Page 7 of 7
Washington, DC
And my brain is like an orchestra playing on insane
This is a green roof at PS 41 in Greenwich Village that I needed to show a proof of vaccination to visit, even though it was outside. I guess it was because you had to go inside (and up all those damn stairs) before you went outside. As for the picture, it’s me testing the new Macro lens feature on my iPhone 13 Pro, which explains that blurry Jefferson Market Library tower in the distance.
Jeanne Gang’s “Hive” is called "Hive" because, well, I guess because it looks like a hive, "Hive" consists of sonotubes stacked so high that they're practically unsafe. The result looks tame on the outside but insane on the inside, which is all anyone could ever want. In person the effect is mesmerizing, easily my favorite of the National Building Museum summer installations so far.
Since we’re in Washington, DC anyway, let’s stop by one of my favorite museums, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian which, according to Wikipedia (and as witnessed in real life) displays American craft and decorative arts. And since we’re there anyway, it might be a good idea to try and figure out why all of those people think lying on the floor is a good idea.
After landing at night, I stayed at the airport hotel before transferring early the next morning to a downtown one
We’re back in New York, and the warm months of summer are now replaced with the not so warm months of October, or, as AIA New York calls it, Archtober, pronounced with a silent “h” so that it sounds more like Arc-tober than Arch-tober. This is an annual, month long event that includes an excellent program called the Building of the Day. Each day, a different city building is available to tour, and this day we’re up at Columbia’s new Manhattanville Campus visiting a very nice (although not spectacular) new building by Renzo Piano. The Lenfest Center for the Arts is a well designed, well detailed, very nice building that is honesly a little forgettable compared to the other Archtober buildings I was able to get inside this year.t
Instead of one Building of the Day, the tour of the new Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island included visits inside Three Buildings of the Day. Of those three buildings, two are pictured below. One is called “The Bridge” and was designed by Weiss Manfredi, and the other is the Bloomberg Center by Morphosis. Not pictured is the Passive (or possibly Passiv) House dorm by Handel Architects, which is nice enough but not as much fun as the others. As to which of the pictures are of the Weiss Manfredi building and which are pictures of the Morphosis building, it’s fairly self evident so I’ll leave that up to you with no further explanation.
The last Archtober tour I took this year was a really good one. 56 Leonard Street is a brand new residential tower in Tribeca designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and the tour (led by the HdM Project Manager) took us to only three floors. Two were amenity floors (pool, gym, IMAX theatre) and one from the 57th full floor penthouse, which recently sold for $34.5M.
56 Leonard Street is often called the Jenga Tower for good reason. But when you’re in it, on a high floor, floating above Manhattan with a completely unobstructed balcony view of the city below, all those cantilevers start to make sense.
