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27 Jan '15
This is a great idea. Alessandra Galletti of the Tribeca Trust board has been pitching parklets for a while. Everyone at Tribeca Trust has been enthusiastic, although parklets are a bit of a headscratcher in terms of getting set up. We wanted to do one for Finn Square but Con-Ed got grumpy. So last summer, […]
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27 Jan '15
A place unlike any other The country of Yemen has many non-architectural tragedies to deal with. It is a failed state. There is more or less anarchy going on, civil war, declining oil prices, a failed popular movement for more democracy and clean government, the operations of a terrorist network and U.S. drone strikes. Yet […]
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I was asked some questions about historic districts recently. So I decided to work up good answers. Here is the short of it. What is a historic district? A historic district is a neighborhood knitted together by some visual commonality and historical experience. The National Register of Historic Places defines it as “a geographically definable […]
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We really need zoning reform. The problem is simple: Big Real Estate has been allowed to run amok in NYC for too long. They toss up over-scaled high-rises right next to fine old neighborhoods. They attack the concept of zoning and the actual existence of historic districts. They tear down buildings that should be landmarks. […]
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A Whole Block Destroyed by Related Companies and Ponte Equities The Landmarks Preservation Commission has turned a deaf ear to our pleas for this block and instead listened to Big Real Estate – notably that powerful long-term enemy of historic Tribeca, Related Companies, whose tower at 105 Duane sparked the original preservation movement in Tribeca. And […]
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Here we have what used to stand at 50 and 52 Murray Street (south side). Fantastic, no? It was owned by Charles Ahrenfeldt and Son, the New York office of an importer of fine Limoges china. Ahrenfeldt operated out of here from the 1860’s until 1913, when other tenants took over these two matching buildings. […]
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Behold the beautiful Lawrence Building which once stood where Square Diner now sits. Magnificent, is it not? It was written up in “The American Architect and Building News” of Oct 4, 1884 on page 162. The review gushed over the “light-buff brick from Perth Amboy,” “the cornices, string-courses and spandrils” and the “window dressings of terra-cotta, […]
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19 Jan '15
The above image is of a house that Mies Van Der Rohe thought should be X’ed out or eliminated, from an 1923 Manifesto printed in “G” Magazine. On the Silliness of the Phrase “An Architecture of our Time” Architects from Germany in the 1920’s got obsessed with a concept called zeitgeist. The idea […]
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Update on the Shenanigans at 172 Duane and the Fate of Duane Park Over the summer there was a neighborhood uproar on Duane Street over a glass building to be cantilevered on top of 172 Duane. The truly awful solipsistic glass design (completely anti-contextual) had the full approval of the Bloomberg Landmarks Preservation Commission […]
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