By Matt Chaban 5/31 7:30pm

Dizzying Designs

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Pier 15 Is for Lovers: SHoP Reshapes the East River Waterfront

That’s what Gregg Pasquarelli, the SHoP principal told us last night, at a party on the pier, part ribbon cutting (even though the thing opened last fall) part book launch (even though that came out three months ago). Really, this is one of the hottest firms in town, so whenever an opportunity presents itself to drink and party, it is taken.

As The Observer was leaving, Mr. Pasquarelli grabbed our arm and pointed out to the FDR, the underside of which glowed a faint purple.

“You’ve got to take your wife out there, I promise she’s going to kiss you,” he said. “It happens to everyone.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/25 5:14pm

Starchitects

14 Photos

Campering Out!

Shigeru Ban Builds a House for Camper in Soho: ‘I Tried to Make It a Surprise’

Shigeru Ban, one of the world’s most brilliant architects, is generally the quiet type, both in demeanor and design.

That made him quite out of place at the new Camper store on the corner of Prince and Mercer on Tuesday night. Mr. Ban stood quietly, drank quietly, spoke quietly to the handful of visitors who actually knew who he was—they all were or looked like architects themselves. All the while a full-on downtown party, in honor of the store’s opening a few weeks ago, raged about Mr. Ban in the shoebox-sized, and shoebox-filled, storefront.

Hipsters and fashion plates surged about for Estrella beer and Cava cocktails, where the cash-wrap had been turned into a bar and DJ booth, dance music and light rap clanging out of the speakers. A table of Spanish delicacies (of which Camper might be considered) had olive oil cakes, those quiche like patatas, marcona almonds piled atop sliced cheese, olives both green and black and, in the golpe de gracia, a gentleman slicing off morsels from a leg of jamon iberico.

Mr. Ban barely seemed to notice, gazing about happily. It would be wrong to think he was ill at ease, for Mr. Ban has a broad smile he deploys readily and frequently. “I’m not used to these sorts of things,” he amiably admitted. “Never for my buildings. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/22 8:30am

Checking in

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No Vacancies Til Brooklyn: How Three Kings of Kings County Conquered Williamsburg, and Gentrification Itself

At the end of April, Vice magazine, the Williamsburg house organ, threw a party in the neighborhood. The party was inside 80 Wythe Street, a giant old factory building, a redbrick behemoth that was built in 1901 as a cooperage. Those bricks used to be covered in graffiti and wheat paste and other street art ephemera from some of the genre’s best practioners. On this occasion, they were gathered inside, to celebrate an installation around the corner by Faile, the local artistic duo known for their psychotropic collages, a mix of comic books, B-movie posters and indigenous art from Asia to Iroquois.

“When we were young artists just getting by, scraping together enough money for that next project, this was the place to be,” said Patrick Miller, one half of Faile. “Williamsburg was it.”

Nearby, two blonde cherubs, the children of Patrick McNeil, Mr. Miller’s artistic partner, spun themselves silly around three stylized Tibetan prayer wheels in the middle of the room. The elder child, a boy of about five wearing the skinniest of black jeans, kiddie Converse and a jean jacket with a giant Tiger patch on the back bigger than the boy’s head head, came to an abrupt stop in his dance. His sister, maybe three, in engineers overalls, a step behind, jumped just then into his arms, and they embraced in a hug. The whole jaded room was watching.

It was the cutest, coolest thing in all of Brooklyn.

A decade, even five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine this scene. “Look at the lineage here, it’s somebody who cares a lot about making Brooklyn cool,” Mr. Miller said, gesturing around the space.

This was not some swanky, skanky loft party on the edgy edge of New York’s social periphery. This was the unofficial opening party for the Wythe Hotel, the kind of establishment that thinks of itself as above opening parties, above press, above hype, even as a line forms out the door. This is, the work of three Brooklyn tastemakers in their prime.

This was, is and will be the greatest thing Williamsburg has ever seen. It is the pinnacle, the acme, the end. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/22 8:30am

Checking in

Watch the throne. (Courtesy Wythe Hotel)

No Vacancies Til Brooklyn: How Three Kings of Kings County Conquered Williamsburg, and Gentrification Itself

At the end of April, Vice magazine, the Williamsburg house organ, threw a party in the neighborhood. The party was inside 80 Wythe Street, a giant old factory building, a redbrick behemoth that was built in 1901 as a cooperage. Those bricks used to be covered in graffiti and wheat paste and other street art ephemera from some of the genre’s best practioners. On this occasion, they were gathered inside, to celebrate an installation around the corner by Faile, the local artistic duo known for their psychotropic collages, a mix of comic books, B-movie posters and indigenous art from Asia to Iroquois.

“When we were young artists just getting by, scraping together enough money for that next project, this was the place to be,” said Patrick Miller, one half of Faile. “Williamsburg was it.”

Nearby, two blonde cherubs, the children of Patrick McNeil, Mr. Miller’s artistic partner, spun themselves silly around three stylized Tibetan prayer wheels in the middle of the room. The elder child, a boy of about five wearing the skinniest of black jeans, kiddie Converse and a jean jacket with a giant Tiger patch on the back bigger than the boy’s head head, came to an abrupt stop in his dance. His sister, maybe three, in engineers overalls, a step behind, jumped just then into his arms, and they embraced in a hug. The whole jaded room was watching.

It was the cutest, coolest thing in all of Brooklyn.

A decade, even five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine this scene. “Look at the lineage here, it’s somebody who cares a lot about making Brooklyn cool,” Mr. Miller said, gesturing around the space.

This was not some swanky, skanky loft party on the edgy edge of New York’s social periphery. This was the unofficial opening party for the Wythe Hotel, the kind of establishment that thinks of itself as above opening parties, above press, above hype, even as a line forms out the door. This is, the work of three Brooklyn tastemakers in their prime.

This was, is and will be the greatest thing Williamsburg has ever seen. It is the pinnacle, the acme, the end. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/21 3:27pm

Street Fighters Too

Red alert. (Courtesy Louis Lim)

You Might Spend 30 Days in Jail If Your Plastic Bag Art Installation Turns Into a Bomb Scare That Shuts Down Bedford Avenue

Plastic shopping bags, the city’s dandruff, get stuck in trees and wrapped around light poles all the time.

Rarely do they cause a bomb scare.

But that is what happened on Friday morning, shortly after 10:30 a.m. According to Gothamist, someone had simply called 311 to complain about a bag a gentleman had recently deposited into a tree on Beford Avenue and inquire about its removal.The 311 dispatcher, apparently spooked by the description of an installation by Brooklyn designer Takeshi Miyakawa—an I [heart] NY plastic shopping bag with a wire hanging out—directed the annoyed neighbor to call 911.

The cops showed up, then the fire department, the the bomb squad, which shut down Bedford from North Fourth Street to North Seventh Street for two hours.

Each May for New York Design Week, Mr. Miyakawa has made various installations throughout  Manhattan and Brooklyn to coincide with the annual festivities, including a floating chair that, like the bags, glowed. It was a spirited—if unsanctioned, but also generally harmless—effort. The installations had gained a modicum of notoriety within the art and design communities, but little notice elsewhere. This year, the work got him thrown in jail, for up to a month, if not longer. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/09 10:20am

Starchitects

Mr. Mayne's Cooper Union collossus. (Wikimedia Commons)

Cooper Square Curves for CornellNYC Tech: Thom Mayne Tapped to Design First Roosevelt Island Building

A gravelly voiced Californian who has won “the Nobel of architecture” and an upstate ivy are now poised to transform Roosevelt Island. From Cornell’s shortlist of high-profile designers, the university has chosen Thom Mayne, Pritzker Prize winner and principal of LA-based firm Morphosis, to design the school’s new satellite campus, to be called CornellNYC Tech. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/24 6:00am

The Mysteries of Brooklyn

7 Photos

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Is an Unconventional Music Venue with a Jagged Design the Last Hope for Williamsburg’s Art Scene?

If Bedford Avenue is the main street of modern day Williamsburg, North Sixth Street is the hipster haven’s Broadway. Home to the first proper grocery store (Tops), concert venue (Northsix), swap meet (Artists and Fleas) and grotesque theme restaurant (Sea), North Sixth Street has long been the grand stage of Williamsburg.

Now performing on North Sixth Street (even if Northsix is long gone, replaced by a Manhattan concert conglomerate) is the Original Music Workshop.

Conceived by Kevin Dolan, a former tax attorney who also happens to be an organ virtuoso, the Original Music Workshop seeks to provide a venue bridging new and old Williamsburg, sustaining music of all types for all ages. As the rest of the neighborhood continues its inexorable gentrification, Mr. Dolan hopes to preserve a tiny corner of Williamsburg cultural past, as well as one of its historic industrial buildings.

“It’s amazing you can knock down anything and build whatever you want,” Mr. Dolan said in an interview. “I’m hopeful that at least the south side of this block will still maintain its feel into the future.” Read More

By Susan Chin and Paul Herzan 4/16 12:00pm

Cabbing Fever

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The Taxi of Tomorrow Is Great, But New York Needs More Design Thinking

The following is an op-ed by Susan Chin, executive director for the Design Trust for Public Space, and Paul Herzan, chair of the board of the Cooper-Hewitt. The trust hosted an exhibition at the museum that helped bring the city its new New York-only taxis.

The considerable buzz around the unveiling of the Taxi of Tomorrow prototype at the 2012 New York International Auto Show reflects not only the ownership that the people of New York City feel for “their car,” but also demonstrates a passionate concern many New Yorkers have for the design of their city and public space.  What makes the Taxi of Tomorrow so significant for New York as its first purpose-built cab is the many improvements for passenger and driver, achieved through an unlikely partnership between the taxi community and the design community—made possible by the Design Trust for Public Space and Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum joining forces with NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and Nissan.

The daunting halo of complexity (“it will never happen”) of the Taxi of Tomorrow project demonstrates the power of design in our city to drive change. Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/02 5:00am

Critical Mass

Tis a far, far better thing I do... (PriceTower.org)

T-Squared Off: With Paul Goldberger Leaving for Vanity Fair, Is This the End of Architecture Criticism at The New Yorker?

There are two great thrones in American architectural criticism, that of The New Yorker and The New York Times. It was at these two journalistic institutions that the practice was born, at the hands of its king and queen: Lewis Mumford, that great champion of public works and technics, and Ada Louise Huxtable, still the dean of the design press.

Paul Goldberger has been in the fortunate, indeed unique, position of wearing both crowns. After graduating from Yale, he would find himself at The Times in 1973, a young buck roaming the city he loved, engaged to write just about whatever he thought of the buildings and street life therein. He was, quite literally, heir to Ms. Huxtable, who had not yet been pushed out of the paper for her obstreperous ways, and the two of them shared the job of architecture critic for nearly a decade. Two years after she left in 1982, Mr. Goldberger won the Pulitzer for his efforts.

Thirteen years later, in 1997, he would himself depart one side of Times Square for the other, joining The New Yorker, restoring the Sky Line column begun by Mumford half a century earlier at the behest of Tina Brown. “When I went there, I thought it was as perfect a life as you could have,” Mr. Goldberger told The Observer in an interview Sunday evening, “to spend half your career at The Times, half at The New Yorker.”

But like so many landmarks, from the Parthenon to Penn Station, few endure. Starting today, Mr. Goldberger will board the notorious Condé Nast elevator, but instead of getting off on the 20th floor, he will report to work two floors up, where Graydon Carter has finally poached Mr. Goldberger for Vanity Fair. Read More

By Matt Chaban 3/08 6:05pm

Kimmelmania

Still calling the shots.

Michael Kimmelman Will Not Play Your Architecture Games

Michael Kimmelman is not a very good architecture critic, at least that is what some of his critics would have you believe. As invigorating as his first few columns championing urbanism and public design were, the whole thrust has devolved into a sort of schtick, whereby every article is about the greatness of cities, and barely about architecture.

Michael Kimmelman knows this. Read More