After a long year and a half, it’s finally happening — the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space is ready for its grand opening! Are you coming? RSVP here!
Artist Transforms Furniture Into Indoor Micro-Farms
Opening this month in a New York gallery, Jenna Spevack’s urban agriculture inspired exhibition showcases in-home micro-farms.
See more images and read the full story here.
Series of Historic Photos From the NYC Municipal. The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. The images subjects include daily life, construction, city business, and more.
(via urbanehood)
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” Making Buildings Work: the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center
Between 2002 and 2010, the United States suffered a 25 percent reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs. Over the same period, New York City experienced a 46 percent loss of approximately 64,000 manufacturing jobs.[1] The high costs of real estate and labor certainly inhibit large-scale mass production operations from remaining in or choosing to locate in New York. But a combination of specific land use policy decisions and speculative real estate development practices has further constrained the supply of industrial buildings and therefore accelerated the decline of the kind of middle class job opportunities that manufacturing has historically provided to New Yorkers: stable, skilled and well-paid. According to the New York Industrial Retention Network (an economic development and advocacy organization that is now a project of the Pratt Center for Community Development), between 2001 and 2008, approved rezonings removed 23.4 million square feet of industrial space from New York City. So, while the assembly line production plants — businesses that don’t benefit from proximity to New York’s markets — have migrated to other parts of the country and the world over the past few decades, a new breed of manufacturers — small-scale, artisanal and oriented to local markets – have struggled to find space to make stuff.
Enter the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a non-profit industrial developer that over the past twenty years has rehabilitated six North Brooklyn buildings and made more than 750,000 square feet of space available to small manufacturers, artisans and artists. The 99 businesses currently operating in GMDC facilities currently employ over 500 people. In addition to the local economic development benefits, the environmental advantages of retrofitting existing buildings to enable the production of local goods by local workers are huge. The greenest building, after all, is the one you have already. GMDC’s model is starting to receive attention from other cities around the country eager to help bring industrial jobs back to their communities. We sat down with Brian Coleman, CEO of GMDC, to discuss this model, the changing nature of manufacturing and the increasing challenges to making buildings that respond to cultural, demographic and economic shifts in urban industry.”
Via: Urban Omnibus
Photo: courtesy of the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4dpr1hamQ1qm7ffpo1_500.jpg)
” Making Buildings Work: the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center
Between 2002 and 2010, the United States suffered a 25 percent reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs. Over the same period, New York City experienced a 46 percent loss of approximately 64,000 manufacturing jobs.[1] The high costs of real estate and labor certainly inhibit large-scale mass production operations from remaining in or choosing to locate in New York. But a combination of specific land use policy decisions and speculative real estate development practices has further constrained the supply of industrial buildings and therefore accelerated the decline of the kind of middle class job opportunities that manufacturing has historically provided to New Yorkers: stable, skilled and well-paid. According to the New York Industrial Retention Network (an economic development and advocacy organization that is now a project of the Pratt Center for Community Development), between 2001 and 2008, approved rezonings removed 23.4 million square feet of industrial space from New York City. So, while the assembly line production plants — businesses that don’t benefit from proximity to New York’s markets — have migrated to other parts of the country and the world over the past few decades, a new breed of manufacturers — small-scale, artisanal and oriented to local markets – have struggled to find space to make stuff.
Enter the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a non-profit industrial developer that over the past twenty years has rehabilitated six North Brooklyn buildings and made more than 750,000 square feet of space available to small manufacturers, artisans and artists. The 99 businesses currently operating in GMDC facilities currently employ over 500 people. In addition to the local economic development benefits, the environmental advantages of retrofitting existing buildings to enable the production of local goods by local workers are huge. The greenest building, after all, is the one you have already. GMDC’s model is starting to receive attention from other cities around the country eager to help bring industrial jobs back to their communities. We sat down with Brian Coleman, CEO of GMDC, to discuss this model, the changing nature of manufacturing and the increasing challenges to making buildings that respond to cultural, demographic and economic shifts in urban industry.”
Via: Urban Omnibus
Photo: courtesy of the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center.
“WALK THIS WAYNew City College center to promote engaged urban design.
Julie V. Iovine. May 14, 2012
To the architect Max Bond, social equity was a core value and so was design integrity. And the new J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City, named for the architect who died in 2009, will actively spread the word through collaborative research projects, design advocacy, leadership development, and education programs at its new home within the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York.
Launched on May 1, the Bond Center, said its founding director Toni Griffin, will aim to be “a leader in thinking on how design can become more central to the policies aimed at making American cities more just and inclusive places to live.”
The center is a reinvigorated recast of the City College Architecture Center (CCAC) that operated in the 1980s and ’90s primarily as a pro bono architecture and planning service for the Harlem community. The Bond Center will focus more on faculty and collaborative research, drawing on disciplines across the CUNY system and beyond, as well as initiate urban projects engaging with policy reform that could become models for other cities, and especially Harlem itself. An active conference, publication, and events program is also on the agenda.
The timing is propitious as activist architecture is having a strong moment, and Griffin, an architect and urban planner, comes well equipped to head the venture, having served over the past three decades as a founder of the Detroit Works Project, a deputy director of planning in Washington, D.C., a director of community development and planning for the city of Newark, and a planning vice president with the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation.
The Bond Center has already brought together landscape design graduates to submit an entry to the visioning Parks for People competition organized by the National Park Service and Van Alen Institute. Another advanced study project is aimed at developing a template with which communities can measure the effectiveness of design policies in their neighborhoods.
Noting that his old friend Max Bond was a director of one of the country’s first community design centers, the Architects Renewal Committee of Harlem (ARCH), founded in 1964, New York–based architect James Polshek said he is looking forward to the Bond Center’s debut: “I hope it will inspire architects, who may still be confined in believing in the capital A for the Art of architecture, that architecture also comes with an obligation to solve problems and break down barriers.”
Via: The Architect’s Newspaper
Photo: MAX BOND. COURTESY PUBLIC INTEREST DESIGN
