Back in March, Gothamist-founder Jake Dobkin had the enviable opportunity to take a tour of Manhattan’s Second Avenue subway construction, deep below the surface of the Upper East Side, and took some incredible photos of the mega-project’s progress (see the photos here). Dobkin’s photos give a rare look into the borrowing subterranean world that construction workers inhabit each day. Since March, workers continue to tirelessly tunnel through the bedrock under Second Avenue, inching closer to the future opening of New York City’s first subway since 1932. Recently, the MTA released exciting updated photos on their Flickr page, which show the remarkable progress that’s been made in the past couple months.

The deep tunnels of Second Avenue look entirely mysterious; a mind-blowing network of connecting caverns covered in curing concrete. Rippling bright yellow layers drape the interior of the illuminated tunnels, giving them a radioactive appearance as the cement dries. In some photos, the droopy, damp concrete resembles the stalactites and exposed rock of deep caves. Others show the MTA’s rapid progress, as the shapes and forms of future stations look nearly finished. While noisy construction has been causing numerous controversies as the subway moves along, MTA’s photographs show that a less congested commute in Upper Manhattan is not too far away, with the opening of the Second Avenue line’s initial phase in 2016. Click through to see them all!

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770 Broadway will hold two floors of Facebook’s new Frank Gehry-designed offices. Photo: via nymag.com

Frank Gehry seems to be the architect of choice for Facebook. The social media giant has now entered into another partnership with the starchitect, to design its new office space in the heart of Manhattan. Previously, Facebook had been using 150,000 square feet of space in the Bank of America tower near Grant Park and Grand Central Terminal. According to this statement (via gawker.com) from Facebook Engineering NYC, the new 100,000 sf office will have:

… big, open spaces for people to work and collaborate, and lots of room for conference rooms and cozy spaces where people can meet or grab a white board to talk through ideas on a whim. We’ll have plenty of video conferencing equipment to make meeting with our colleagues in other offices really quick and easy. We’ll have room to build out a full service kitchen and serve great food throughout the day. And, of course, we’ll still have all the other Facebook benefits like free laundry, gym memberships and lots of paid vacation.

In other words, this will be an awesome place to work. Located within trendy NoHo, and next to NYU and Washington Square Park, this is also some prime real estate. Architecturally, what can we expect? If Gehry’s Facebook West campus is any indication, it will be a playful and open design facilitating Facebook’s informality and collaboration.

Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg review the model for Facebook’s West campus in Menlo Park, California. Photo: via arch2o.com

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Images courtesy of Pinkcloud

Midtown Manhattan combines millions of square feet of floor slab with tourist-choked hellholes like Times Square, which together create a recipe for economic success. This is why a 21% office vacancy rate in this same comes as a big surprise. It seems that, due to the Great Recession, Midtown’s glass-and-steel beauties cannot be filled, leaving a major hole in the district’s long-term economic forecast.

Danish supergroup Pinkcloud has stepped in to fill the void with a proposal for replicable Midtown pop-up hotels. These auberges would use a deployable room module based on the dimensions of the average corporate elevator. Using wood shipping pallets as a base, partitions are stacked efficiently for transport. These can then be erected on site. Pinkcloud has not only developed a design, but also an entire economic model.

The project won the Radical Innovation in Hospitality Award, a competition co-founded by the John Hardy Group and Hospitality Magazine and sponsored by Global Allies.

See more images of the Pop-Up Hotel below.

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Image: Gary He / Insider Images via EPA

One World Trade Center was topped out on Friday with the addition of the final piece of its spire. At the overtly symbolic height of 1,776 feet high, give or take a few feet, the tower is now the highest in the US and third tallest in the world. This is, of course, pending the approval of the spire as an integral part of the building; otherwise, its height would be counted to the highest occupiable level of the building. Keep a look out for when it opens for business in 2014!

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Image: NASA

You probably already guessed it, but New York City really does look like a giant night-light from space. This 400-millimeter satellite photo was taken by the crew aboard the International Space Station on March 23, 2013. Basically, nearly every nook and cranny of the greater New York region is lit up to the nth degree, excepting the city’s various parks and green spaces. (Central Park is that dark thin rectangle near the center of the photo.) That razzmatazz in the middle there is Times Square, home to the biggest and brightest stars on Earth. Maybe.

[via Gizmodo]

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the Living Small category. See the full list of winners here.

Seeking a pied-a-terre in Manhattan, a client commissioned New York-based Specht Harpman to renovate a tiny penthouse duplex apartment in the Upper West Side. The chosen loft was rather unusual: a minuscule 425 square feet divided over three levels, with ceilings reaching over 25 feet, and appropriately titled Manhattan Micro Loft. Making the rather drab apartment modern and livable, while opening up the space as much as possible, were key elements to Specht Harpman’s sleek, sophisticated design. While packing as much program into a relatively small amount of space, the designer’s immediate goal was to find a way to make it all fit, while keeping the light-filled verticality of the space intact. Read more!

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Coming soon(ish) to New York, the “East Side Access”! Set to open in 2019, the $7 billion project is one the greatest infrastructural works currently underway in urban America. Every day for nearly seven years now, giant machines and teams of workers buried deep in the ground excavate tunnels through Manhattan’s bedrock core. These tunnels will house the future trains that will traverse the length of the new Long Island Railroad (LIRR) line, connecting Sunnyside, Queens, to Grand Central Terminal. At peak times, the line will route 24 trains per hour and ferry 162,000 trips in both directions.

At present, 5.6 miles of tunnel have already been dug. The MTA recently posted images of the construction progress, which finds workers toiling away in a giant crater beneath Grand Central. This cavernous space will be home to a large platform that will terminate the line. Click through for all the photos!

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The latest in our “Real or Fake” feature is yet another amazing image of Central Park. And no, they never get old. This new photo actually isn’t new at all, but (re-)surfaced online earlier today. Near the center of the image is the the Mandarin Oriental hotel at 80 Columbus Circle, and it’s here that make us question the authenticity of the “photograph.” It doesn’t take too sophisticated eye to pick up on how Columbus Circle’s twin towers look like computer renderings convincingly photoshopped into a spectacular panorama of Manhattan at sundown. We wouldn’t be surprised if there were further touch-ups and edits that we haven’t spotted yet. Still, despite these, the gridded array of skyscrapers and historic housing buildings that hug the western perimeter of the lush, green park make for great web fodder. Click on the photo for high-res!

[via Gizmodo]

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Contrary to what your eyes are telling you, this aerial photo of Central Park is not, in fact, a still from Sim City 3D. It’s real—well, sort of. The striking image, which spans all of the park’s 843 acres and 51 Manhattan blocks (plus a few more), is actually made up of aerial photographs stitched together to form a giant 3D panorama. The work was produced by Russian photographer Sergey Semonov, who took the top prize in the amateur category at the Epson International Photographic Pano Awards for the tableau. Semonov captured the photos for AirPano, whose panoramas of cities such as Dubai and New York and destinations like the Taj Mahal use spherical lenses to construct 3D landscapes that can be experienced virtually on their site. The Central Park image appears to have been flattened, as can be seen by the distortion of towers along the edges.

[via The Atlantic]

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First it was the High Line. Then the Lowline. Now the Vine Line? New York architect and Upper West Side resident Laurence Tamaccio has drafted a petition to extend New York’s captivation with linear green space to the West Side Highway, where he wants to install a trellis of ivy to conceal the structure’s unsightly industrial blemishes. “The Vine Line is a concept to create a visual screen between the pedestrian viewer and the highway structure itself,” Tamaccio explains in a YouTube video about his proposal. “Almost like a scenic backdrop, but as a green wall that’s freestanding from the highway structure.” If he wins, the island of Manhattan will be one step closer to an improbable (but logical) fate of waking up one day under a carpet of ever-expanding parklike surfaces! Read more.

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