When we spoke to landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh in December 2009 about Brooklyn Bridge Park, just before the first phase of the project opened to the public, he spoke about what it means to design something that continues to live and grow, and how this particular site offered an opportunity to completely reimagine what parks should be in today’s cities. Next week, on Tuesday, November 22, at 7pm, Van Valkenburgh will elaborate on his ideas about design, ecology and landscape across a variety of scales and locations, in “Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens.” The talk, organized by the Architectural League and co-sponsored by the Cooper Union, will be followed by a conversation with Kate Orff, partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and Vice President for Landscape at the League. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Read on for more information (check archleague.org for the latest about the event):

Current Work
Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
“Parks, a Campus, and Three Summer House Gardens”
Introduced and moderated by Kate Orff
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
7:00pm
The Great Hall, The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
1.5 CEUs

Michael Van Valkenburgh will present the recent work of his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). Based in Brooklyn and Cambridge, MVVA is a landscape architecture firm, which works on projects in scale from the city to the campus to the garden. MVVA’s commissions have sought to achieve an “ecological urbanism,” with projects such as the Master Plans for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Wellesley College, and built work like Mill Race Park and Allegheny Riverfront Park.

The office, led by its three principals, Laura Solano, Matthew Urbanski, and Michael Van Valkenburgh with a staff of 65, works closely with urban planners, architects, engineers, and ecologists. The firm’s projects have received numerous honors, including the ASLA Design Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects; the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York City; Progressive Architecture Awards; and awards from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada. MVVA has also won multiple high-profile design competitions including Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House, the Lower Don Lands project in Toronto, and The City + The Arch + The River competition for St. Louis and East St. Louis. Van Valkenburgh received the 2003 National Design Award in Environmental Design from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and was the 2010 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Van Valkenburgh earned a B.S. in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, and a M.F.A. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Van Valkenburgh teaches landscape design as well as the use of plants as design material. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Landscape Architects.

Kate Orff is a partner of Scape/Landscape Architecture and is the Vice President for Landscape of the Architectural League of New York.

Tickets 
Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Member tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program. Non-members may purchase tickets here.

Organized by the Architectural League of New York. Co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union. AIA and New York State continuing education credits are available.

Video from the September 2010 Urban Omnibus feature Park as Process: Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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SOUTH BRONX RISING
This week, The New York Times new architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took a walk with NYC’s planning commissioner Amanda Burden through the South Bronx. They discuss the area’s long journey after decades of disinvestment and neglect and cite the importance of Nos Quedamos and Yolanda Garcia’s vision of what the South Bronx could become in driving its apparent resurgence, alongside the Bloomberg administration’s smart decisions about the physical elements that make a neighborhood: maintaining a street wall, ground floor retail, street trees and density. The walking tour ends with a followup to Kimmelman’s review of a new residential development in the neighborhood, Via Verde. Check out the video and the write up of the tour.

WHERE TO SHARE?
A couple of weeks ago, Janette Sadik-Khan announced that New York City was starting a new bike share program, set to open with 1000 bikes and 600 docking stations, and asked New Yorkers to suggest where to the stations should be placed. But how will the final locations be selected? The Atlantic Cities reports on the complexities of deciding exactly that. Working with Alta Bike Share, the company selected to implement the program, the city will  ”first target optimal service areas using detailed data models and public suggestions, then approach community boards that govern these areas with at least three possible locations, and last allow the neighborhoods themselves to make the ultimate decision.” In order to reveal the complex methodology of locating the nodes of this new infrastructural system, the article goes on to explain in detail the three “pillars” of a successful bike share program, “high density of stations, close proximity to transit and community feedback.” The public presentations begin next week. Check out the schedule of community meetings and other events at the bike share program’s timeline, and head over to Streetsblog for up-to-date coverage as this program unfolds.

TOO MUCH PARKING!
When people complain about parking in New York, the gripe isn’t usually that New York City has too many spaces. Yet, according to an article in Crain’s New York this week, Robert Moses-era zoning laws dictate that in new residential construction outside of Manhattan, the developer must build four parking spots for every ten residential units, despite New York’s comprehensive mass transit system. Building owners are losing money on predominantly empty parking garages. And even facilities that draw large crowds, like Yankee Stadium, have parking lots that remain mostly empty much of the time. The Yankee Stadium example is now prompting fears that the parking allotment for the contested Atlantic Yards Stadium in Brooklyn will also remain under-utilized. The prospect of a giant blacktop hole adds to an increasing number of concerns about the new development.

PEANUT PARK
New York City is becoming increasingly dependent upon public-private partnerships to maintain its parks. Central Park and Bryant Park have both been arguably saved by such partnerships, to name only two. This week, a new park has opened, this time sponsored by Planters, of nut fame. Mr. Peanut made the requisite appearance at the opening, monocle and all. While there may be something built into the premise of corporate sponsorship of public, even semi-public parks, that smacks ominously of corporate encroachment into civic life, the results are encouraging. Planters Grove, one of three such parks sponsored by Planters and designed by Ken Smith, was built for The Wald Houses, a public housing development in the East Village. The garden allows residents of the project access to the herbs planted there, and will also be open to the larger neighborhood. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

EVENTS and TO DOs

CINEBEASTS’ GOWANDERLUST!
This Saturday evening, Cinebeasts is hosting Gowanderlust! with Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker and film festival programmer. Kensinger will be leading a “zig-zagging tour-screening” — part walking tour, part short film screening — along one of the cities most historied and fascinating industrial landscapes, the Gowanus Canal. Buy your tickets here and then join them Saturday, October 8th at sundown in front of the Bell House, 149 7th Street. A reception, including refreshments provided by Brooklyn Brewery and Cabinet Magazine, will follow at Cabinet Space. For more information, check out Cinebeasts.

OPENHOUSENEWYORK
The 9th annual openhousenewyork, when some of the city’s most spectacular and hard to access spaces and structures open their doors/gates/elevators/ladders/trap-doors to the public for viewings, takes place the weekend of October 14th-16th. Many talks, tours, and workshops are free; some require advance reservations (with a $5 fee). As usual, people are snatching up reservations fast, so be sure to plan your weekend soon. Here’s just a sampling of what you can find in the slate of events: the Holly Whyte Way Arcade Parade, a walking tour along the Old Croton Aqueduct (in both Manhattan and the Bronx), a walking tour on Shaping Urban Design and Policy: The East 96th Street Corridor, Brooklyn Bridge Park (previous coverage of BBP here), Elastic City’s Monumental Walk (previously), Pier Luigi Nervi’s George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, AVAC System on Roosevelt Island (previously), the final days of the BMW Guggenheim Lab (previously), Lyn Rice Architects, Architecture Research Office (ARO), East Harlem School (previously), the Arsenal, Noguchi Museum (stay tuned for more on this next week!), the Digester Eggs at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Little Red Lighthouse, Fresh Kills by Bus, Build It! Architecture Workshop, Urbanitis East Harlem Tour, Chris Pellettieri’s Stone Carving Workshop at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, East 4th Street Cultural District Tour (previously), El Puente South Williamsburg Walking Tour, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Melrose Commons, or tour the city on bikes with either the NYC DOT, a historian Exploring the Street Grid, or with Velo City’s high school student guides teaching you about urban design. Download a PDF event guide here or click through to make reservations on the OHNY site.

ILLUMINATING THE CITY
Last weekend’s Bring to Light, New York’s second Nuit Blanche festival, brought light sculpture, installations and video to the walls, streets, alleys and public spaces of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tomorrow, the New Museum is hosting a panel discussion to consider the potential of the Nuit Blanche model to reimagine public space and catalyze dialogue. “Illuminating the City: Site-Specific Art as Urban Activator” will start at 4pm and will feature Ethan Vogt and Ken Farmer of Nuit Blanche New York; Eva Franch, director of Storefront; Stephanie Thayer, executive director of the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn; David van der Leer, assistant curator for architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim; with more panelists to be announced. Buy tickets or find more information here. And if you missed Bring to Light last weekend, check out photos from the event in Time Out,  Flavorwire and on the Bring to Light website.

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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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Delancey Underground | image via nymag.com

LES LOW LINE
The Lower East Side might be getting a new park. The proposed project, the Delancey Underground, would repurpose the the abandoned underground Williamsburg Bridge Railway Terminal in an effort to inject some green space into one of the least green neighborhoods in the city and to join the ranks of the High Line in reimagining disused infrastructure. The subterranean wonderland lit by “remote skylights” would provide a green space “nearly the size of Gramercy Park” at the base of the bridge. The project, conceived by architect James Ramsey, PopTech executive Dan Barasch and money manager R. Boykin Curry IV, was presented to Community Board 3 on Wednesday evening. According to DNAInfo, the presentation “wowed” the packed audience. According to Curbed, skepticism abounded, despite the seductive renderings, about keeping the park safe and well lit, how it would be funded, or how the space would be programmed to best serve the community. Check out more renderings on Architizer and read more in New York Magazine.

On the Go Travel Station | image via popsci.com

TOUCHSCREEN TRAVEL
The MTA has a new magic map trip planner, the first of what they are calling their On-the-Go Travel Stations, now installed at the Bowling Green subway station in Manhattan. The Station is a 47-inch touchscreen that allows riders to access up-to-the-minute service announcements, plan trips and navigate the subway map. The upper portion of the screen is devoted to subway information, with clearly identifiable buttons for Service Status, Elevators, MTA Maps and Key Destinations. Service alerts scroll under the interactive portion, while the lower third of the screen is devoted to advertisements. For more coverage, including a video of the Bowling Green Travel Station, check out Popular Science.

TOOLS AT SCHOOLS
Engaging in a design process taps creativity, communication skills and general understanding of how things work. So why isn’t it introduced to students earlier in their education? That question is the basis for Tools at Schools, a partnership between design firm Aruliden and furniture manufacturer Bernhardt Design. The program asked 44 eighth graders from The School at Columbia University how they would redesign the basic components of classroom furniture: the chair, the desk and the locker. The students went through the entire design process: researching existing products, identifying what they saw as lacking, sketching and modeling their ideas and presenting them to representatives from Bernhardt and Aruliden. The designers took ideas from each team and turned them around into 3D models. From there, the students were invited to the furniture factory in South Carolina to see how designs become realities. The final products were presented at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair earlier this month and an exhibit of the furniture will open at the Museum of Arts and Design on October 6th. Read more of the coverage at Smart Planet.

Solar village, Solar Decathlon 2011 | Photo by Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy

SOLAR DECATHLON HITS DC
The 2011 Solar Decathlon has hit DC! After designing and building their prototypes on home turf, the nineteen teams began final construction of the houses in West Potomac Park on the 14th. Starting today, the houses are open to the public and judging has already begun. Only a few hours in, Team Maryland is in the lead, though Team New York (one of three New York/New Jersey-area teams participating in the event) has taken an early lead in the People’s Choice category. The houses will be on view through October 2nd. Keep tabs on scores and standings here and, for readers in the DC area, find more information about visiting the installation on the Solar Decathlon website.

EVENTS AND TO-DOs

PROJECT NEON: THE SHOW! In February, Kirsten Hively told us about her ongoing effort to document and celebrate the neon signage of New York City. Now, complete with a fetching new neon sign of its own, Project Neon has been turned into an exhibition, opening tonight, September 23 from 7-10pm, at Brooklyn’s City Reliquary. The show features several dozen of Hively’s photographs and marks the release of her new, free Project Neon iPhone app. For more on Project Neon, revisit our feature about the project, check out the website, or see a preview of the exhibit at the Times’ City Room.

DUMBO ARTS: The annual DUMBO Arts Festival starts tonight! Rain or shine, head towards the Brooklyn waterfront to check out three days of events with over 500 artists. Visit artists’ studios, watch performances by musicians, dancers, poets and circus artists throughout the neighborhood, commune with instrument makers in workshops, listen to tech gurus talk about the latest advances and join walking tours to hear little-known stories of the neighborhood. The festival runs from tonight, Friday, September 23, through Sunday, September 25. Check out the full schedule of events here.

LIVING AS FORM: Also opening tonight is Creative Time’s new project Living as Form, which explores the intersection of socially engaged visual art, architecture, urban design, theater and activism, just to name a few disciplines. Bringing together 25 curators, taking place both in Essex Street Market building and the surrounding neighborhood, the project will feature over 100 socially engaged projects from around the world. An exhibition and related programming will be presented through October 12, all of which will lead up to a book, scheduled for publication in January 2012. Check out the schedule of events, as well as more about Living as Form here.

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NYC SOLAR MAP
A new interactive map was launched by New York City Solar America City Partnership, led by Sustainable CUNY, to show the potential NYC has for solar panel placement. Showing both existing solar photo voltaic (PV) panels and solar thermal installations in NYC, the map also gives an estimate of solar PV potential for every rooftop in the five boroughs. The map allows users to assess any building’s solar panel capacity and estimate a financial payback. Created by gathering imagery and data using LIDAR technology, Inhabitat reports that the map shows that 66.4% of all buildings in the city are suitable for panels, and could generate up to 5,847 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, the city currently outputs 6.5 megawatts of solar energy. The map represents opportunities for building owners to assess solar capacity on their rooftop for free. See Inhabitat’s piece on the map here, and to find out your building’s solar potential, check out the new NYC Solar Map.

1,000 Nike+ runners in NYC | Image via Cooper Smith

RUNNING IN NEW YORK: MAPS
Graphic design student Cooper Smith developed a striking series to visualize the location, route popularity and time of day people run in New York City. The series was produced for an SVA course with visionary designer Nicholas Felton using the Nike+ GPS-synced mobile app. By geolocating 1,000 runners’ paths, Smith produced beautifully mapped stills and time-lapse videos showing multiple facets of New York runners’ paths. See Infosthetic’s piece on the topic and the full work here.

Underground construction on the 7 Line | Image via MTAPhotos on Flickr

7 TRAIN EXTENSION
Official MTA photographer Patrick Cashin caught some beautiful shots of subterranean work currently underway on the 7 train’s extended line. The extension is expected to be complete in three years, after which passengers will be able to reach 11th Avenue and 34th Street. See the full Patrick Cashin slideshow on Flickr.

9/11 MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM UPDATE
The Architect’s Newspaper reported on developments around the much anticipated opening of the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial and Museum scheduled for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy this coming September. The new complex will feature a subterranean museum and memorial space, an aboveground museum pavilion and a landscaped plaza with reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers. However, due to serious security concerns, a temporary ring of chain link fences and concrete barriers will limit public access to 1500 people at a time. After September 12th, visitors will be required to buy a ticket and pass through a series of metal detectors and x-ray machines in order to enter the plaza. Eventually security measures will be moved into the museum itself, but for the time being, security features trump accessible open space.

Artist’s rendering of +Pool | Image via +Pool

SWIM IN THE EAST RIVER?
Brooklyn designers Dong-Ping Wong of Family and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab have launched a Kickstarter campgain around their latest project +Pool, a project to build a floating pool in the East River, similar to Berlin’s famed Badeschiff. The designers have developed a comprehensive plan with engineering/design/planning firm ARUP and other experts to help make the pool a reality. The proposed pool will filter river water through its wall to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, making it swimmable and safe by City standards. Four pools (Children’s pool, Lap pool, Lounge Pool and Sports Pool) will join together to create a giant plus sign in the East River. Their latest round of fundraising will support the physical testing of the proposed filtration system. See the full project description here. To read up on floating pool ideas UO has covered in the past, see Jonathan Kirschenfeld and Ann Buttenweiser’s take on the topic.

NATION’S LARGEST URBAN CAMPSITE IN BROOKLYN
According to a recent press release from the National Parks Service, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has announced that the nation’s largest urban campground will be established at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a former airport used by Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes. The park’s current five campsites will be expanded to 90 over the next two years, and may eventually reach 600. Special outreach to underserved communities around the area will introduce families to camping skills and equipment in their home neighborhoods and will facilitate participation in overnight use, complete with campfire programs, kayaking and swimming opportunities.

EVENTS + TO DOs:

New York City in 2040 Image via Interboro Partners (left) and Amsterdam in 2040, Image via Space&Matter (right)

GLIMPSES of New York and Amsterdam: 2040
The Center for Architecture has teamed up with the Amsterdam Center for Architecture (ARCAM) to present “Glimpses of New York and Amsterdam in 2040,” a new exhibit showcasing visions of the future for two cities that share an extensive waterfront and similar climate challenges. The organizations commissioned architects and landscape architects in both cities to conceptualize the “future of the future,” with five basic necessities for living: breathing, eating, making, moving and dwelling. The exhibit features five firms from each city: New York’s dlandstudio, Interboro Partners, Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and WORKac, and Amsterdam’s Barcode Architects, DELVA Landscape Architects / Dingeman Deijs Architect, Fabrications, Space & Matter and van Bergen Kolpa. GLIMPSES will be shown through September 10th at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place. Read Inhabitat’s coverage of the exhibit or, for more information, see the official site.

COME OUT & PLAY NEW YORK
Come Out and Play, the annual festival of citywide street games, will begin on June 19th and run until July 16th. In years past, the festival has “turned New York City into a playground for a weekend,” with satellite city festivals held in San Francisco and Amsterdam. This year, Come Out and Play will begin in Lower Manhattan in partnership with the River to River Festival. Come Out and Play will run the series over the summer, culminating in a one-day field day in mid-July on Governors Island. For more information, see the official site.

GRANT OPPORTUNITIES
The Awesome Foundation is offering multiple $1,000 grants each month to “people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.” Although no New York City projects have been funded as of yet, the NYC Chapter is now accepting applications. To apply, click here.

Sappi has announced a call for entries for grants up to $50,000 with the “Ideas that Matter Grant Program.” Ideas that Matter is open to individual designers, design firms, agencies, in-house corporate design departments, design instructors, and individual design students and design student groups. To apply for an Ideas that Matter Grant, click here. The deadline to apply is July 15th.

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