2013
Open House New York Weekend
Let the summer go, let tomorrow take care of itself
We’re starting with some lyrics of Nothing but Flowers by Talking Heads:
This used to be real estate
Now it's only fields and trees
Where, where is the town
Now, it's nothing but flowers
The highways and cars
Were sacrificed for agriculture
I thought that we'd start over
But I guess I was wrong
Perhaps Francois-Xavier Lalanne was thinking of Nothing but Flowers when he decided to turn a closed Getty gas station near the High Line into a site specific artwork wonderfully called Sheep Station. It is what you think it is, although I have some mixed feelings about the closed Getty station to be honest. Sure, gas stations are awful, but I’m not sure that the all luxury apartment canyon around the High Line is an improvement from the vast empty parking lot desert it is replacing. Feelings about urbanism can be complex sometimes.
For a slideshow all about Open House New York Weekend, we’re going pretty deep without actually seeing any actual Open House New York sites yet.
Ok, things are back to normal. This year’s Open House New York Weekend was another good one, and this one in particular had a real treasure map feel to it, leading me around the city to all sorts of interesting places I might otherwise miss, like here at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on, well, Fifth Avenue.
This year’s big five star attraction was a construction tour of 4 World Trade Center designed by Fumihiko Maki, which included a terrifying construction elevator ride up the outside of the building. And by terrifying, I am not singling out this construction elevator as much as I am blaming all skyscraper construction elevators of being terrifying, an opinion I stand by with no hesitation.
That terrifying construction elevator took our hard hatted group to a higher floor, where the views and the reflection of the views are just insanely spectacular. The first image is one of the favorites I have ever captured, and one that I immediately switched to my desktop image, with a disappearing One World Trade Center and a Hudson River that’s just all over the place. Great views, nice building.
And between getting our hard hats (at a trailer on the left) and going up 4 WTC (the tall, light reflective building on the right), we walked right past my new future favorite building, probably. This is the start of the Santiago Calatrava PATH Station, a bird or dinosaur with crazy ass wings and a hell of a lot of design for a PATH Station when you come to think of it.
Next up on this Treasure Map (or should I be saying Treasure Hunt) Weekend is Morton Loft designed by LO-TEK. It’s a residential unit in an old garage where you actually sleep inside an old petroleum trailer tank. I think that pretty much says all you need to know here.
We’re taking a quick detour to Brooklyn just to see the BRIC House, which is not a brick house but instead a home for BRIC, an organization which stands for Brooklyn Information and Culture- the and is apparently silent and the R is there because BRIC sounds better than BROOKIC or BIC.
We’re at the Arup offices to enjoy a sound presentation, and a good one at that. Those geniuses have created a room that can mimic the reverberation and effect of sound in a specific room, so you can preview the sound of your brand new concert hall before it’s even built. That seems a lot smarter than just building it and hoping for the best.
As for the picture, well, you couldn’t take pictures inside the sound lab and the pictures there wouldn’t look like that much anyway, so instead here’s a picture of a staircase at the offices and you can just imagine the rest I guess.
After sound, we’re now all about vision. This is Gallery 225 at Focus Lighting, our last stop for this year’s Open House New York Weekend full of generally obscure sites, not counting that hard to miss skyscraper, the Nothing but Flowers sheep and the angry but entertaining signs by locals. The main draw at Gallery 225 was its conference room with video projected walls, a real life Total Recall type room, although in the presentation they said they needed to only show still images because images with motion were just too damn upsetting. Something to remember when designing the dystopian future I guess.
Keep going back in time. Open House New York 2012 is next.
