New York: The Latest Architecture and News

Or Regev and Shirly Kujawski shared their entry for the new Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, hosted by Sucker Punch Daily. The project is located at Essex Market in New York City, nearby the Williamsburg Bridge. The architects approached their design for the proposal for MoCCA as an extension of the media that the museum is designed to house and present.

Read on for more on this project after the break.

LightHearted is the winning design for this years Times Square Valentine, an annual competition to deign and build a heart for Times Square. Designed by Freecell, a 2010 P.S.1 contestant, in collaboration with Peter Dorsey, the ten-foot diameter heart is a light weight construction, with five pairs of aluminum elliptical loops radially arranged with rotating connections. The structure is covered with an open weave red fabric that both captures and reflects light while letting wind pass through.

LightHearted is an interactive installation, six people will hold the heart up for fifteen minute intervals. The ten-day event, February 10 to February 20, will need over 2,600 volunteers to share in this collective experience.

Head to the LightHearted website and sign up for your fifteen minutes on their volunteer calendar!

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Architects: Freecell, and Peter Dorsey Location: 46th Street and Broadway, New York City, New York, USA Web Design: Deelux Sponsor: Times Square Alliance Public Art Program Photographs: Courtesy of Freecell

The Museum for African Art, New York, and Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies, Committee on Global Thought, and Center for African Education have announced the creation of Sightlines: New Perspectives on African Architecture and Urbanism, a lecture series devoted to Africa’s rapidly changing urban environments.

Sightlines will comprise talks by distinguished practitioners of architecture, urban planning, and architectural theory, each of whom will apply his or her particular area of expertise to the exploration of contemporary African cities as unique built environments. The lectures, which will be open to the public free of charge (see schedule below), will examine the architectural, social, physical, and emotional contours of the cities, while also addressing the global relevance and applicability of this emerging field of discourse. Sightlines additionally includes a lecture by Senegalese artist Viyé Diba, whose work is tied to urbanization.

Complete lectures schedule after the break.

For the occasion of the first Festival of Ideas for a New City in New York City, Storefront for Art and Architecture jointly with the New Museum and New York City’s Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) are launching the StreetFest Competition for the design, management, and construction of temporary outdoor spaces that produce new ways for collective gathering and city engagement. On Saturday, May 7, 2011, one winning entry will occupy designated outdoor spaces along the Bowery and the surrounding streets of the New Museum during the Festival. We envision fabricating a minimum of fifteen structures that will cover approximately 2,000 square feet.

Nabito shared with us their latest project for mixed uses, The Stairscraper, a horizontal skyscraper, designed to be in New York, which won the Total Housing Competition. It is currently on exhibit until the 22nd of January at the Store Front for Art and Architecture in New York City. More images and architect’s description after the break.

Our friends from Manhattan-based Weiss Manfredi have shared their museum design for Ithaca, New York’s Paleontological Research Institution, which houses one of the United States’ largest paleontological collections. Situated in the Finger Lakes region, the natural landforms of the site inspired the architects to take advantage of the existing gradual 40 ft slope – a feature which resulted from a receding ice sheet more than 20,000 years ago. Rather than considering the site as distinct and separate from the museum, this project creates a new topography: a continuous, terraced landscape that fuses architecture and ecology into a cohesive expression of the geologic processes involved in the region’s formation.

More images and more about the museum after the break.

Studio Mode/modeLab is pleased to announce the third installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop (with an optional third day) to be held in New York City during the weekend of January 08, 2011. Further information and registration can be found below. We hope to see you next month!

We received the following exhibition by Chandler Ahrens and John Carpenter. It is located in Brooklyn, New York City, and it was inaugurated on the occasion of the conference ACADIA 2010 LIFE in:formation hosted by The Cooper Union. It examines concepts, tools and technologies that implement responsive and generative aspects of information in the design process.

The exhibition chairs are Chandler Ahrens, Michael W. Su and Axel Schmitzberger and conference chairs are Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Aaron Sprecher and Shai Yeshauyahu.

Further information and photos after the break.

INFLUX_STUDIO shared with us their new project for Newark’s Visitors Center. See more images and architect’s description after the break.

Advanced Parametrics is a two-day intensive design workshop (with an optional third day) to be held in New York City during the weekend of December 04.