jealous no shade

North West getting dragged through the airport living the goddamn dream. http://t.co/4ahd9FFyej pic.twitter.com/bUpR2maHSA

— Gawker (@Gawker) March 18, 2015

hooray for governors island!

it's almost ready and almost open for summer. hip hip hooray!

nErD aLeRt!

nymag's justin davidson offers an update on the governor's island re-design:

With $260 million of the city’s money, workers are shoring up seawalls, running pipes and cable, reroofing historic buildings, and, most dramatically, shaping a new landscape. While bureaucrats wrangled and budgets festered, the Dutch architect Adriaan Geuze and his firm West 8 spent years observing the summertime crowds and their habits of leisure. They have plowed that knowledge into a design that’s ambitious and spectacular, but also freewheeling and improvisational. (via)

do yourself a favor and try learning something for once in your life. 

nErD aLeRt!

The park here, called Madrid Río, has largely been finished. More than six miles long, it transforms a formerly neglected area in the middle of Spain’s capital. Its creation, in four years, atop a complex network of tunnels dug to bury an intrusive highway, also rejuvenates a long-lost stretch of the Manzanares River, and in so doing knits together neighborhoods that the highway had cut off from the city center.

All around the world, highways are being torn down and waterfronts reclaimed; decades of thinking about cars and cities reversed; new public spaces created.

Most famously, in beauty-mad San Francisco, the 1989 earthquake overcame years of entrenched thinking: the Embarcadero Freeway was taken down, which reconnected the city with its now glorious waterfront. In Seoul, the removal of a stretch of highway along the now-revived Gaecheon stream has made room for a five-mile-long recreation area called Cheonggyecheon. In Milwaukee, the destruction of the Park East freeway spur has liberated acres of downtown for parks and neighborhood development. Even the nearly-30-year, bank-busting Big Dig fiasco made Boston a better place by tunneling a downtown highway, though it was obviously nobody’s idea of a stellar urban redevelopment project.

In New York, city and state officials are inching closer to tearing down the Sheridan Expressway, a mile-and-a-quarter-long gash in the South Bronx connecting the Bruckner and Cross Bronx Expressways, perhaps to replace it with homes, commercial spaces, playgrounds, swimming pools and soccer fields arrayed along the Bronx River.

But Madrid Río is a project whose audacity and scale, following the urban renewal successes of Barcelona, Spain’s civic trendsetter, can bring to a New Yorker’s mind the legacy of the street-grid plan, which this year celebrates its 200th anniversary. That’s because the park belongs to a larger transformation that includes the construction of dozens of new metro and light-rail stations that link far-flung, disconnected and often poor districts on Madrid’s outskirts to downtown. (via)

gabe?

nErD aLeRt!

looks like frank gehry got himself laid off again...

Dutch design firm West 8 will replace world-renowned architect Frank Gehry on a Miami Beach park project, the final component of the massive New World Symphony complex now under construction. The firm was selected from a dozen applicants for the $13 million park project and ratified by the Miami Beach Commission in a 6-1 vote Wednesday. (via)

careful, joel!