January 24, 2013

My Micro NYC; image: nARCHITECTS
On Tuesday we wrote about the new exhibition “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers,” which opened yesterday at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). The exhibition–full of dollhouse-sized studios and apartmentlets of the future–includes several of the designs submitted for New York City’s adAPT competition. The winning submission, My Micro NYC, by nARCHITECTS, Monadnock Development LLC, and the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, will be developed on a site on East 27th Street in Manhattan. The structure will include multi-purpose spaces, lounges, and even an attic garden, providing luxuries not typically associated with efficiency apartments while encouraging interaction among neighbors. But while a lot of attention has been given to the winning proposal, there were actually 33 entries in total, a record within the Housing and Preservation Department. We’ve collected a few of the other submissions for your viewing. Click through to check them out!
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January 22, 2013

Installation view of LaunchPad, the micro-unit on display at the Museum of the City of New York, designed by Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects. Photo: John Halpern/courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York
If you’ve ever walked into a New York apartment and thought to yourself, Well, there is just TOO much space in here! get over to the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) and experience your shortest pace-through ever in the dollhouse/storage locker/”apartment” of the future. With its pert fuchsia couch and sliding TV, the 325-square-foot unit from Pierluigi Colombo and Amie Gross Architects anchors the exhibition “Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers,” which opens tomorrow and will be on view through September 15.
Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg visited the museum to announce the winner of the city’s adAPT NYC competition, which asked architects and developers to propose designs for New York’s first micro-unit apartment building. Noting the city’s changing demographics—just about half of the population is single, and one-third of households are occupied by adults living alone—Bloomberg called upon New York’s unmarrieds to put themselves in storage until they pair up. Actually, the mayor put it much more mildly: “The growth rate for one- and two-person households greatly exceeds that of households with three or more people, and addressing that housing challenge requires us to think creatively and beyond our current regulations.” If only he still permitted 32-ounce soda cups—we could just live in those! See more from the show, plus the winning adAPT NYC design, after the jump.
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June 30, 2011

The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis
Jun 14 through Oct 30 at the Museum of the City of New York (above)
This beautifully curated show celebrates the presence of Colonial Revival in today’s city as a result of its rampant popularity from about 1885-1950. The style has been applied to everything from building exteriors to pewter spoons, and today’s city is resplendent with its influence, for better or for worse. (It also made the highly-coveted upper right corner of NYMag’s Approval Matrix this week — highbrow and brilliant, people!)
Why you should trek up to East 104th Street to see it, after the jump:
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April 4, 2011

As much as we like to both highlight and trash-talk Post-Modernism in architecture, we’re still talking about it as a historical moment. So what phase are we in now?
Architect Rafael Viñoly will join editor Julie Iovine to discuss just that tomorrow evening at Museum of the City of New York, and the museum is offering Architizer readers a special discount.
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November 23, 2009
Walking around ‘Eero Saarinen:Shaping the Future’, the exhibition now at the Museum of the City of New York, I was surprised by how marvelously exuberant his work appears. Consistently so, as for him every commission had to have an urgent, iconic presence.
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