But according to the city's Department of Transportation, one out of 10 of us gets lost every week based on department surveys. "And those one the ones who would admit it to us," Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told The Observer. The department also found that one in three New Yorkers couldn't say which was was north and one in four out-of-towners could not say which of the five boroughs they were in when asked.

To help with this confusion, the city will begin installing 150 wayfinding signs in four city neighborhoods starting in March. Midtown, Chinatown, Long Island City and Prospect Heights and Western Crown Heights will all be getting the new signs, which include major local landmarks and destination, all streets and estimated walking times, since the focus is on helping pedestrians get around town.

"Whether you're a life-long New Yorker or a first-time visitor, everyone knows the feeling of walking out of a building or a subways station and being turned around, not knowing where you are," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "These maps will help everyone in the city get around."

The signs will be located at high-traffic pedestrian locations, like business districts and subway stations. One of their keen innovations is that the signs are formatted in "heads-up mapping," meaning that they are oriented the way a person is looking. Rather than putting north at the top, what is in front of map readers is at the top, what is behind them is at the bottom. The map on the other side of the new signs is therefore "upside down."

Another interesting innovation is the maps are laser printed directly onto the glass. "Don't you just hate those crinkly paper maps?" Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "This will never happen with ours." But the ink can be wiped away and the glass reprinted as the map changes, allowing for easy updates without having to make a new map.

The city began seeking designers 18 months ago, with the winning bid coming from a consortium known as PentaCity, made up of graphic design studio Pentagram, map makers City ID and industrial designers Billings Jackson. This was actually the first project with Pentagram, launching a long-term relationship that has led to other projects already unveiled, like the LOOK safety campaign and new parking signs, with still more to come.

The project cost $6 million to develop, with 80 percent of that money coming from the federal Department of Transportation and much of the rest from local business improvement districts in the four neighborhoods, which have agreed to pay for, install and maintain the new signs. "These neighborhoods have a little bit of everything—premier business districts, residential neighborhoods, landmarks, cultural destinations," Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Many of these BIDs already have their own signs, but they are of inconsistent design and quality. "There's a real cacophony of signage out there," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. The goal was to unify all the wayfinding signage, including a new font called Helvetica DOT that Pentagram designed special for the department, a throwback to the same font gracing the subways.

The design program included creating a mapping system that will now allow additional maps to be printed by other BIDs in the city simply by calling up the appropriate blocks and printing them out, requiring only production costs be covered. A version of the maps will also be installed in all new bike share stations.

The signs will not only help people get around but also boost the local economy, the city believes. "Studies have shown people have a four-block mental map and this will help expand them," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "That's good for business, that's good for communities, that's good for everybody. People will start to mix it up, exploring new neighborhoods and even new blocks in their old neighborhoods."

"This will really wipe the confusion of where to go off the map."

Michael Beirut, streetscape chauffeur. (Twitter)

Michael Bierut is one of the most renowned designers in the world. As a principal at Pentagram, he has created logos, identities and campaigns for everyone from United Airlines to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Citibank to New York and The Atlantic, Saks Fifth, Princeton and Yale, even Walt Disney and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for which he designed an updated “doomsday clock.”

Still, one of the greatest typographical minds of our time could never make sense of the city’s parking signs.

“On the occasions I drive and try to park on the street, I tend to get as confused as anyone,” explained Mr. Bierut, who lives in Westchester and normally takes Metro-North into the city. “I have received many tickets and been towed twice. I am so paranoid now that I will park in a garage for even a 15-minute errand.”

Perhaps now he can start parking on the street again.

On Monday, the city’s Department of Transportation unveiled new parking signs it created in partnership with Mr. Bierut and a team of designers at Pentagram. Simplified from four signs down to two—one for commercial vehicles, one for everyone else—the new signs feature a unified, streamlined design meant to convey the details in a straightforward way with as little clutter as possible. Previously, parking signs had been the work of the city’s sign shop, a no-nonsense place, the kind of outfit where the difference between left-aligned text and center-aligned text holds little meaning.

“Design conventions for the parking signs were basically almost 19th century in their character,” Mr. Bierut said. “It’s like if you were doing a playbill for vaudeville performances at some music hall in 1895. You’d have everything in capital letters. You’d decide what was important, make that the biggest. A little less important, something smaller. A little less important, something smaller. And you’d center everything. If something was really long, it would be in a squashed, condensed typeface. If something didn’t have that many letters, you’d make it in a wide typeface.

“It was as undesigned as possible.”

The very first thing Mr. Bierut and his designers considered was bigger signs—“you always want more room to play with”—but that was quickly dispensed with because every sign in the city must hew to set dimensions dictated by the sign shop, in this case 48 inches high by 18 inches wide. Besides, the signs might become less cluttered, but the streets would become more so. “No New Yorker wants that, not even me,” Mr. Bierut said.

Once the team had the dimensions, the Pentagram team got to tinkering. “As typical designers, our first inclination is to see if we can turn all the dials all the way down and still have the thing work,” Mr. Bierut explained. They started out by making every single word and letter the same size and set it in—what else—Helvetica. “And then you go from that, and you do this fairly painstaking—but this is what we do for fun—exploration,” Mr. Bierut said.

They tried out various colors and weights and shapes and types of fonts before settling on the current layout. It is similar to the original, with commercial regulations on top, but now both signs have the same format, the only real difference being the color of the type and the outline—a federal regulation that Mr. Bierut tried to do away with but couldn’t. “I don’t see why you need the line,” he said. “The sign acts as its own border. But I don’t make the rules.”

The other big debate was over the typeface. “We did one sign that used a custom Helvetica that we had designed for another DOT project,” Mr. Bierut explained. “It looked really beautiful, but in a way that they looked like they would be perfect parking signs in Zurich or Geneva, and somehow didn’t seem New York enough. They felt a little bit unnerving to the people at DOT, I think.”

So what makes a perfect New York City street sign? This is a town that’s always been obsessed with signage and typography, from the spectacles of Times Square to the crown of the New Yorker Hotel. Helvetica has long held sway in the subways, since Massimo Vignelli (Mr. Bierut’s first employer) imported it from Milan in 1966.

“The city of New York’s genius is, and this seems to have been part of its DNA from the beginning, is that it really derives beauty from function and necessity,” Mr. Bierut said. “The emblematic parts of New York often have some pure beauty that someone just did for the sake of it. It’s either people trying to solve complicated problems or someone trying to decide, ‘How do I get people to move into my fancy office building? Well, what if I put a fancy top on it?’ Voila, the Chrysler Building. Sometimes it’s, ‘How do I make my train system kick the ass of every other train system in the city?’ And then you get Grand Central.

“When it comes to the way we do things, it’s just someone trying to figure out how to maximize the value and efficiency and get the job done. And I think New Yorkers just getting the job done has actually created all these icons of inadvertence.”

We can now add the homely parking sign to that list.

Huh? (FX/Tumblr)

At today's press conference unveiling the new and improved parking signs for Midtown, quite a few reporters questioned the actual need for redesigning the street signs. Both Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Councilman Dan Garodnick said they had received complaints about the old signs and agreed they required "a PhD in traffic" to decipher.

Among those flunking out on their TCATs? None other than the brilliant Louis C.K.

The Observer was just on the phone with Michael Bierut, the celebrated designer whose firm Pentagram helped the city redesign the street signs. (You can read more about what actually went into the signs in Wednesday's print edition of the paper, and the unusual emphasis New York tends to put on our signage—we're a busy city.) During our conversation, Mr. Beirut reminded The Observer that the first episode of the third season of Mr. C.K.'s show Louie, the title character spends the opening and closing credits puzzling over an embellished version of the city's parking signs.

"It's a sign that's been exaggerated, but only slightly," Mr. Beirut said. "Most New Yorkers would look at that and think it probably existed somewhere because some of our signs were that confusing."

The first scene mostly consists of Mr. C.K. and another driver just making confused faces. "I can't..." Mr. C.K. mutters, before reading off some of the absurd regulations.

"Is it after midnight?" his flummoxed compatriot asks.

"Yeah, but it's also after midnight," Mr. C.K. responds.

One sign reads "2 hour parking, 6 a.m. - 5 a.m., Mon. thru Fri.," the kind of vague window that would confuse anyone. The sign below it reads, "Parking of vehicles only authorized." Bureaucratese at its finest.

The second scene only gets even more ridiculous as they try and puzzle out the meaningless green circle:

But in terms of actual new, completed projects, 2012 has been a lean year. This is largely the fault of the recession. Downturns tend to stifle development generally, but especially when the heart of the slow down is a real estate bubble. Design can actually be at its best just after the bubble bursts, and the gaudiest visions are getting wrapped up. And so, there are no Frank Gehry towers or Diller, Scofidio + Renfro cultural confections this year.

Still, there are surprises to be found in the city, as always. Maybe a little humbler, a little less showy, but also perhaps better for New York’s character, its peace of mind, its future. This is sensible architecture for a wiser time.

In many ways, this was the year of the public space and the park, a development that makes all the more sense in light of Zucotti Park and the opening of Louis Kahn’s Four Freedoms memorial. Whoever knew what a POPS was until now, or that a grand vision from 40 years ago could ever get built, and be one of a celebrated architect's best works, at that? And continuing a trend throughout the Bloomberg era, many of these public spaces are on the waterfront.

Another Bloomberg hallmark? Many of these notable projects are public works, civic architecture on the highest order, and an important reason the quality of life in New York continues to rise.

In line with the post-bubble brunt of design in the city at the moment, no housing projects made the list this year, after dominating it in the past, New York by Gehry, Jean Nouvel's 100 11th Avenue and Neil DeNari's HL23 among them. Another major development is the continued pull of gravity across the East River—barely half of the projects are in Manhattan, with five of them in Brooklyn. If there were any doubt the borough has arrived, look no further than its bold new buildings.

A hypothetical skyline, with 225 West 57th at right, One57 middle, 432 Park at left. (Curbed/NYO)

1780 Broadway, the one piece that will remain. (City Realty)

If King Kong were to swing into New York sometime this decade, he might actually have a hard time figuring out where to go.

In the original 1933 black-and-white classic, King Kong famously scales the two-year-old Empire State Building, cementing it in the conscience of the world as arguably its most famous skyscraper. Four decades later, the giant gorilla set his sights higher, standing astride the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Today, perhaps he might climb atop their succesor, the new 1 World Trade Center. But one gets the sense that King Kong is given to gigantism, so only the city’s tallest tower will do.

Until a few months ago, that would have been 1 World Trade. But since 432 Park Avenue began to rise skyward in April, the 1,397-foot condo tower developed by Harry Macklowe and CIM on the old Drake Hotel site would have claimed the skyline crown. It beats out its downtown rival by 29 feet, so long as one ignores the silly 400-foot sorta spire atop 1 World Trade. Should King Kong arrive sometime in 2014, this slinky tower would probably be his choice.

But a year or two after that, and he might turn his gaze further down 57th Street, past the already striking 1,005-foot One57 tower, Gary Barnett's billionaire bauble nearing completion despite that crane accident. There it would settle on another tower being developed by Mr. Barnett, at 225 West 57th Street, just one block from what was already going to be the city's tallest apartment building when it opens next year. The new tower's height, according to building permits filed last week: 1,550 feet. 

That would make it the world's sixth tallest building—at least until something else comes along and knocks it off its pedestal.

That is a good 50 percent taller than either the Chrysler Building or One57, while all three are about the same size, between 1.2 and 1.4 million square feet. The tower will be slender, but it will also be solid unlike some of its spindly rivals, notably 432 Park and predecessors like the Trump World Tower. (Amazing how that held the record for tallest apartment building for a decade, surpassed by only a few feet by Frank Gehry's Spruce Street tower, and now, it's just off to the races, especially when the 1,050-foot MoMA tower is added into the mix. And never mind all the super-tall office towers on the horizon, like the 1,300-footer at Hudson Yards and all those maybe-taller towers coming out of the Midtown East rezoning.)

The tower will reach 88 stories, which sounds like a lot, but when the overall height is considered, that belies exceedingly high ceilings. At the same time, much extra space will also likely be devoted to mechanical systems to keep such a colossus running, as well as the fact that the first five floors, as construction documents show, will be given over to a Nordstrom, as was announced in July. On the seventh through 12th floors, there will be a hotel, and then, boom, 223 residential units. That is almost twice as many units as One57, though the hotel is also considerably larger there.

"I don't want to confirm anything except to say we've filed permits," Mr. Barnett told The Observer Monday by phone, when asked if the project had financing and was set to rise.

As noted by the eager architecture savants on Skyscraper City and Wired New York, who first noticed the building permits yesterday, construction equipment is already on hand at 217 West 57th Street, one of the lots Mr. Barnett controls and will be building on some day. Similarly, the Morton Williams grocery story at 225 West 57th Street closed last month, paving the way for demolition of that building and its replacement to rise.

This is one of Mr. Barnett's most complicated deals ever, requiring the assemblage of numerous parcels of land and air rights from surrounding buildings and properties, including tax lot mergers and air rights purchases, essentially turning the entire block into a piece of the project, even if some of the buildings thereon will remain standing. "We've been at this seven or eight years," Mr. Barnett said. "We've bought different parcels and air rights, etc, etc, and here we are." Building documents show no fewer than nine different parcels tied up in creating the lot.

Back in the spring, Mr. Barnett told The Observer he was still working on assembling pieces for the project, with the implication that the goal would be to reclaim the title of New York's tallest apartment tower. (The Burj Khalifa in Dubai still boasts the world record, with apartments through the tower's 108th floor.) Previously, it had been speculated that 225 West 57th Street would top out around 1,250 feet, but Mr. Barnett has pushed beyond that to new heights.

"There won't be a spire or anything like that, the floors will go all the way to the top, or almost to the top, with some mechanicals above," Mr. Barnett said. "This is not a gimmick."

On the highest occupiable floor, the 85th, construction documents call for a "residential accessory lounge open to sky." Apartments will be from the 15th through 84th floors, with no mention of layouts (full-floor, duplex, etc.). The building permits also mention another residential lounge on the 14th floor, and the seventh floor houses a number of amenities for the hotel: a restaurant, salon, gym, lounge and "sky lobby." The ground floor has separate entrances for the Nordstrom, the hotel and the residences.

One thing that will not be new is the facade along Broadway, the former BF Goodrich building. Because of a deal struck with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2009, the old auto building at 225 West 57th can come down, despite the protests of preservationists, but its sibling at 1780 Broadway must remain. A 1920s red brick building, its 12-story facade must be integrated into whatever Mr. Barnett builds. The building will have T-shaped configuration as a result, with section on Broaway, 57th and 58th streets.

What lucky architect gets to design such a multifaceted project? The Observer had heard that Herzog & de Meuron had beat out the likes of Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster and SHoP, but on that count, Mr. Barnett demured. "I'm not going to confirm or deny that, but I wouldn't print that if I were you," he said. The associate architects listed on the construction documents are Adamson Associates, who were the architects of record on all three of Larry Silverstein's World Trade Center towers, Durst's One Bryant Park, the Goldman Sachs headquarters and the still unbuilt MoMA Tower by Mr. Nouvel. So whomever the architect is, it must be a pretty high caliber firm.

Still, Mr. Barnett is taking nothing for granted. When The Observer tried to congratulate him on a new project, and the city's tallest at that, he responded, "Congratulations are only in order when you've finished the building and cashed the last check."

"We're just working hard and hoping the market stays healthy," he added.

No doubt when this project is finally finished some years from now, Mr. Barnett will stand atop it, perhaps out on the residential accessory lounge open to the sky and thumping his chest in triumph. King Kong certainly would.

The city has so far hit upon the novel idea of using shipping containers to house the displaced, stacking prefabricated modules one on top of another. It is an innovative model the likes of which are untested worldwide, but already one company has built a prototype in South Jersey, and the city is prepared to test out some version of it as early as next year. So please, step inside what could be your apartment for a year or two after the next big one hits.

Mr. Dolan, tear down this arena. (MAS/Twitter)

The MAS Summit has been going on for the past two days, and it has been a cornucopia of delights for the city-obsessed, full of zany proposals for affordable housing, green buildings, starchitecture, community-based development and a giant floating doughnut hovering over Grand Central. But so far the most thrilling moment was deliver by The Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman during a discussion capping day one with the Municipal Art Society's president, Vin Cipolla.

The two of them basically meandered through a bunch of Mr. Kimmelman's columns from his first year on the job, and the first question was about Penn Station, when the critic had the audacity to tell the Dolans to scram. He still believes it is one of the most pressing planning issues in the city all these months after he wrote the piece. "I think there's a hunger to do something about this site, which I think is a blight on millions of people's lives every single day," Mr. Kimmelman explained.

He then mentioned that he was going to the Barclays Center later that night, that he is preparing his response to that project, but first he had a message for the Dolans, who—James Dolan in particular—are not especially well known for heeding the advice of others.

"I just have this feeling that the Dolans, whom I gather are very ambitious and competitive people—I don't know why I think that—are going to discover that they have, despite the money they're pouring into Madison Square Garden, that they have now the worst arena in town," Mr. Kimmelman said, drawing titters from the audience. "Well, they always had the worst arena in town, but now they have the second best, which is also the worst arena."

At this, everyone broke out into full-throated laughter.

Mr. Kimmelman could have left it there, but he went on to reiterate the case he has already made for moving the arena to improve Penn Station—like the Dolans, he is not one to let a subject that is bothering him drop.

"I'm serious in a way about Barclays," Mr. Kimmelman said. "None of this is going to happen or would happen in the next few years. Even if you're looking at this optomistically from the Dolan's perspective, they poured in this money, but amoratizing it over the next decade or 15 years, they may find it's a useful thing, over the next decade or two, to find a new home for the Garden. It's moved many times before. And maybe we can even address this central problem for the development of Midtown West."

It has been a little over a year since Mr. Kimmelman's first column ran in The Times, on the front page no less. In that time, he has covered a lot of territory—perhaps not quite enough, we still wish he wrote more than every few weeks, sometimes even only once every month, but that is largely because he has probably surprised many of his doubters and proven himself to be an extremely capable architecture critic.

It is true, he may not be an architecture critic in the usual mold, but Mr. Kimmelman has proven himself to be one of the foremost advocates for quality design and urbanism at this time. While too many may focus on the sexy rendering, the individual building, Mr. Kimmelman has taken a humanist, global, even universal approach to his job that is as much about making his own impositions on the buildings and places he writes about as on letting those designer and designers impose on him.

Look at what he has come up with this week, not simply another call to arms about what to do with a threatened midcenutry icon in Chicago, the Prenctice Hospital. Instead, he went out and tapped one of Chicago's foremost architects, Jeanne Gang, and challenged her to create a solution. Judging from the local press, while they may bristle at the carpetbagger telling them what to do, the proposal has indeed started a conversation about alternatives to save the hospital and let Northwestern expand all the same.

If anything, Michael Kimmelman is a design advocate, not an architecture critic. That may be just what The Times, and these times, call for.

Update: This just in from Twitter.

@MC_NYC @kimmelman @weareyourfek That comment seems kind. How about "worst arena in the world"?

—
Paul Goldberger (@paulgoldberger) October 19, 2012

"Google didn't exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn't exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn't exist 25 years ago," Andrew Winters said on a recent afternoon. The director of capital projects and planning for Cornell NYC Tech, he was giving a preview of the the school's proposed Roosevelt Island campus in a large conference room inside the Wall Street offices of SOM, the master planners for the 12.5-acre project. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning L.A. architect designing the first academic building on the campus was also present, along with a number of other Cornell construction executives.

"The challenge," Mr. Winters continued, "is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?"

This was not simply a philosophical question. Like all projects large and small in the city, Cornell NYC Tech would be defined by an unforgiving zoning text, a set of parcels, parameters, pathways and public open space, boxes, empty vessels into which the creative designs and desires of thousands of engineers and entrepreneurs would be filled for decades to come. The plan calls for four new buildings just south of the Queensboro Bridge by 2017 and six more by 2038, for a total of roughly 2 million square feet—about the size of the Google building in Chelsea.

The public review process, including specific plans for the first phase and more general ideas about the rest of the project, begins today when the City Planning Commission is expected to certify the project. It then faces half a year of intensive community scrutiny, though recent meetings on Roosevelt Island have shown broad, positive support for the campus. The site is already occupied by a 1930s hospital building set to be decommissioned next year. Once that happens, demolition will commence to make way for the campus.

The new campus may be looking for the future, but the very first problem it must tackle is as old as Noah. Because the project resides on an island, an especially narrow and low-lying one at that, it is highly susceptible to flooding. The first pieces of the campus created, then, was the main pathway, called the Tech Walk, that runs through the middle of the site, roughly along the highest point of the island. All buildings will have their primary entrances on this thoroughfare as a precaution against extreme flooding. "Code requires us to build to 100-year-flood standards, but with global warming, we're preparing for a 500-year-flood, which could become our new 100-year-flood," SOM associate director Colin Koop explained.

The geography of the city continues to define the shape of the campus, but from the Tech Walk, the designers—which also include James Corner Field Operations, the firm responsible for the High Line among other high-flying landscapes—turned their attention to the skyline. A number of important landmarks, including the U.N Building, the Empire State Building, the famous Pepsi sign in Long Island City, and the bridge and its massive piers, created vistas the team wanted to accentuate. They carved paths creating view corridors to these spaces, and filled in between the lines either with buildings, which the designers refer to as "nodes," or grand lawns and plazas, which are the "links" that will be among the campus' myriad public amenities.

"We wanted to create a cinematic experience, with framed views of different things," Mr. Koop said.

The team is also using this as an opportunity to redesign the road that encircles the campus, which is actually so old it does not meet current city requirements. The new configuration will create a wider esplanade along the water, followed by a bike lane (it is a college campus, after all), then a single driving and parking lane after that and a generous sidewalk beyond.

If the entire design of the site is meant to emphasize the river and the views beyond, the challenge for the buildings themselves is to be landmarks, as well, ones that create an unmistakeable presence for the campus without interrupting or overtaking the island on which they will rest. Only the academic building, the work of Mr. Mayne's firm Morphosis, has an explicit design so far. One design decision about it and almost every other building except for the two dorms is that they will be limited in height to five stories, or about as tall as the bed of the bridge. The two dorm buildings will not surpass the masts of the bridge, which reach about 300 feet above the island.

The first phase calls for one of the dormitory towers, a hotel conference center space for hosting events and visiting faculty and a so-called corporate co-location building where students and established tech firms and investors can meet to work. The centerpiece, though, is Mr. Mayne's academic building. Resembling an aircraft carrier from another planet (it even has a similar elongated pentagon shape), the specifics of the design are still being worked out. But like at Mr. Mayne's Cooper Union building, it will emphasize interactivity.

"Hallways aren't hallways anymore," the architect said. "They are the connection points where all the real work gets done, where the chance interactions inspirations take place." A huge atrium, perfectly aligned with 57th Street, will be the focal point of this work, creating a grand entrance for the students, faculty and visitors, and funneling them into a grand staircase connecting the five floors. Every landing has nooks for tables and couches to encourage public work and relaxation. Elevators are pushed to the edges of the building to discourage their use.

A large cafe, open to the public, is just off the atrium—Mr. Mayne joked that Starbucks is the new campus library—and retail will ring the building, providing an amenity not only for students but also Roosevelt Islanders, who are are starved for shopping.

The exact finish of the building is still to be determined, but by far its most striking feature will be a gigantic two-acre solar array, part of the promise to create a net-zero academic building that generates as much energy as it uses (for a tech project, that is an especially impressive task). "The site is challenging and the programming is challenging, but more than anything, net zero is challenging, and that decision has informed every aspect of this design" Mr. Mayne said. "This will be an absolute prototype."

Just like the ideas the campus is meant to elicit.

Last week, +POOL, that brilliant, crazy, possibly over-designed, possibly perfectly designed project that places a floating, self-filtering pool in the East River announced it was going to try and raise $1 million in the next six months to make its aquatic dreams come true. It is a prospect, which makes The Observer giddy with child-like joy. Swimming in the river, in river water no less.

That youthful excitement is infectious, especially when talking to Dong-Ping Wong, one +POOL’s founders. “It's a simple idea that didn't really come from anywhere," he explained in an interview. "As for ‘Why the idea?’ It was a combination of a few things, a hot and sweaty summer looking at the water, taking the train over the water, and riding my bike over the water but never really seeing it at all. I’m from San Diego, we use and view water very differently than we do from here."

Not that New York should be more like SoCal—heaven forbid—but it is true that we all live on the water (four out of five boroughs are on islands don't forget) and yet so rarely do we get the chance to interact with it.

Even with the funds, building the pools is not going to be easy. After all, the Olympic-sized +POOL will have to filter more than 500,000 gallons of river water a day to make it clean and safe. We wont say ‘make it swimmable’ because there are a few brave souls who take daily plunges in New York’s rivers already, but lets say, for the rest of us who still can’t shake the thought of local Superfund sites, +POOL has you covered.

The team has been working with engineers at ARUP and ecological consultants at One Nature to study the mechanical and environmental aspects of the pools filtration system, and they have learned all about enterococci and fecal coliform from professors at Columbia University. You don't have to go much further than that to understand the stream of contaminants that +POOL is trying to eliminate.

The feasibility of designing such an intricate filtration process is just one of the many issues surrounding the project, but Mr. Wong isn't worried. “When we first put it out there, it was three of us, and we all had similar reservations, cynicism," said Mr. Wong. "How will it work? Will anyone care about it? I mean not every New Yorker will really want to swim in the East River. But the more we looked into it, the more it seemed that not only is the technology already there, it just hasn't been thought of this way. I mean all the technology exists in some way or another.  In a weird way, the more we learned about it, the more the idea was right there in front of us."

More than a few New Yorkers seem to agree with him. The project first showed up on Kickstarter last year, but now the team has launched its own campaign, and even so, it is goingly swimmingly.

“Because it’s off of Kickstarter now, the audience is different that it might have reached on that website," Mr. Wong said. " Kickstarter is an awesome, basically readymade community, but what's great now is we’re also reaching a lot of people direct from the local community who we wanted to talk to anyway. In some ways the benefit of this campaign is that people are seeing it for the second time. The fact that we're still at it, is making people maybe even more excited than we were in the beginning.  It continually re-legitimizes this project.”

It’s hard not to compare any new park idea, especially one that springs so evidently from the same architecture and design world to that high-flying and High Line or low-lying Brooklyn Bridge Park did.

"This all could be a potentially new model for how architecture can be made," Mr. Wong said. "For us The High Line was so exciting to see happen. It started with two guys and took ten years. We feel like the pool has that kind of same potential."

The project is spilling over into other cities as a result. Tokyo, London, Cape Town and at least a few other cities have contacted the team about getting their own +POOLs. Right now, in fact, +POOL, has a sister endeavor in Sydney with a local city rep who is shepherding the idea through it’s very early stages along the same parallel municipal and city support that +POOL went through here. It’s an idea that came from the mayor of Syndney who had early on tweeted his support of the project.

“In many ways, they’re already ahead of New York in the way that they view their waterways,” Said Mr. Wong, “But there are a some places because of industry, shipping, where they still need a lot of work to actually clean it and besides the barriers are safe to swim in from wildlife. You know, sharks and all.”

It’s not a bad piece of branding if they wanted it.  In a world full of sharks and—ahem—contaminants, +POOL remains an idea worth diving into.