Sponsors: Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space The New York City Department of City Planning The Municipal Art Society of New York Type: open, two-stage, international Fee: None Eligibility: The Competition is open to any individual, group of individuals, or legal entity worldwide. Timetable: 15 March 2019 – Submission deadline Awards: A payment of $2,000 will be provided to each Awardee. The Awardee that created the logo chosen as the official New York City POPS logo will receive an additional $2,000 payment.
Jury: – Jerold S. Kayden, Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design – Glen Cummings, Creative Director, MTWTF – Katherine Farley, MArch, Harvard GSD – Elizabeth Goldstein, President, Municipal Art Society of New York – Marisa Lago, Director, NYC Department of City Planning – Kim Mathews, FASLA, RLA – Justin Barrett Moore, Executive Director, NYC Public Design Commission Design Challenge: Since 1961, New York City has offered floor area bonuses and other zoning incentives to private developers of office and residential buildings to encourage them to provide the more than 550 POPS that are scattered about the city, especially in the borough of Manhattan and increasingly in Brooklyn and Queens. Combined, the city’s POPS provide nearly 3.8 million square feet of additional public space – equivalent to nine Bryant Parks, 24 Union Squares, or 10% of Central Park. Each POPS has a distinct identity shaped by its design, location, applicable legal requirements, owner and manager, and users.
For POPS to be well used by the public, it is imperative that residents, workers, and visitors know which spaces are indeed POPS and what amenities are required. For example, during what hours is a space required to be open? Must it provide amenities such as seating, landscaping, water fountains, bathrooms, or bike racks? If members of the public have a question about the space, whom should they contact? The New York City Zoning Resolution, from 1975 onward, has obliged almost all POPS owners to post signage on-site, identifying the space as a POPS and specifying required hours of access and amenities. Signage must also include information about who owns and manages the space and to whom a complaint may be submitted. For more information: http://popslogo.nyc Contact info: contact@popslogo.nyc
In July 2019 the Vilnius Concert Hall competition jury began its deliberations to identify a suitable design for this major performing arts project. As one might have anticipated, two of thejurors on the seven member panel, Ole Gustavsen (Snohetta) and Andreas Cukrowicz (Nachbaur Architekten) had won high profile competitions for similar music center projects—in Oslo and Munich.The jury was confronted with a formidable task, as the competition, organized according to UIA regulations and anonymous in its format, had attracted 248 entries from around the world. For this one-stage competition, the organizers listed the following evaluation criteria, whereby the order of the criteria was not to reflect any priority:
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Memorials to commemorate atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II have taken many forms. Holocaust museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. by Pei Cobb Freed or the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, all endeavor to paint a broad picture, including narratives covering most of the major events and sites. Former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald have been frequent tour destinations. In the case of Buchenwald, the local city of Weimar has placed pictures of “Witnesses” throughout the downtown area as a reminder of the Nazi legacy.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
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