up another passenger. The Bloomberg administration is responding with a proposed hike in fines for fare dodgers, from $200 to $500, and may revoke licenses for cabbies that commit three infractions within three years — an idea that’s been met with ire from drivers’ groups who say cabbies shouldn’t be punished for trying to preserve their profits. But for the sake of anyone trying to get from Manhattan to Bed-Stuy at 3am, let’s hope Taxi & Limousine Commission Chair David Yassky’s prognosis that “it is getting to be like the bad old days when taxis wouldn’t go to Brooklyn” won’t last.

STRINGER DISSES DEPARTMENT OF BUILDINGS
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calls out the Department of Buildings in a Gotham Gazette piece reacting to the deaths of two ironworkers this month. Stringer cites a history of deadly accidents in the department, as well as bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. His solution? An independent review committee and reform that will modernize and streamline the department. The economic downturn could actually present an advantage — allowing time to enact improvements before the building market picks up.

ROUNDABOUTS AND REVOLUTION
Last week, as people began unpacking the greater significance of Egypt’s revolution, Vishaan Chakrabarti discussed the importance of  public space in facilitating, and impeding, civil discourse and dissent in his Country of Cities series on Urban Omnibus. This week, Jonathan Liu extrapolates lessons of Tahrir Square to an examination of the traffic circle as a literal public sphere in a Motherboard article ”Roundabouts and Revolutions.” Both pieces offer nuanced insights to the criticality of planned spaces for the spontaneous public congress, a conversation which we hope continues.

There Will Be Blood | production still

MANIFESTO!
In response to a January installment of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Manifesto series, celebrating the publication of Pamphlet Architecture #30: Coupling, InfraNet lab has put together its own manifesto on infrastructural opportunism. Touching on topics discussed at the Storefront launch, InfraNet’s manifesto is a cursory collection of ideas already budding in architectural spheres, like the physicality of software or exploiting trashed materials, and a reminder to re-engage with concepts that have long piqued interest of designers, like systems networks and “architects as expert generalists.” Into this mix, InfraNet’s manifesto throws fresh takes on scale and the need to stay informed, grounding theories in examples that range from a man-made island in the Maldives to everyone’s favorite milkshake quote in There Will Be Blood.

There’s another book launch / Manifesto series tonight at Storefront. This one’s called EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, which promises to relate the cyclical nature of intellectual history to the ecological imperatives of the day, like, um, recycling.

BMW PAVES NEW WAYS TO USE YOUR CELL PHONE (NOT WHILE DRIVING)
BMW can’t seem to let a trend escape them. The car company has caught on to “urban exploration” in their recently established BMW i-ventures, a venture capital firm, that with $100 million in hand, will forge solutions in “sustainable mobility.” The first $5 of that $100 was allocated to a smartphone app first developed for the NYC BigApps competition. Called My CityWay, the application is a catch-all city guide that discovers location-based activities and local conveniences as the user, his smartphone and his BMW traverse the city.

YOUNG ARCHITECT PROGRAM ANNOUNCES RUNNER-UPS
Curious to see what else could have been installed in a Long Island City courtyard this summer? This week MoMA PS1 released the short list of entries that almost made the cut in their Young Architects Program (League Emerging Voice Interboro Partners won the competition with their “holding pattern” design). Among the finalists was Bronx-based firm FormlessFinder as well as MASS Design Group and IJP Corporation. Though MoMA has picked its winner, the range of  public reactions have prompted Archinect to host a People’s Choice Award on their site. The polls are open through March 11th for readers who wish to weigh in.

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

Union Square is the latest stretch of Broadway that might soon become another one of Bloomberg’s “signature open-air concrete parks,” pedestrianized and plaza-ified like Times Square and Herald Square. The proposal will be presented on Monday to the local community board, and the NYC Transportation Department is currently considering the plan’s proposal to ban vehicular traffic along Broadway between 17th and 18th streets and to “reshuffle traffic patterns” around the square.

The New York times reports on the recent release of the New York City Transit’s yearly station-by-station breakdown of subway ridership. They’ve embedded the statistics into a pretty awesome interactive subway map – when you slide your cursor over a particular subway stop, the map displays the average number of daily riders in 2009 and the percent change since 2008. While transit officials attribute the decline to construction, economists tend to identify unemployment as the real issue.

Amongst the sea of thousands of smart phone applications available today, architecture-related app’s remain difficult to track down. So, Architectural Record has the run-down on the growing number of apps for architects, including “Project Photo”, which connects your iPhone photos of buildings with their architectural plans; “Concrete Calc”, which calculates the amount of concrete necessary for a project; and “EcoFlash”, which provides flash cards for LEED exam test-prep. “Dual Level” even turns your iPhone into a construction tool — it allows your phone to act as a level and measure when a surface is horizontal.

NY1 has featured the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center’s online software modeling system that offers a 4-D model of the World Trade Center redevelopment. The modeling software allows viewers to see 3-D renderings of the project’s estimated future progress at various points in time (the fourth dimension!) While the software was developed primarily for construction coordination, the LMDD is currently incorporating the 4-D modeling system into their website, which will allow residents to plan their lives around the development.

If you want to learn more about the World Trade Center redevelopment and other megaprojects, check out the New School’s summer course, “The Politics of Urban Megadevelopment.”  The urban planning class — that Curbed describes as “Development Battles become Homework” – will be based on some of the city’s most controversial megaprojects and will examine Atlantic Yards, the World Trade Center rebuilding, and the Jets Stadium/Hudson Yards proposal, among others.

Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.

Debates surrounding the future of Coney Island have raged for years, and many have voiced their concerns about the area’s demise. BoingBoing features photographer Joshua Brown’s beautiful and eerie short film that presents a wintery and seemingly-abandoned Coney Island. Scouting New York recently posted “Abandoned Coney Island,” a photo essay that ventures inside the now derelict Bank of Coney Island building. Those worried about the decline of amusements in the area might enjoy this animated virtual tour of Luna Park, the new amusement park set to open this Memorial Day. Located on 6.9 acres of land that the city bought from developer Joe Sitt for over $95 million, the park will feature 19 new rides, including a “Wild River” ride inspired by the original park’s ride, “Shoot the Chutes,” which you can see in all its 1903 glory below:

Top image by Flickr user acmace. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The app, thanks to Irene and Brett’s wariness of function creep, is well edited. The speculative projects included all share what Irene called an aspect of unreality; not only were they visionary at the time they were introduced, but also unattainable. Quotes from the architects and a few architectural renderings are provided, but the user is left to draw conclusions about what the impact would have been.

Details about the Phantom projects are available to app users only once they are within range of the site, though they are accessible online at any time. This choice is intended to encourage people to treat the whole city as a museum, not just their mobile device.

After Irene and Brett’s talk we went on a short walk, exploring the projects accessible in Midtown, before finding a corner in a nearby bar to settle in and talk apps – the Great American iPhone App to be precise. A conversation about the Phantom City – what could have been – led to a discussion of what could be.  Everyone in the group, which ranged across age groups and professions, articulated what his or her dream app would be, some specific and some grand. An envisioned app that would track the daily route of the iPhone owner turned the conversation towards subjective mapping. Like a spatial journal, such an app could turn a map of the city into a personal checklist, encouraging urban exploration, as the Museum of the Phantom City’s bursts of light do, and prompting the user to fill in non-traversed areas. Or a user could access the paths other app users take through the city. Kevin Lynch’s theories put to the test. What could we learn about our city with that kind of information? What layers of the city might be revealed?

Besides the well-known GPS feature, the iPhone has several underused high-tech sensors like an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor which can provide mass amounts of recordable data. But smartphones’ already demonstrated prowess at collecting information has not yet been matched by potential applications to centralize, disseminate, or make visible said data for advocacy or other productive uses.

Many hoped to find ways to use this technology for public information sharing beyond restaurant reviews. But close behind the utopian possibilities afforded by the new media, just as in all of the visionary sites that make up the Phantom City, are the dystopian ones. How do we ensure that this new public platform becomes something other than a new tool of consumerism? And when am I actually going to break down and buy one? At this point it doesn’t seem too far off.

Thanks to everyone who joined us, both on foot and in conversation. Check out a few photos of the event below. If you came along and have more pics to share, add them to our Flickr group and tag them “urbanomnibus.” To find out about more upcoming events, and to stay on top of our weekly features and forum posts sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Check out other recaps of the event from our co-sponsor WNYC and Omnibus advisor Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, Executive Director of the Queens Council on the Arts.

Rachel Aland is project associate of Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn.

Video excerpts courtesy of Wayne Congar

Photos by Varick Shute

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.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones who think this is the coolest thing to hit our iPhones since Shazam. Coverage from the Times to BLDGBLOG has affirmed that these guys are onto something. As Cheng and Snyder discussed in last week’s feature:

iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.

Cheng and Snyder have built a new app that uses GPS technology to explore “how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.” The app is called “Museum of the Phantom City,” and it turns the iPhone into an “architectural dousing rod.” As you wander the streets of New York, it shows a city that could have been — 50 architecture sites that never got built.

WNYC’s Soterios Johnson took the iPhone tour with Irene Cheng. They started off at Bryant Park, the site of a proposed airport. Take a listen to the tour:

Cheng and Snyder developed the app with the help of the Van Alen Institute — the beta version of the app is available for free on iTunes, and you can see the whole tour on their website.

On Saturday afternoon, come join us and WNYC’s culture department as Cheng and Snyder take us on a mid-town tour of some of the sites. If you don’t have an iPhone, we’ll pair you with someone who does. RSVP to culture@wnyc.org.

Urban Omnibus and WNYC Meet-up
Museum of the Phantom City
Saturday, October 31
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Meet at the Bryant Park Fountain (6th Avenue side)
Drinks and conversation to follow
RSVP to culture@wnyc.org or on Facebook

Click any image to view a slideshow of all images.

Every building or neighborhood has a story to tell. As self-admitted archi-nerds, whenever we travel we often find ourselves wanting to know more about the places we pass. Yet as a genre, architectural information graphics seem arrested in the nineteenth century forms of the plaque and the guidebook – modes that are didactic and technologically primitive. We wondered how ubiquitous mobile devices might be harnessed to make the city’s hidden stories visible.

Such speculations led us to develop the Museum of the Phantom City: OtherFutures – an iPhone app that lets users browse visionary designs for the City of New York on their phones. The app is now available in beta form on the iTunes store, thanks to the efforts of a multidisciplinary team of programmers, researchers, a graphic designer, and an architecture historian.

Mobile Media and Urban Experience
iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality?

We are also interested in how architects might capitalize on the ubiquity of personal digital devices to reach an audience beyond the world of design, to inspire a greater interest in urban and design issues in the general public. Fortunately, this desire to reach a broader audience coincided with the Van Alen Institute’s mission to promote emerging works of “public architecture,” and we were able to develop the Phantom City project through the generous support of their New York Prize Fellowship.

The inaugural exhibition of the Museum of the Phantom City is OtherFutures, and it features speculative and sometimes fanciful visions of the city that were never realized. We launched the project on October 3 with a scavenger hunt sponsored by the Van Alen that began on Roosevelt Island.

How it works
When you open the app, the first screen to appear after the initial credits is a dark, nearly black, field punctuated only by several pink and white “bursts.” The screen is intended to be a kind of terrain vague, to make you feel like you are groping through some unknown territory. On closer inspection, you might notice that the black field conceals a Google map underlay, and that it is centered on your current location. The bursts indicate sites for which a designer has created a visionary proposal at some point in the past. A pink burst means you are close enough to access the site—to see the designer’s images and words. A white burst means you are not within range: venture closer to unlock that site’s content.

(Users outside of New York City are out of luck for now, until we can get additional funding to expand the project to other cities. Though the entire archive of utopian projects is also accessible on the Museum of the Phantom City website.)

The sites include well-known projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Midtown Manhattan and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, as well as less famous proposals like Fuller’s “Mini-Earth”—a miniature globe that would have been suspended by cables across from the United Nations building, constantly reminding diplomats of the “bigger picture” of their actions. Or Raymond Loewy’s 1941 proposal for a helicopter landing field to be built on steel pylons over Bryant Park, which he claimed could double as an air raid shelter.

Phantom City in prospect
Combing through the archive of OtherFutures, one becomes aware of certain generational preoccupations: Visions at the turn of the twentieth century are full of soaring towers, bridges between skyscrapers, and flying machines, while mid-twentieth-century proposals, not surprisingly, reveal Cold War disquiet about bomb attacks. The 1960s generated myriad megastructures composed of prefabricated units that would purportedly leave the existing urban fabric intact.

On one level, such proposals can be viewed merely as quaint curiosities – the detritus of bygone hopes and anxieties. But on another, they serve as a pointed contrast to present-day urban proposals. Sure, an airport over Bryant Park seems far-fetched, but are we necessarily happy with the current status quo in urban transportation systems? How does the Related Companies’ West Side Railyards proposal appear when juxtaposed with Michael Sorkin’s whimsical, elegiac scheme for a homeless colony on the same site? OtherFutures provokes the question of whether our current designs for the city are imaginative enough, whether we are thinking big enough.

Users are free, however, to interpret the content of the app as they wish. A rating function allows one to vote on each proposal, and to see how others have voted: Was Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway project utopian or dystopian? Beauty or beast? Yawn or yell? You decide. Then roam elsewhere and discover another city that could have been.


Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder are founders of Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York City and Philadelphia. Brett teaches design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and Irene is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at Columbia University.

Photos from project launch on Roosevelt Island © Van Alen Institute, 2009. All other images courtesy of Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder.

Project Credits:
Museum of the Phantom City is a public art project designed by Cheng+Snyder with generous support from the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship.

PROJECT COLLABORATORS
Ray Cha, website programming and user interface
Michelle Chang, research and project development
Noah Keating, iPhone programming and interactive design
Olivia Wright, research and project development

Cheng+Snyder gratefullly acknowledges the following for their contributions and input: Alexander Arroyo, Inbar Barak, Maria Berman, Jessica Blaustein, Christy Cheng, Adam Dayem, Chris Dierks, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Sam Feldman, Abby Hamlin, Jamie Hand, Elizabeth Hodges, Steven Holl, Brad Horn, Joan Ockman, Brian Schulman, Liz Shearer, Michael Sorkin, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, Alie Thomer, and Bernard Tschumi.

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.

Yesterday we joined business and tech leaders from around the world (we were a little under-dressed, to say the least) at IBM’s Smarter Cities forum. IBM’s President and CEO Sam Palmisano kicked things off by explaining why cities are a focus area within IBM’s broader Smarter Planet initiative. Sure, the world is smaller and flatter every day, let’s make it smarter too. With four billion cell phones, 30 billion RFID tags and two billion internet users constantly providing and collecting data, what happens when we apply analytics to guide more strategic resource allocation as our digital and physical infrastructures converge? IBM has a few ideas (and software platforms). But so did an extremely high-powered roster of guests including CEOs, CTOs, scholars, governors, senior policymakers, and mayors, leading off with… Mayor Mike.

Bloomberg used the occasion to announce the Connected City Initiative, a “series of technology programs to transform the ways in which New Yorkers can interact with – and expect the delivery of services from – City government.” The first of these programs is the NYC 311 iPhone App, which allows you to submit reports, along with pictures or video, of select conditions around the City to NYC 311 via your iPhone.

Speaking of iPhones, we already let you know that if you want to take the coolest tour of unbuilt urban projects around, you should hop on the Museum of the Phantom City bandwagon. But if you’d prefer to spend your Saturday touring some projects that are not only built but also setting a new green standard, then check out GreenHomeNYC’s Green Buildings Open House, which offers the public a unique glimpse at the inner workings and design details of exemplary green buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Guests will be hosted by the dedicated sustainability practitioners of these buildings, including expert architects, developers, engineers and owners, on a registered one-hour tour of the building. More information, a complete list of 2009 Green Building Open House sites, tour times and RSVP information is available at GreenHomeNYC’s website.

And then, no matter what you spend your afternoon doing, make sure it includes a stopover at the opening of THE DROP NYC: Urban Art Infill. It’s an art festival held in an 8,000 square foot space, with 30 artists involved, including Yoko Ono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky). The festival is from 12 noon to 9pm and the exhibit will be open till October 17th. The official opening party will be under the High Line on 25th St. at around 6pm. Food trucks, cheap beer, DJs… it may sound like a regular party, but we promise there are some high-minded art and design implications, check out the full program for more details.

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

Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder are launching a mobile media project this weekend that allows people to browse proposed, visionary, but unbuilt designs for New York City on your iPhone. (Reason #172 why I love having an iPhone.) Museum of the Phantom City: OtherFutures is a project Cheng and Snyder developed during their Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship, a program which supports advanced research and experimental practice that explores, challenges, and expands conventional definitions of public architecture. You might recall past Omnibus mention of other New York Prize recipients Alexander Levi and Amanda Schachter and their crossing of the Bronx River. This weekend’s event is equally worthy of our attention and attendance.

The press release explains further:

Users can view images and descriptions of speculative projects ranging from Buckminster Fuller’s dome over midtown Manhattan, to Antonio Gaudi’s unbuilt cathedral, to Archigram’s pop-futurist “Walking City,” all while standing on the projects’ intended sites.

Created by Van Alen Institute New York Prize fellows Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder, Museum of the Phantom City: OtherFutures is not only a window into innovative architecture, but a work of unconventional design in itself – a robust, database-driven contribution to the field of mobile media public art and part of the small but emerging genre of iPhone “app art.”

The project launches this Saturday, October 3, at 1:00 p.m. with a self-guided tour and scavenger hunt. Participants met at the Roosevelt Island tram station, and reconvene later in the day for a reception and prizes at the Van Alen Institute.

Individuals interested in participating in the tour and scavenger hunt must email rsvp@vanalen.org by 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 30 to reserve a spot and to receive instructions on downloading the iPhone app. Those who do not have an iPhone will be teamed up with someone who does.

1:00 p.m. – Tour and Scavenger Hunt
Meet at the base of the aerial tram station on Roosevelt Island
4:00 p.m. – Project Reception and Prizes
Convene at Van Alen Institute
30 W. 22nd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10010
(212) 924-7000

Go, appreciate some database-driven mobile media public art, and explore the unbuilt city.