Governors Island is still a somewhat hidden New York City gem, but not for long. The historic island, which exclusively housed Army troops and families from 1783 to the 1960s, is quickly becoming a hot spot for locals and tourists alike. Visitors can travel back in time to climb on forts, ride bikes along paths, or marvel at the late 19th-century homes.

Recently, the island has been chosen to undergo a massive overhaul by urban design gurus, West 8. The firm plans to revitalize and enliven the island’s sprawling public spaces with custom lighting, seating, pathways, and outdoor lounge areas surrounded by new luscious gardens and woodlands. While West 8 has the island grounds covered, designers are now needed to revamp the aging architecture. The Trust for Governors Island has issued a request for proposals for any and all single and multiple buildings for commercial, educational, cultural, or mixed uses. Learn more about it here.

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Another year, another quirky pavilion on New York City’s Governors Island. The FIGMENT art and cultural festival, held every summer on the former-military-base-turned-urban-getaway, has announced the latest installation to join its lineup: Studio Klimoski Chang Architects’ “Head in the Clouds,” a groovy blue-and-white structure made of donated empty milk and water bottles. The Head in the Clouds proposal beat out 199 other entries for this year’s City of Dreams competition, and is expected to go up during the 2013 summer season. Read more!

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Today marks the deadline for the Bloomberg administration’s competition to design a new school of applied sciences in New York City. At stake: $400 million in land and infrastructure improvements, which is predicted to spur up to $6 billion in economic activity. The two names to look out for: Stanford and Cornell, both of whom have been anything but discreet about their respective plans to overhaul a chunk of Roosevelt Island. Read on.

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Photo by Jerry L. Thompson

When it opened for the season over Memorial Day weekend, the lawns of Governor’s Island looked a little different: now boldly punctuated by 11 giant steel structures by artist Mark di Suvero, the East River island is “one step closer to a proper urban park.” It’s been eight years after the city of New York bought it for a symbolic $1 from the US Coast Guard — what do we have to show for it?

Home to decaying military defenses and abandoned military family housing, the island has been the subject of much speculation in the past decade, including proposals of zany architectural interventions and planning schemes like Santiago Calatrava’s timid (compared to these ideas) project linking the island to Lower Manhattan and an ideas competition hosted by the Van Alen Institute.

Find out how public art has rescued the image of Governor’s Island, after the jump.

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In only a month and a half, Governor’s Island re-opens to the throngs of New Yorkers looking to escape the lawless, sweat-stained hellscape that is New York In The Summer.

As the date approaches, FIGMENT, ENYA, SEAoNY have announced the winner of their annual City of Dreams Pavilion competition, which will be constructed on the Island for an early-June opening date.

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Images (c) The New York Times.

Making an 140-year-old home carbon neutral? A few years ago the idea would have seemed impossible. But  a renovation and addition in Birmingham, England — the urban epicenter of the Industrial Revolution — has accomplished this seemingly quixotic feat. The Times elaborates – click through for more pics, too. [via The New York Times]

Tonight at Storefront, CAD-savants from over 30 firms will participate in the “Instant Architecture Manifesto Marathon.” Drafters will respond to given challenges in model space, projected onto the facades of the buildings surrounding Storefront. Think of it as Layer Tennis or Cut & Paste for architects. 7pm at 97 Kenmare Street, tonight! [via Storefront for Art and Architecture]

Epic: USC’s “Mega Review” took place this week on the 50th and 51st floor of a downtown L.A. tower. Over 700 students exhibited their work high above the city. [via Curbed]

Here’s an example of a great first-year design/build project: 37 first-years at Sci-Arc created an ambient environment called “Sway” in the parking lot of the school this winter. “Sway” is a set of 228 bundled steel rods attached to the ground plane and arching overhead into a flexible, interconnected canopy. Check it out after the jump. [via A/N Blog]

New competition announced: A brief calling for designs for a pavilion on Governor’s Island been released by FIGMENT/AIA NY/SEAoNY. The “City of Dreams” Pavilion will be built in time for the 2011 summer season on the island. Deadline for registration is January 15, so get on it here!

And an old competition wraps up: All that Glitters is Good! Last spring’s competition — whose  brief called for architectural drawings that somehow used glitter — has released its winners! We are huge fans of such an awesomely unpretentious competition concept. See the winners here.

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Yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency deemed the long-ignored and extremely polluted Newton Creek anofficial Superfund site. The four-mile-long creek divides Brooklyn from Queens and is the second such site in New York City, in addition to the Gowanus Canal. The Superfund cleanup will only address the water and sediment in the creek, not the contamination underneath the adjacent land in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, which was identified in the soil in 1978. (The city of New York used the creek as a dumping ground for raw sewage starting in 1856.) [via NYTimes]

Architizer — in collaboration with publishing house Actar and Storefront for Art & Architecture — invites architects, design offices, freelancers and students around the world to submit their built or speculative work to the TOTAL HOUSING COMPETITION launching October 7th. Festivities kick off with a Total Housing book party and panel discussion tomorrow night at Storefront from 7-9 pm. [via Architizer]

Ann Ha and Behrang Behin, the designers behind the winning entry in the City of Dreams Pavilion Contest sponsored by ENYA, are disassembling their Living Pavilion and distributing the building blocks (planted and unplanted dairy crates). Swing by Governor’s Island this Saturday for a literal piece of the action. [via Governors Island Blog]

The Europe 40 Under 40 list has just been announced, and it rounds up some of the best emerging architecture firms working on the continent today: K2S Architects (Helsinki), Durrer Linggi Architekten (Zurich), Coldefy & Associes (Paris), and more. [via The Chicago Athenaeum]

OMA has completed its first project in Hong Kong; the Edouard Malingue Gallery — which focuses on Impressionist and Modernist art — opens today. Pictures below. [via Architizer]

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“Andreweland” is the big winner of the Tablet Talk/Architizer photo contest with a wide margin. His photo of Santiago Calatrava’s L’hemisferic in Valencia, Spain took the top prize (two nights in London and two nights in Berlin). 5000 votes were cast, while “andreweland” won by about 600 votes. Congrats to the winner and to all that submitted. And . . . another side vote is in the work for most creative (off the beaten path) photos. Check them out below and on Tablet Talk, and vote. [via Tablet Talk / Architizer]

Magazines, such as Vanity Fair, seem to be busy memorializing the now-ending “Age of Gehry.” Paul Goldberger and Renzo Piano both agree that Bilbao was quite important, and so do a survey of architectural big-names. However you feel about Gehry (that debate will never end), hopefully good architecture wasn’t an ending fad. [via Vanity Fair]

The Sagrada Familia is in danger! Spanish Parliament has temporarily suspended construction of a high-speed rail tunnel uncomfortably close to the unfinished Gaudi masterpiece in Barcelona. “Gaudi built without buttresses,” Joan Rigol tells the Independent. “Any light movement could cause a great deal of damage.” [via The Independent.]

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Dominating the newswire last night was the record-setting auction price of a Picasso at Christie’s for a cool $106.4 million. Not coincidentally, the estate of Frances and Sidney Brody is also selling off the late couple’s Modernist home in the tony Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. 11,500 square feet of A. Quincy Jones-designed opulence? The low, low price of $25 million. [via Wall Street Journal]

An intrepid San Francisco architect named Hulett Jones used SketchUp to illustrate the size of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill — in two days, the leaked oil could fill a Bay Area Victorian. Watch the video here. [via A/N Blog]

New York’s ex-military outpost and current design incubator Governor’s Island is now open for Wednesday and Thursday tours. Free access and a boat ride are still included, though tickets are limited to 60 people per day, so hop to it. [via National Park Service]

The Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo will allow visitors to “try out” Copenhagen’s best attractions: ride a bike, walk alongside the “river,” picnic on the roof, and scope the Hans Christian Andersen mermaid sculpture that usually resides in the city’s harbor. [via Bustler]

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Get thee to Governors Island this summer to check out the winner of City of Dreams Pavilion competition winner.

The full release and images below:

FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architect Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) are pleased to announce that their competition jury has selected Ann Ha and Behrang Behin’s “Living Pavilion” as the winner of the first‐ever annual pavilion competition. The winning project will be assembled on Governors Island this spring, and will be open to the public from June 6 through October 3.

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