GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEXT 100 YEARS BY WXY ARCHITECTURE + URBAN DESIGN

After Foster + Partners’ vision, then SOM’s, WXY Architecture + Urban Design is chosen as one of the firms to re-think the public realm around the future Grand Central Terminal.

“New zoning rules should trigger real transportation links to public space. One way is to harness the untapped potential of Grand Central’s edges” says Claire Weisz, one of WXY’s founding principals. ”The plan for Midtown’s near future needs to make the Grand Central neighborhood a place people enjoy being in not just running through.”

WXY’s proposal would create a striking new ground transportation hub, through the following interventions:

• Transforming Vanderbilt Avenue into a pedestrian-only street,
• Creating new public spaces around the base of the MetLife building,
• Adapting the west side of the current Park Avenue Viaduct into an elevated pedestrian and bicycle path, with a glass floor and seasonal plantings, and
• Introducing a new tower, featuring \”sky parks,\” on the west side of Grand Central Terminal.

Focusing efforts along 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, the plan by WXY Architecture + Urban Design restores pedestrian-friendly amenities to what had been an automobile-centric urban layout. The pedestrian/auto hybrid strategy includes making Vanderbilt Avenue a pedestrian-only walkway. The west side of the Park Avenue viaduct would become an elevated promenade featuring tall grass plantings and glass paving — a space for reflection hovering over the city bustle.

Combining walkable skylights with wide staircases and a multi-level approach, points of entry to the Grand Central area become unusual and gracious outdoor rooms that provide access and support to an expanded terminal city. Direct access to and links between the multiple subway and train lines — including the new East Side Access/LIRR lines — would be greatly expanded and improved.

Egress from the MetLife building’s base would become visually striking and yet relaxing to use, with escalators transporting travelers into a cleared podium park. Some years after completion, visitors exiting via these escalators will have the experience of being greeted first by the park’s grove of trees, a pleasant surprise in the Midtown East district. Surrounded by an active facade and a sky lobby above, the podium park presents an opportunity for a unique public event space.

WXY’s plan also includes a tapered obelisk-shaped tower west of Grand Central Terminal. The tower’s graceful, elongated pyramidal lines are broken at odd intervals by garden terraces that protrude like enormous window-box gardens, and feature seasonal plantings. The roof is likewise vegetated, reinforcing New York City’s renewed commitment to finding and creating green spaces for the health and enjoyment of its citizens.

 

Location: New York, USA 
Architects: WXY Architecture + Urban Design

HALO ABOVE GRAND CENTRAL STATION BY SOM

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architect firm with offices here in New York, has proposed a futuristic-looking halo to be suspended between two buildings over Grand Central Station as part of an initiative to bring the travel hub back to its past glory.  

A pedestrian halo suspended in the sky between two office towers. An elevated glass walkway with seasonal grasses. A pedestrian plaza with sidewalk cafes and retail. These are a few of the proposals by architects who want to transform Grand Central Terminal from a chaotic beehive back to its former glory as a stately entry point to the city for the many thousands of commuters and tourists who use it each day.

The Department of City Planning has proposed a rezoning of the area around Grand Central, including parts of Park and Madison avenues, to allow for a handful of new office towers. As part of the proposed rezoning, some developers would be required to donate to a fund to make infrastructure upgrades in the area, including building additional stairways to access the subway platforms in Grand Central and a pedestrian mall on Vanderbilt Avenue.

But some want to see more ambitious solutions to Grand Central's pedestrian traffic jams, which are only expected to increase with the addition of more office space and new commuter access to the terminal by the Long Island Rail Road. "What's in it for the public?" said Roger Duffy, a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, an architecture firm.

"Grand Central itself is our most beloved landmark. It's the center of commercial New York. It's also a neighborhood. But yet, the area over the years, it has become somewhat disconnected and a little lonely at times, particularly in the evening," said Vin Cipolla, president of MAS.

The ideas from the architects have thus far found a receptive audience with the department. "I look forward to seeing the concepts that the MAS teams have put forward and to continuing conversations with the public about critical pedestrian and transit network improvements that can accompany future development in East Midtown," City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden said in a statement.

The most visually striking proposal, designed by Skidmore Owings, is a halo suspended between two new office buildings that would move up and down. It would give visitors a view of the city from different heights, similar to the London Eye. The firm says it has consulted with engineers and the proposal is technically feasible, but the bigger challenge would be to ensure that the government and owners of potential new office towers could work together.

"That's kind of radical. Currently there's a divide between the public and private," Mr. Duffy said. The firm of WXY Architecture created a design for an elevated pedestrian walkway on the current Park Avenue Viaduct with a glass bottom and seasonal plantings similar to the High Line. "Our strategy was the dream of the near-future being a lot better," said Claire Weisz, a founding partner at WXY.

Foster + Partners, which designed the Hearst Tower near Columbus Circle, stuck to more incremental changes, such as creating a pedestrian plaza on Vanderbilt Avenue, increasing the heights of the pedestrian tunnels and creating more open, visible entrances to the terminal. "It's one of the most wonderful civic spaces anywhere in the world," said Brandon Haw, a senior partner. "Nonetheless, it is very difficult to navigate."

source: The Wall Street Journal

PARRISH ART MUSEUM BY HERZOG & DE MEURON

Exhibit A is the Parrish Art Museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and scheduled to open on November 10. The museum, which is visible to anyone driving along the Montauk Highway on the South Fork of Long Island, New York, is a single low-slung rectangle, about 100 feet wide and more than 600 feet long, under a standing-seam metal roof.

“The starting point for the new Parrish Art Museum is the artist’s studio in the East End of Long Island. We set the basic parameters for a single gallery space by distilling the studio’s proportions and adopting its simple house section with north-facing skylights.

Two of these model galleries form wings around a central circulation spine that is then bracketed by two porches to form the basis of a straightforward building extrusion.

The floor plan of this extrusion is a direct translation of the ideal functional layout. A cluster of ten galleries defines the heart of the museum. The size and proportion of these galleries can be easily adapted by re-arranging partition walls within the given structural grid.

To the east of the gallery core are located the back of house functions of administration, storage, workshops and loading dock. To the west of the galleries are housed the public program areas of the lobby, shop, and café with a flexible multi-purpose and educational space at the far western end.

An ordered sequence of post, beam and truss defines the unifying backbone of the building. Its materialisation is a direct expression of readily accessible building materials and local construction methods. The exterior walls of in situ concrete act as long bookends to the overall building form, while the grand scale of these elemental walls is tempered with a continuous bench formed at its base for sitting and viewing the surrounding landscape.

Large overhangs running the full length of the building provide shelter for outdoor porches and terraces. The placement of the building is a direct result of the skylights facing towards the north.

This east-west orientation, and its incidental diagonal relationship within the site, generates dramatically changing perspective views of the building and further emphasises the building’s extreme yet simple proportions. It lays in an extensive meadow of indigenous grasses that refers to the natural landscape of Long Island.” Description of Architects.

Original design for the Parrish Art Museum

 

Original design for the Parrish Art Museum

Location: South Fork, New York

Architect: Herzog, De Meuron

Project Team: Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Ascan Mergenthaler

Project manager: Jayne Barlow, Raymond Jr. Gaëtan, Philip Schmerbeck

Client: Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, USA

Area: 34,400 square foot

Cost: $26 Mil.

Year: 2009-2012

VISITOR CENTER BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN’S BY WEISS AND MANFREDI

In May 2012 the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened its new Visitor Center, designed by architects WEISS/MANFREDI.

Partners Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi actually live nearby, and maybe that proximity allowed them to craft a building that appreciates the existing characteristics of the place while still looking to its future. The serpentine building beautifully transitions from city to garden, all the while carefully balancing architecture and landscape to create a special hybrid. The architects answered a few questions about the project.

What were the circumstances of receiving the commission for this project?

The project commission was initiated by an invited request for proposal where we decided to question the original Brooklyn Botanic Garden Master Plan location that sited the building in the center of an existing berm abutting a parking lot. Rather than abide by the original Master Plan location we elected to propose an alternative in placing the structure towards the street of Washington Avenue giving the Garden a visible ‘gateway’ while preserving the Garden’s tall mature Ginkgo trees that lined the top of the existing berm.

Can you describe your design process for the building?

Leveraging its unique context within the Olmsted-designed Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the design for the Visitor Center inverts the distinctions between building and site. Like the gardens themselves, the building is experienced cinematically and is never seen in its entirety. The serpentine form of the Visitor Center is generated by the garden’s existing pathways. Architecture, landscape, and ecology collaborate in a series of braided paths that are part landscape and part architecture. The shifting section and slow twist of the plan create a metered transformation from city to garden, with a section that changes dramatically from a freestanding urban gateway to an inhabitable earthwork whose glass-lined interior gallery is an extension of the paths through the garden.

How does the building compare to other projects in your office, be it the same or other building types?

We continually explore the relationships between landscape, architecture and infrastructure. Our vision of a constructed site finds its place somewhere between two extremes: the modernist archetype of a purely sculptural, autonomous architecture and the architecture of camouflage, where construction is fully blended into a context. This constructed hybrid – equal parts natural, cultural, and infrastructural – is invented through the lens of geometry and topography and given measure and value through material construction, cultivation, and use.

 

For instance, our design for the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, which operates at a significantly larger scale than the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center, employs parallel devices of section and topography, sequence and movement to demonstrate how a city can be reconnected to its waterfront through a dynamic landscape infrastructure that integrates art and architecture. Settings for art, ecology, and recreation are woven together and stitched into the fabric of the city to create a catalyst for new development and a nexus for an emerging community.

Further engaging a site specific approach at a larger scale, our Museum of the Earth, commissioned by the Paleontological Research Institution, engages the remarkable landforms of the upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region. The museum houses one of the nation’s largest paleontological collections and demonstrates the intrinsic relationships between geological events and biological evolution. Shifted and carved by a receding ice sheet twenty thousand years ago, the site is marked by a gradual, forty-foot slope. The design capitalizes on this rich condition, making vivid the dynamic interrelationship between biology and geology that is central to the museum’s mission.

How does the building relate to contemporary architectural trends, be it sustainability, technology, etc.?

The new Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center will achieve LEED Gold Certification. The sustainable design integration seeks to establish a standard for innovation in urban institutional buildings. An active education program makes these sustainable initiatives visible to the Garden’s visitors and local community.

The Visitor Center incorporates several sustainable measures that are aimed at increasing thermal efficiency by embedding the structure into an existing 20-foot sloping berm, incorporating a low-emitting fritted glass envelope designed to minimize heat gain while maximize illumination from sunlight and constructing a geoexchange system consisting of ground-source thermal wells to reduce the structure’s overall energy consumption. Additionally the project is designed with an exciting new experimental ‘living’ green roof with more than 40,000 grasses, spring bulbs and perennial wildflowers. The living roof slows and channels rainwater to a series of rain gardens that retain and filter stormwater.

To make this undulating ‘living’ roof, the design utilized three-dimensionally modeling that gave measure to the 29 hollow steel tube frames used to contain infrastructure. Using the 3D modeling programs for the architecturally exposed to view steel structure allowed both design and fabrication to be seamlessly engineered and constructed.

Email interview conducted by John Hill - Source: World Architects

Client: Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Architects: WEISS/MANFREDI
Project Architect/Manager: Armando Petruccelli, RA
Project Architects: Hamilton Hadden, Justin Kwok, Michael Steiner
Project Team: Christopher Ballentine, Cheryl Baxter, Michael Blasberg, Paúl Duston-Muñoz
Additional Team Members: Patrick Armacost, Jeremy Babel, Caroline Emerson, Eleonora Flammina, Kian Goh, Michael Harshman, Aaron Hollis, Hanul Kim, Hyoung-Gul Kook, Lee Lim, Jonathan Schwartz, Na Sun, Jie Tian, Yoonsun Yang
Structural/Civil Engineer: Weidlinger Associates, Inc., MEP/FP Engineer, Jaros, Baum & Bolles Consulting Engineers
Landscape: HM White Site Architecture
Building Area: 22,000 SF
Photos: Albert Vecerka / Esto

Brooklyn Botanic Garden

ARTIST RESIDENCE AND STUDIO BY CALIPER

Set in historic Greenwich Village, the residence is composed of two low buildings, originally one was a metal shop and the other a garage.

Roy Lichtenstein

In the late 1980s artist Roy Lichtenstein moved into a two-story warehouse that was converted to a residence and studio by 1100 Architect. Lichtenstein died in 1997, and the building, located across the street from Westbeth Artists Housing, is now occupied by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation,

Dorothy Lichtenstein

The mission of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation is to research, document, protect and share Roy Lichtenstein’s art and creative legacy. The Foundation has been actively involved in 20 Lichtenstein solo exhibitions, via loans, documentation and assistance with institutions throughout the United States and in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Moscow, Japan and Puerto Rico.

In 2007 the Foundation hired Caliper Studio for restoration and renovation work.

The buildings had between them eight roof surfaces totaling 6,000 square feet of  aging roof.  The two larger surfaces were transformed into a quiet landscape of wall to wall sedum plants within which are set two of Roy Lichtenstein’s sculptures—Brushstrokes and Endless Drip.

This newly formed urban sculpture garden is framed by the tall rugged neighboring buildings of Manhattan’s west side. The kitchen and penthouse were rebuilt with dark reflective brick, connecting them is a black locust wood deck curving and stepping above the landscape.

This warm wood surface forms a path, a viewing platform and a resting area to enjoy the new garden.  The sedum planting continues onto two new concrete shell skylights whose curved form gently diffuses light into the studio below.

Preservation of the artist’s studio was a primary design objective of the project. Careful technical detailing of the building’s envelope along with new climate controls help ensure the longevity of the studio.

The quality of the space and its character have been maintained through original artifacts including the artist’s built-in wall easel system and paint splattered floor.

The most overt outcome of the process happens on the 6,000-sf (557-sm) roof, where "a quiet landscape of wall to wall sedum plants" now exists. The L-shaped roof is crowded in by buildings on three sides, but it does reach toward Washington Street on the west, in the direction of Westbeth (photo at right).

People walking up and down the street can glance atop the one-story garage to get a glimpse of one of two large-scale Lichtenstein sculptures installed on the roof, in this case "Endless Drip."

"Brushstrokes" sits at a remove from the street, between a rebuilt penthouse office and new concrete shell skylights. A locust-wood deck snakes its way from the office to a rebuilt kitchen; the gray bricks of each volume stand out from the original building, marking these as new constructions.

Further, Caliper Studio -- which is comprised of Caliper Architecture and Caliper Fabrication -- is responsible for much of the fabrication: skylights, canopy, trellis, planter, window frames and grates, railings. Their construction documentation is worth a look, particularly for the forming of the skylights.

Below the roof level, much of the work carried out was in keeping with the original conditions of Lichtenstein's studio and residence. According to the architects, "The quality of the space and its character have been maintained through original artifacts including the artist’s built-in wall easel system and paint splattered floor".

This leaves the roof as the canvas, if you will, for the architects, who chose sedum as their primary medium, even as they crafted other pieces in wood, metal, and concrete. The roof landscape softens the space between the various buildings and gives Lichtenstsein's sculptures a contrasting background, something akin to a sculpture garden in the middle of the city.

General Contractor: Riverside Builders

Structural Engineering: GMS

Landscape and Planting Design: VertNY

 

INFO: www.lichtensteinfoundation.org

         www.caliperstudio.com

           www.archidose.org