Earlier this week, the EPA designated Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site, much to the chagrin of developers and local group Clean Gowanus Now! (their punctuation, not mine), two groups that generally prefer Mayor Bloomberg’s faster, cheaper cleanup plan, which (because it is faster and cheaper) would allow for major development projects to proceed much more quickly.
But as [...]
Apart from delivering the welcome news that Manhattan’s West-Park Presbyterian Church was recently awarded landmark status, ArchPaper’s review about how the building averted demolition also alludes to a interesting - but by no means unprecedented - strategy for generating public support to destroy (inconveniently) historic structures.
Back in 2003 (before being landmarked), the West-Park congregation proposed replacing the 1880s church [...]
More than a couple critics have located both the climax and requisite decline of an “architectural epoch” in the last decade. During that time, the United States - and by extension, much of the world - built up for itself a real-estate bubble just begging to be popped. And popped it was.
Among the high-profile development victims were Frank Gehry’s Brooklyn [...]
Saving an old, dilapidated building from the wrecking ball can be challenging - especially if you are not its owner and if local leaders, blinded by opportunistic developers, fail to comprehend its significance. Even if you succeed in thwarting its demolition, there is always the tricky issue of how to make the building’s preservation more [...]
By now, most architects and design professionals know about Dubai’s belated (and deserved) encounter with something approaching economic reality.
During the last two decades, Dubai proved itself to be the United Arab Emirates’ most enthusiastic practitioner of the art of capitalism and until last week, when Dubai World (Dubai’s state-run development company) nearly collapsed under roughly [...]
When I posted about former pro-football player Keyshawn Johnson’s new interior design gig, I assumed he was a pioneer out to prove that good fashion sense in post-game attire is indicative of design-ability. I also assumed Keyshawn’s love of interior design was about as deep as his love of the television show that supplied him [...]
Should the Gowanus Canal be declared a federal Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency?
As if PCBs, heavy metals, raw sewage, and brackish tidewater weren’t damaging enough, New York City’s Gowanus Canal won’t get an answer until the end of an on-going political battle among forces wielding nearly as much influence on its physical state [...]
Who knew? Strip clubs can pave the way to urban revitalization and redevelopment! Well, maybe not. But consider the Norshor Theater in Duluth, Minnesota (it’s a cool city), the first entry in…Forlorn Building of the Day.
Cities across the country have countless buildings, a few worth saving and many more worth “remembering,” in varying states of [...]