Architecture And Design

March 9, 2016

Use This Cool Paperweight for Efficient Decision Making

The city's fast paced environment presents a myriad of challenges on a daily basis -- Should I take the express or local train? Is that apartment worth the extra $300 a month? When should I start looking for a new job? Now, instead of letting the stress eat you alive, make these difficult choices with this cool Decision Paperweight.
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March 9, 2016

First Look At Harlem’s Baldwin Condominiums, Inspired By James Baldwin

By Ondel Hylton

In a corner of Harlem hemmed in by a steep ravine within Jackie Robinson Park and the Harlem River, a residential enclave is undergoing a renaissance. Among a string of four recently finished sale buildings, a seven-story, six-unit condominium has begun work at 306 West 148th Street, between Bradhurst Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Conceived by Bottom Line Construction & Development (no comment), the 10,000-square-foot building is to be called The Baldwin after the eminent Harlem-born novelist, poet, playwright and social critic, James Baldwin. Channeling the author's spirit, the condo will capture in its residences "the sophisticated details and artistic flare of contemporary Harlem living."
Find out more

March 8, 2016

Norah Jones Gets Approval to Renovate ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Carriage House

By Michelle Cohen

According to plans filed with the Department of Buildings, singer/musician/actress Norah Jones is planning to renovate the historic and charming Cobble Hill stable she purchased last fall. Back in September 6sqft reported that Ms. Jones was the buyer of the $6.25 million converted 1840s firehouse that had a cameo role in the Julia Roberts film "Eat, Pray, Love." Permit documentation shows that Ben Baxt of Baxt Ingui Architects has drawn up plans to convert the two-family home into a single-family dwelling and replace an existing rear addition (including the existing solarium) with a new back wall that features a full-height door and sliding glass door on the ground floor and two sets of French doors with Juliette balconies on the floor above. Plans also include six skylights and roof access, among other updates. Landmarks has also given the green light to the proposed rear-facade renovations (h/t Brownstoner).
More on the reno plans this way

March 8, 2016

Beyer Blinder Belle Publishes Renderings of Essex Crossing’s Site 5

By Emrys Fitzgerald

The nine-site Essex Crossing plan underway on the Lower East Side will bring more than 1.9 million square feet of residential, commercial, and community space to the largest undeveloped swath of land in the borough south of 96th Street. The long-tweeked master plan is being developed by an alliance named Delancey Street Associates, which consists of BFC Partners, L+M Development Partners, and Taconic Investment Partners. The plan's site 5, located just a block southwest of the Manhattan entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge at 145 Clinton Street, will bring 211 apartments, 73,000 square feet of retail space, and a 15,000-square-foot park to the full-block parcel between Grand, Clinton, Broome and Suffolk streets. Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners are the designers of the red-brick tower and recently published a set of renderings, first shown to the community in 2015, giving us a more detailed look at the $110 million, 15-story building.
More details and renderings ahead

March 8, 2016

Giant Tic-Tac-Toe Set Transforms Any Patio Into a Playground

By Rebecca Paul

Spring has almost sprung, and we can hardly wait to get out of the apartment and out in the wilds of our backyards—or our friend's backyard. Regardless of how you get there, outdoor gatherings are always better with a friendly game of tic-tac-toe, especially when you're playing with giant Xs and Os. This beautiful set was designed by Jeremy Exley and is sure to bring the right amount of friendly competition to your next outdoor event.
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March 8, 2016

Renderings Revealed of Turkey’s Shiny, New 32-Story Consulate Tower

By Dana Schulz

Though Perkins Eastman's design of Turkey's forthcoming 32-story consulate tower was inspired by a Turkish crescent (a large, ornate, gilded instrument), the firm took a very streamlined approach to their vision, using swooping curves and geometric patterns to "evoke Islamic themes and Turkish art and culture," as 6sqft previously described. The Turkevi Center will rise along Consulate Row, at 821 United Nations Plaza, the corner of 46th Street and First Avenue. According to a press release first spotted by Curbed, it will "feature prominent loggias along the upper floors of the south and east faces, and be stacked atop a podium wrapped in perforated metal paneling." The project had been on the drawing board for more than three years, but Perkins Eastman have now received the green light to move ahead with the building that will house new consulate offices, passport and visa branch offices, conference rooms, a multi-purpose prayer room, fitness center, auditorium, underground parking, and residential space for staff and visitors.
Additional details and renderings ahead

March 8, 2016

Gilded-Age Riverside Drive Mansion With Basement Pool Returns to the Market for $20M

By Michelle Cohen

The Philip and Maria Kleeberg House is a stunning, unique and impossibly grand 11,000-square-foot manse overlooking the Hudson River at 3 Riverside Drive. This 19th-century limestone landmark was designed by noted mansion architect C.P.H. Gilbert for the aforementioned wealthy pair. Young Mr. K was something of what today we’d call a serial tech entrepreneur, and the mansion sits on a stretch of the Hudson River that was being developed to rival the grandeur of Fifth Avenue. According to a New York Times article in 2012–when the 18-room home hit the market at $40 million–the home’s current owners, Regina Kislin, a real estate developer, and her husband, photographer Anatoly Siyagine, found it in 1995 in a state of disrepair, bought it for $10 million and embarked on a facelift of epic proportions based on the potential they saw in the regal wreck, which Ms. Kislin says "...reminded my husband of the mansions in St. Petersburg back in Russia.” According to the current listing, "It is as close as a Manhattanite can come to living in a European castle." Several price chops later at $20 million (h/t TRD), it remains a pretty incredible piece of real estate, albeit with a more realistic price tag. In addition to the restoration efforts, modern touches include an elevator and an indoor pool, sauna and gym in the cellar.
Must be seen to be believed, this way

March 7, 2016

360º Views: This Is the Largest Panoramic Photo of New York’s Skyline Ever Taken

By Diane Pham

Just when we thought we'd seen every angle of the New York City skyline possible, here comes a mind-bogglingly detailed panorama courtesy of photographer Jeffrey Martin. According to the Daily Mail, the sweeping (and interactive!) image was the product of two days spent atop the Empire State Building, with Martin wielding a Canon 5Dsr and a 135mm lens shooting more than 2,000 frames that were later painstakingly stitched together. The image is in fact so large and exhaustive that its 20 Gigapixels would give way to a photo that's 57 feet wide and 27 feet tall if printed!
Click here to access the interactive panorama

Architecture And Design

March 7, 2016

New Renderings of the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Office Space and Food Hall

By Dana Schulz

After announcing two weeks ago that they'd be launching a free shuttle service to connect with 13 subway lines, the Brooklyn Navy Yard has now released additional details about the shuttle, as well as new renderings of Building 77's $185 million renovation, reports Brownstoner. The 1,000,000-square-foot structure, a former ammunition depot, is the largest on the site, and when it reopens in 2017 it will offer luxury commercial space, a 16,000-square-foot rooftop, and its hotly anticipated food hall to be anchored by Lower East Side mainstay Russ & Daughters. The shuttle will have WiFi and will also connect to the LIRR. Additionally, the Navy Yard will get seven Citi Bike kiosks and 1,600 parking spaces.
More details and all the renderings

March 7, 2016

Office Cocoon Promotes Privacy and Productivity in any Environment

By Rebecca Paul

Staying focused at work can be challenging for a variety of different reasons, from the coworker who screams on personal calls to the colleague who chews gum with his mouth open, but this clever piece of office furniture is here to help you keep your head in the game (literally and figuratively). Tomoko, designed by MottoWasabi, is an acoustic dome that promotes privacy and concentration in open-plan offices, lobbies, and other public spaces, so you can physically create your own office no matter what your surroundings are.
more on the design here

March 7, 2016

Baxt/Ingui Architects Designed This $19M UWS Townhouse As an Energy-Efficient Passive Home

By Michelle Cohen

The listing calls the townhouse at 25 West 88th Street "beyond mint," and it's certainly green enough to qualify. This 8,000- square-foot Central Park West home has gotten its fair share of publicity recently. In addition to being a landmarked 1910 historic beauty and having undergone a stem-to-stern modern overhaul, the home's current owners, investment banker Kurt Roeloffs and his wife Shyanne, worked with the well-known Baxt/Ingui Architects to create an energy-efficient masterpiece that meets both LEED platinum and passive house standards. Even with all that efficiency, they didn't skimp on luxury. With six floors (and an elevator) and a finished cellar, six bedrooms plus rooms dedicated to yoga, meditation, exercise and crafts, this may, in fact, be "one of the finest contemporary townhomes on the Upper West Side."
Find out more about this amazing, energy-efficient home

March 6, 2016

The Best and Worst of Brutalist Architecture in New York

By Carter B. Horsley

Frills are not part of the Brutalist vocabulary. Brutalist architecture has never been very popular but its blunt forcefulness, its rude breaking with tradition, and its startling and often simplistic inventiveness have made it hard to ignore and therefore still very vital. While Brutalism flourished in the 1960s, it has long suffered from a reputation […]

March 5, 2016

East 61st Street Condo Finally Reveals Itself, $82.5M Sellout Projected

By Ondel Hylton

At the northeast corner of East 61st Street and Second Avenue, a long shrouded condominium project is finally showing us some skin. The 19-story building addressed at 301 East 61st Street exhibits a creamy stone exterior, with inset balconies and vertical fins projecting from a floor-to-ceiling glass curtain wall. The building is being developed by Orlando-based Inverlad Development who purchased the 3,800-square-foot lot for $15.4 million in 2012.
Find out more

March 4, 2016

Why Micro-Apartments in Carmel Place Are So Expensive

By Michelle Cohen

We’ve been hearing a lot recently about the city’s new micro-apartments. As 6sqft has reported, NYC’s first micro-apartment complex Carmel Place (formerly My Micro NY) at 335 East 27th Street began leasing at the end of last year. The nine-story modular development in Kips Bay has 55 studios that are 260 to 360 square feet. Of these, 22 are affordable and they’ll go from $950 to $1,500 a month. Market-rate units on the other end range from $2,540 to $2,910. According to CityRealty, the average rental price per square foot for New York City apartments overall is $51, while Carmel Place units ring in at $98 per square foot. The idea of micro-housing was presented, in part, to address the need for more affordable apartments. So why is it that the result is what a recent New Yorker article calls “micro-luxury" housing?
Small Is Beautiful–but Not Affordable

March 4, 2016

Live Like Park Slope Royalty Atop a Queen Anne Stone Mansion for $1.85M

By Michelle Cohen

There's a lot that's grand about this listing, including the fact that you're steps from Grand Army Plaza (with all of Prospect Park below). But the building that holds this three-bedroom condominium is the kind that turns heads. The historic Queen Anne/Romanesque Revival mansion at 70 Eighth Avenue stands out even in a neighborhood filled with architectural grandeur, with a turret and bell dome, terra cotta ornamentation and stained glass details. This 1,847-square-foot, three-bedroom duplex on the market for $1.847 million would give you a chance to roll up to that bad boy every day. You would have to keep rolling up at least a couple of flights of stairs (there's no elevator to get to this "penthouse") but the landmarked four-story beauty would certainly be an interesting place to call home.
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March 4, 2016

VOA Architects Design 70-Story Mixed-Use Supertall for the Far West Side

By Ondel Hylton

Here's a first idea of what may be coming to a valuable far west side corner owned by former governor Elliot Spitzer. First spotted by the eagle-eyed SkyscraperPage, the scheme was prepared by VOA Architects for Highgate Hotels and shows an approximately 70-story, mixed-use tower stacked with a 1,000-key hotel with condominiums above. The site at 451 Tenth Avenue at 35th Street was picked up by Spitzer for $62 million in 2014 through a 99-year lease from Madd Equities. VOA's blog page states, "the project would have been the first new convention hotel in NY since the Marriott Marquis opened in 1985." Judging by the past-tense nature of the description, it seems this exact vision will not come to fruition.
More renderings ahead

VIDEO: Watch the World Trade Center Oculus Get Built in 65 Seconds

Time-Lapse Courtesy of EarthCam

March 3, 2016

VIDEO: Watch the World Trade Center Oculus Get Built in 65 Seconds

By Dana Schulz

When we talk about Santiago Calatrava's $4 billion World Trade Center Transportation Hub, there's always the inevitable mention of how long (12 years!) it actually took to get the project up and running and built. Which is why this stunning time lapse is all the more fitting to mark the Hub's opening today at 3:00pm. The webcam experts at EarthCam teamed up with the project contractor, Skanska USA, to capture all 42 months (June 2011-December 2014) of construction progress for the famed and notorious winged oculus and condense it into a 65-second video.
Watch the full time lapse here

Architecture And Design

The Bedrock Myth: The Evolution of the NYC Skyline Was More About Dollars Than Rocks

Manhattan, and the bedrock beneath it, via imgur

March 3, 2016

The Bedrock Myth: The Evolution of the NYC Skyline Was More About Dollars Than Rocks

By Michelle Cohen

The reason so many skyscrapers are clustered Downtown and in Midtown isn't so much because of geological feasibility as because everybody else was doing it. It was long assumed that the depth of our venerable Manhattan Schist bedrock, well-suited for the construction of tall buildings, was the determinant in where the city's towers rose. Though the bedrock outcroppings are indeed at their deepest and closest to the surface in the areas where many of the city's tallest buildings are clustered, it's more likely to be coincidence than cause and effect. The real reason there's a big doughnut hole in the spiky man-made terrain between FiDi and Midtown has more to do with the way the city's dual business districts developed from a sociological and economic perspective between 1890 and 1915.
Find out why the bedrock myth is on shaky ground

March 3, 2016

Stuff You Should Know: How Air Rights Work

By Diane Pham

“For whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell.” Most folks outside the architecture and real estate industries are likely to believe that putting up a new skyscraper is simply about finding an empty lot to build up. However, those in the know understand that it takes much more than a stretch of space and a good […]

March 3, 2016

Grand Carroll Gardens Brownstone With Original Details Gets a Price Chop to $6M

By Michelle Cohen

The story of the historic townhouse at 46 First Place in Carroll Gardens is just as much a story of its owner, Kathryn Sennis, who has lived in and worked from the elegant 1899 brownstone for nearly 32 years. In 2012, Sennis, a psychotherapist, opened Who's On First? Children's Enrichment Studio with her daughter here, offering art classes, parties, baby yoga and programs for parents and children, including foreign language classes and parenting groups. Ms. Sennis's story was highlighted in the Observer last May, where she told of buying the townhouse in 1981 for $250,000 from an “elderly Italian woman,” how her presence confused the neighbors at the time ("you ain't even Italian!") and how much the neighborhood has changed since then. She also talks of the extensive, exhaustive renovations she painstakingly undertook. She rents out the upper two floors, and her daughter uses the garden level of the four-family home. It’s a Brooklyn story like so many others–though in this case it's one with a $6 million price tag attached.
Tour the inside

March 3, 2016

Renzo Piano’s Ship-Like Academic Center Coming to Columbia’s Manhattanville Campus

By Ondel Hylton

On a triangular lot, where north-skewing West 125th Street meets West 129th Street, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) and Dattner Architects have crafted a 56,000-square-foot, ship-like structure for Columbia University's Manhattanville Campus. Known as the University Forum and Academic Conference Center, the three-story building will host academic conferences, meetings, and symposia. It will contain a 430-seat auditorium, meeting rooms, and gathering spaces. According to Piano's page, "The building looks like a ship levitating above the light and transparent Urban Layer." Its prow points westward and may be just small enough to sail under the Riverside Drive Viaduct and into the Hudson River.
More details ahead

March 3, 2016

New Renderings and Video Released for Sheepshead Bay’s Waterfront Vue Condominium

By Ondel Hylton and Julian Friedman

Rybak Development's latest venture named the Vue Condominium will add a bit of pizzazz and a sizable plaza to a popular stretch of Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay. Rising from a prominent, full-block parcel at the intersection of Emmons and Sheepshead Bay Road, the envisioned eight-story structure replaces former neighborhood fixture the El Greco Diner, whose site was snapped up by Sergey Rybak and Jason Reznik for $13 million in late 2014. The project first appeared one year ago, and now a handful of renderings and a video have been released by the developers. The 175,000-square-foot structure will be the first LEED Certified building in south Brooklyn and will house 58 condos, 26,000 square feet of retail, two commercial office units, and a 134-car garage shared by tenants and businesses. The 9,000- square-foot plaza will take up a quarter of the development site and will have raised planters, ambiance lighting and bicycle parking.
Watch the video and see more renderings

March 2, 2016

Six Architects Reimagine the MetLife Building As an Eco-Friendly Tower of the Future

By Michelle Cohen

Earlier this week, the six finalists in the "Reimagine a New York City Icon" competition were announced (h/t NY Yimby). The competition to reimagine the MetLife Building, sponsored by Metals in Construction magazine and the Ornamental Metal Institute of New York, isn’t part of any real-life plans for the iconic Midtown tower, but when great minds get to this kind of imagining, great ideas are born. Architects and engineers were asked to "reimagine 200 Park Avenue with a resource-conserving, eco-friendly enclosure—one that creates a highly efficient envelope with the lightness and transparency sought by today’s office workforce—while preserving and enhancing the aesthetic of the building’s heritage." Designed by Emery Roth & Sons, Pietro Belluschi, and Walter Gropius, the 59-story MetLife Building, located to the north of Grand Central Terminal, opened in 1963 as the Pan Am Building. MetLife bought the building in 1981, and though they sold it in 2005, the architectural icon keeps their name. Below are the finalists' descriptions and renderings for the tower's eco-friendly future.
See what the finalists came up with

March 2, 2016

Police Building Penthouse Gets a $5 Million Price Cut With New Views of Its Secret Room

By Emily Nonko

Remember that $40 million penthouse that occupies the cupola of 240 Centre Street, the 1909 Beaux Arts NYPD headquarters in Nolita? It's hard to forget a four-story, 6,000-square-foot apartment that comes with insane outdoor space (right outside the cupola!) and a secret room originally only accessible to clock mechanics. The Police Building was converted to condos in 1988 but this particular apartment, which both Calvin Klein and Steffi Graf have called home, was recently remodeled. The condo hit the market in November to quite a bit of fanfare, but apparently buyers aren't biting. Sotheby's has recently listed the penthouse for a $5 million discount -- a cool $35 million -- and also offers some new interior photos to obsess over.
See the extravagant interior

March 2, 2016

Bring Tomorrow’s Weather Indoors With Tempescope

By Ana Lisa Alperovich

Weather in New York is anything but predictable these days, with 60-degree days followed up by below-freezing winds. But while fluctuating temps have been irksome, we've found a fun little gadget that makes unpredictable weather a serene and beautiful thing. Meet Tempescope, an ambient physical display devised by Ken Kawamoto that physically visualizes impeding weather conditions like rain, clouds and lightning. The minimal device is designed to receive weather forecasts from the Internet and reproduce the next day's sky inside your home.
Learn more about this cool gadget

Architecture And Design

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