Category Archives: Architecture

$3.92 Million For Tree House Inspired “Imagination Playground” Unveiled For Brownsville

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The Rockwell Group offered a pro-bono plan for a Brownsville Imagination Playground as a renovation to the existing Betsy Head Playground on Dumont and Thomas S. Boyland St. At a price tag of $3.92 million, the park is the second worldwide Imagination Playground and the first for Brooklyn.

Inspired by tree houses, the park will include a multi-level space with water, sand, and loose part play areas surrounded by a long, curving play ramp that weaves through the trees and is bridged by permanent play equipment; renovated basketball and handball courts; and an exercise area for adults.

A trained staff of Play Associates will be onsite to maintain and manage the loose parts during the summer.

MKW + Associates, LLC is the landscape architect for the project.

The $3.92 million playground will be funded with $3.1 million capital funds from Councilwoman Darlene Mealy (D-Brooklyn), $750,000 from Borough President Marty Markowitz, and $70,000 from Mayor Bloomberg.

“The Imagination Playground concept allows children to exercise their minds, as well as their bodies,” said City Parks Commissioner Veronica White. “David Rockwell’s innovative design at the Burling Slip site of the South Street Seaport has proved a tremendous success and we are thrilled that he is working with us to introduce a vibrant new permanent play space for children here in Brownsville’s Betsy Head Park. Special thanks to Council Member Mealy and Borough President Markowitz for allocating the capital funds for this imaginative oasis of play.”

The playground uses large blue re-configurable blocks for “unlocking children’s creative spirit” says Matt Goldman, Co-founder of the Blue School. The Rockwell Group has donated a preliminary set of play blocks to the Brownsville Recreation Center to test.

This comes as great news as the Brownsville Partnership and the Municipal Art Society have recently been holding Hope In: Parks and Open Space sessions as a break out from their successful Hope Summit community planning event earlier this year. Conducting park audits to assess and rank the needs of the community, the organizations are looking to their partnership with Community Board 16 to produce actionable steps toward engaging city resources to do the work that needs to be done in Brownsville—a predominately black area that has seen considerable disinvestment in recent decades in physical environment and educational creative outlets for the youth. This could be a grand opportunity to affect am entire generation of young black and brown children and cultivate their minds to think creatively not only about their play but the physical world around them.

Who knows. I might not be the last black Architect out of Brownsville after all thanks to this.

Read full story at nypost.com.

Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Architect, Passes at 94

Gregory Payan/Associated Press

The design community and Mexico mourns the loss of a great visionary in #minoritydesign.

Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the architect who led many of Mexico’s landmark Modernist construction projects of the mid-20th century,including museums, the country’s largest sports stadium and the shrine that attracts its most important religious pilgrimage, died on Tuesday, his 94th birthday, in Mexico City.

Read full story on the New York Times.

Yep. Personal Helicopter Car. Where’s Yours?

*Hipster voice* Oh, you don’t have your personal flying helicopter car yet? It’s so three days ago.

This week the Dutch company PAL-V announced the first flights of its prototype “flying car”.
This unique vehicle is called the PAL-V One, or the ‘Personal Air and Land Vehicle’, and It marks the start of a new era.

On the ground the vehicle drives like a sports car. Within minutes its rotor is unfolded and its tail is extended: then it is ready to take off thanks to the advanced gyrocopter technology.

Frank Lloyd Wright was drawing helicopter cars for Broadacre City way before these posers. Check out this video by my friend and Fulbright Scholar, Shelby Doyle.

Exhilarating Film Takes You Through 11 Countries in 1 Minute

This guy gets me. This is how I see space.

“Move” shows actor Andrew Lees strolling toward us in perfect sync, surrounded by a mind-boggling group of scenarios, all whizzing by so quickly you have to watch this quick clip a few times just to absorb it all.

The film was part of a three-film series of short subjects commissioned by STA Travel Australia, based on the concepts of movement, learning and food. Of the three, this one is by far the most compelling. The other two, entitled “Learn” and “Eat,” are artfully done as well, and all are beautifully photographed by Director of Photography and Editor Tim White.

Week 4 | Monrovia: Architecture and Perspective

There are multiple sources that one can access to gather a varying range of opinion of Monrovia. One such resource is a National Geographic Blog by Teri Weefur, a Digital Media employee at NatGeo. A native of Liberia, she left in 1990 in the onset of civil war. She has an awesome flickr page that gives you a sense of landscapes and textures around the city.

I include this link to a recent article in the Economist as it proposed a question of a deficit in postwar documentation. The author, reading “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy inquired why there had not been a similar novel that details the accounts of wartime events from the peoples perspective. Nevertheless a thought provoking article, the comments section seems to be the most insightful section, with a number of responses that

How about President Sirleaf’s Autobiography, or her fellow Nobel Prize winner Leymah Gbowee’s recent memoir, or Helen Cooper’s House on Sugar Beach?

For non-Liberian authors, what about Johnny Steinberg’s excellent “Little Liberia” published last year in the UK and now for sale in the US, that recounts a host of harrowing personal trials during the worst days of the conflict? More academically, there’s the exhaustive account in Stephen Ellis’s The Mask of Anarchy, for starters.

That’s not to mention the dozen of award-winning documentary and drama films about the Civil War, such as Pray the Devil Back to Hell, or Johnny Mad Dog.

- “Praunda“

There are other such comments in that give name to documentation around the war if one is so inclined to check it out.

Architecture Masonic Temple

Ruined state of the Masonic Grand Lodge House after years of civil war conflict and being used as a refugee center.

Masonic Grand Lodge House in 1967. The House was the location of the elite Masonic Americo-Liberian governing body since their arrival and establishment in 1867.

One of the oldest buildings in Monrovia, the now ruined Masonic Grand Lodge House was once Monrovia’s major landmark. The Masonic Order of Liberia was established in 1867. It is one of 17 lodges in Liberia. Since most Masons were Americo-Liberian descendants of the original settlers, the Temple was a prominent symbol of previous regimes, and was vandalised after the 1980 coup when the Masonic Order was banned. It was used as a refugee center during the recent civil war. A grand master’s throne from the temple, once used by William Tubman, sits on dusty display at the National Museum.

A testament to its Americo-Liberian significance, the temple is adjacent to the Embassy of the United States on a perch that overlooks the peninsula.