There are just a few days left until the July 31st deadline for the IfUD’s By the City / For the City design competition! Don’t miss this opportunity to have our top-notch jury review your design ideas and have your work featured in An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York. The Atlas will be discussed and celebrated across New York City during Urban Design Week, from September 15-20, 2011. Don’t waste this last weekend–register now and get to work!
IfUD Founder Ann Ferebee and Fellow Jeff Byles spoke recently at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y about their new revised version of Ferebee’s book, A History of Design From the Victorian Era to the Present, which can be purchased now at WW Norton’s website. They’ll be speaking again, downtown this time, at the Skyscraper Museum on August 2nd. This one’s not to be missed!
In a Time magazine article about the advent bookless libraries, Patron Steven Holl noted that “Acknowledging the digital and its speed and putting it in relation to the history and physical presence of the books makes it an exciting space. A book represents knowledge, and striking a balance in a library is a good thing.” Asked what makes a city successful, Board Member Saskia Sassen (pictured at left) argued that it is cities’ “incompleteness that gifts them their longevity. A city does not become obsolete.” (Sassen also sat down with Nicolas Nova for a great interview in advance of Lift Lab earlier this month.) And June Williamson spoke about the future of suburbia in one of Record‘s “What’s Next” features, explaining that “We spent 50 to 60 years building it up, so we’re going to have to spend an equivalent period of time restructuring, infilling, and remaking it.”
We are pleased to announce that Claire Weisz, a longtime Fellow of the Institute, has joined the organization’s Board of Directors. Claire was instrumental in the development of the concept for By the City / For the City, and will also serve on the competition jury next month. Welcome, Claire!
Steve Rosenbaum spoke with Michael Arad about the 9/11 Memorial and his role in the reconstruction of Ground Zero (of which the Daily Mail released some fantastic construction photos); Susan Chin appears in a video from a recent University of Chicago panel on the role of architecture in building cultural vitality; Richard Dattner’s PlayCubes (pictured at left) were revisited by the Playscapes blog; David Dixon is developing a comprehensive 20-year master plan for tornado-ravaged Birmingham, Alabama; Architectural Record looks at how Bruce Fowle turned his firm’s office into a veritable art gallery; Ken Greenberg released a study with recommendations for the future of a busy stretch of Toronto’s Yonge Street; Lebbeus Woods wrote an enthusiastic piece on Patron Steven Holl’s Vanke Center in Shenzhen; Chicago Magazine‘s Whet Moser called Helmut Jahn’s Mansueto Library a “[serious] reading room for the digital age”; Elle named Kate Orff as one of their Inspirational Women of 2011; and Domus featured archi-horoscopes by Dan Graham, including one on Cancerian IfUD Patron Robert Venturi.
We love hearing about our Fellows getting out there and working to make the world a safer, happier place. To wit: a new 104-unit affordable housing complex designed by Carmi Bee just opened in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood; Board Member Matt Blesso hosted his third annual star-studded birthday bash fundraiser for WorldWide Orphans (pictured at left) at his fantastic loft in Manhattan; and John di Domenico volunteered his services to design a new ADA-accessible entrance to Brooklyn’s Transit Museum.
Our friends at the Design Trust for Public Space will host one of their Public Space Potlucks at Barbara Wilks‘ Harlem Piers Park on 7/20 (pictured at left); Craig Dykers will participate in the Forum for Urban Design’s Next Urbanism discussion at Scandanavia House on 7/27; Ernie Hutton will moderate a panel on PlaNYC at the Center for Architecture on 7/29; and an exhibit of AIA Connecticut’s Design Awards winners, including work by Herbert Newman, will be on view in Clinton through 7/31.
Over the past few weeks, with the deadline for the IfUD’s By the City / For the City design ideas competition drawing closer, we have been contacted by many planners, artists, and architects about entering, but for whom early July is a particularly busy time. As a result, we have decided to extend the deadline to July 31st, 2011, to give everyone working on entries some breathing room!
Our goal in creating By the City / For the City is to reflect the incredible range of ideas, skills, and efforts that go into shaping public space, and so we will document it all in An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York, a book whose contents are being created by the hundreds of people who have participated in the process at each stage.
Ultimately, the decision to extend the competition deadline is rooted in our desire to give designers more time to visit the website, choose a challenge somewhere in the five boroughs that represents an opportunity where design could bring transformative change, and create a brief proposal that gives visual form to those ideas. All entries will be published in the Atlas and celebrated at the first-ever Urban Design Week festival in New York this September 15-20.
While the deadline has been extended, we strongly encourage designers and artists who plan to enter the competition to register by July 24th so that we can better plan for the printing of the Atlas in time for UDW. Anyone with questions about the competition can contact us at urbandesignweek@ifud.org. Good luck to all who enter!
Speaking at a meeting about the UNITY 4 plan concerning Forest City Ratner’s development of the Atlantic Yards site in central Brooklyn, Tom Angotti did not mince words, stating that “If they are going to call it transit-oriented development, then there has to be a plan to improve transit.” Down in New Zealand, AECOM CIO Joseph Brown explained his Global Cities Institute’s selection of Auckland as the subject of a planned study on livability, noting that the city’s “scale and impressive assets and ambitions provide a useful case study for many other cities hoping to combine growth with improved livability.” And Sudhir Jambhekar offered an intriguing description of the facade on FXFOWLE’s Museum of the Built Environment in Riyadh (pictured at left), explaining that a series of prisms will “create an amazing textural quality that resembles fish scales.”
Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved.
