Hasta La Ideas

It’s a daunting project to design a new website for a design-driven, project-based New York City nonprofit: The Design Trust for Public Space (motto: “We love public space.”). Kiss Me I’m Polish and Type/Code were up for the design and development challenges, respectively, and behold the freshly launched Designtrust.org. The new site is intended to be “an effective tool for cities, citizens, and organizations worldwide interested in initiating change in their communities,” according to the Design Trust. In addition to a database of Design Trust initiatives such as Five Borough Farm and Under the Elevated, it includes case studies, a publications library, and an impact map of projects across the five boroughs.

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Watch out, High Line, there’s a new park in town. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on hand yesterday to unveil a 5.5-acre waterfront park and several roadways at the site of the Hunter’s Point South development in Queens. We dispatched writer Nancy Lazarus to assess the city’s newest green space.

The multi-use green oval at Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, which opened to the public yesterday. (All photos: Albert Vecerka/Esto)

Many New Yorkers know Long Island City from the Silvercup or Pepsi signs visible across the East River. Art enthusiasts associate LIC with galleries, studios, and MoMA’s PS1. With the opening of Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park, locals now have recreational reasons to visit. So hop on the subway or East River Ferry and bring your cameras, bicycles, bathing suits, and dogs to NYC’s newest waterfront oasis.

Hunter’s Point South development, formerly known as “Queens West,” would have hosted an Olympic village if New York had won its 2012 bid. New York City Economic Development Corporation is overseeing the project, and Thomas Balsley Associates and Weiss/Manfredi collaborated on Phase 1, the design of the park and open space, with ARUP acting as prime consultant and infrastructure designers. Affordable housing and a school are also being built.

During a recent press tour, Marion Weiss, Michael Manfredi, and Thomas Balsley described how they converted the former marshland and industrial area for leisure use. While the tour was on a bright sunny day, the area was designed to be sustainable and to withstand storms. According to Weiss, the park flooded briefly during storm Sandy, but the water quickly receded, thanks to their water runoff and conservation system. There’s more official interest now in addressing potential floods, Manfredi added.
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Fontastic graffiti, stencilled on a wall in Guelph, Ontario.

“The plague of Times New Roman is the unspoken disease of our age….[S]urprisingly, given a visual training, some architects have fallen victim to the plague. Times New Roman is often incised into new buildings in major cities, unrelated to the essence of their architectural character. Before the TNR outbreak, beautiful signage was normal, whether a take on a classic of architectural typography, or a font pushing the progressive zeitgeist of the building style. Those were the old times. Now a 1930s newspaper font is a default setting for monumental inscription. It’s one that we must switch off.”

–Jonathan Foyle, CEO of World Monuments Fund Britain, in the Financial Times

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Raymond Pettibon, “No Title (Safe he called…),” 2010. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

Take me out to the High Line, where Raymond Pettibon has thrown out the summer’s first public art pitch–a baseball-themed billboard. The jumbo-sized version of “No Title (Safe he called…),” a 2010 work from the artist’s famous series of baseball drawings, debuts today in the sky above West 18th Street and 10th Avenue in New York as the tenth installment of the High Line Billboard series. We suggest visiting with a group to discuss the array of cultural references, from the depiction of a game between the the Boston Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers (before their 1957 defection to Los Angeles) and references to Moses (brokers of Biblical and civil power, who knew from exoduses) to shout-outs to Jackie Robinson and Biggie (“Where Brooklyn At?”). As the latter would say, “Anytime you’re ready, check it,” but make sure anytime is within the next month, or you’re out! Of luck, that is, because the billboard is on view through July 1.

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“After so many years of averting the border patrol between the disciplines of art and architecture, while inhabiting both yet claiming to be outsiders, this is the ultimate validation,” said Elizabeth Diller last Wednesday at the Plaza Hotel, as she joined partners Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro in accepting the American Academy of Rome’s Centennial Medal for their exceptional contributions to the worlds of architecture and the visual arts. The trio spent the previous evening at the New York Public Library, where they discussed their interdisciplinary design studio’s renewal of Lincoln Center. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to attend the event and harvest some memorable quotes. Learn more on May 10, when Diller and Scofidio will be joined by DS+R monograph author Edward Dimendberg for a book talk at the Center for Architecture.

Redesigning Lincoln Center was an epic undertaking that involved a prominent public landmark and a painstaking process that evolved over nearly ten years. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the design studio behind most of the project, has chronicled their experiences in Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account (Damiani). The three principals shared their views on the project and the book at a recent event hosted by New York Public Library and moderated by Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at MoMA. The DS+R trio is just as articulate as they are creative, so here are excerpts from that discussion.

On Lincoln Center’s design:
Diller: The old Lincoln Center was too elitist, solid, and turned its back on the neighborhood and community. We were drawn to the promenade levels where everyone pours out in the middle of events. We wanted to extend that social feeling to the rest of the project. We broke down the edges to enable events in the public spaces. There’s more symmetry now across the public and private spaces.

Scofidio: There were no photos of the old Lincoln Center except the main plaza with the fountain. Someone said that in the 1960s, plazas were designed to be desolate.

On how they approached the project:
Diller: To win the project we showed many ideas, since we tend to think in multiples, with different approaches and solutions. We demonstrated our affection for the place and showed how to take it to the next step. We felt we could do it justice and interpret it for contemporary culture. We wanted to transform Lincoln Center for the logic of our time.

Scofidio: We didn’t go in and say here are the problems we have to correct. We just said we can finish Lincoln Center.
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