Elmhurst half-house to be demolished!

Hey all,

One of the very first dung piles featured on this blog was the "Elmhurst Half-House" back on December 9, 2006. This spectacular architectural abortion featured a low-rise attached house converted into a 4 story modern nightmare but still appearing to be attached to its former twin.

Well, the NYIMBY blog brings us the news that demolition permits were filed back in May for the smaller building. The replacement will be 4 stories with 7 units.

I'm not sure which is worse at this point: the house in its current embarrassing condition or the replacement.

Man looks forward to city contract to build more tiny houses under de Blasio's latest plan to build "affordable" housing

THE CITY

Entrepreneur Tom Saat built a teeny, tiny house in Queens.

“It has a stand-up shower, compost toilet, full-size refrigerator and a second-story high enough to stand in,” said Saat, a 57-year-old Turkish immigrant who worked on his 300-square-foot home in Astoria before moving it to a Long Island City industrial warehouse last year.

“It took my family more than a year to build,” he said. “I have a construction background and watched a lot of YouTube videos. God bless the internet.”

Tom Saat sits atop the roof of tiny house he built. Photo: Courtesy of the Saat family

Saat, who runs a business as a general contractor, is among those excited about the de Blasio administration’s bid to boost affordable housing by easing restrictions on backyard dwellings and basement apartments. The mayor revealed the proposal last week ahead of his State of the City address at the American Museum of Natural History.

“People should be allowed to put tiny houses in their backyard — or someone else’s backyard with their permission,” said Saat, who actually lives in Lower Manhattan. “And there should be lots assigned for tiny-house owners.”

Saat’s eight-foot-wide, 23.5-foot long house on wheels, with an electronic, retractable second floor, cost roughly $50,000 to build. He and his family eventually moved it out of an industrial warehouse in Long Island City on Thanksgiving Day last year and headed to a more affordable lot upstate in Stormville, N.Y.

Saat conceded that his little home, while cozy, does not comply with city building codes in its current state: The 6.5-foot second-story ceiling does not meet the required minimum clearance, for instance, and the bathroom uses removable plastic bags for waste.

“Number one goes into a separate container which can include a small chlorine tablet inside for keeping it clean, germ- and odor-free,” he said. “Number two goes into the plastic bag area and sawdust, or other natural dust made from coconut shell, is used to cover number two each time it is used. Once or twice a month, this bag is replaced.”

If the city were to ease restrictions, Saat said, he would consider offering classes on building tiny homes in the boroughs. He had planned to offer classes in Queens before heading north.

De Blasio administration officials predict at least 10,000 additional units, including newly approved basement apartments and tiny backyard homes, could be added to the city within the next 10 years under the proposed changes, which the City Council must approve.

I think it's necessary to also post the conclusion of this article, which throws this ridiculous (and gross idea) into the growing dung heap of de Blasio's housing policies:

Other architects, however, remained a bit skeptical.

Lorena del Río, an assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union who has worked on affordable housing in Madrid, said, “It’s not going to resolve the bigger problem. Affordable housing should have even higher standards in terms of design so that people don’t end up living in a closet.”

The solution to the city’s housing crunch, she suggested, involved more alliances between the public and private sectors — and the “political will” to regulate housing prices.

“That is the future of affordable housing,” she said. “Not tiny houses.”

 Not only should people not end up living in a closet, but people shouldn't end up shitting in plastic bags every day.

Queens architectural photography exhibit

From Curbed:

In 2012, architect Rafael Herrin-Ferri began photographing low-rise houses in Queens not just to understand the differences in the borough’s low-rise housing stock, but to examine how Queens’s attached, semi-detached, and detached houses, along with its small apartment buildings, reflected the rich diversity of the borough’s population.

To date, he has documented one third of the borough in over 5,000 photographs, and now his work is the subject of a new exhibition by the Architectural League of New York titled, All the Queens Houses.

The exhibit, which opens October 20 and can be seen by the public at the League’s office gallery on Fridays, is comprised of 273 of Herrin-Ferri photographs. Herrin-Ferri focused on the buildings’ facades, side elevations, and any other distinct features in his photographs.

At the exhibit, the photographs are lined up in alphabetical order by neighborhood, starting with Astoria. In addition, Herrin-Ferri has decided to give his photographs humorous names, which the Architectural League describes as “part academic, part broker listing, part New York magazine caption.”

Separating the cream from the crap

From BQDA:

​With the growth of new development and renovation in our boroughs over the past five years, our professional associations are excited to collaborate on this event tailored to professions of the built environment that we all share.

In its second annual celebration, the Brooklyn + Queens Design Awards (BQDA) was established to encourage excellence in architectural design, raising public awareness of the built environment and to honor the architects, owners & builders of significant projects. The AIA Brooklyn and AIA Queens Chapters now in collaboration with AIA Staten Island and AIA Bronx Chapters will honor and recognize the best architecture and professionals that Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx can offer.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It's your opportunity to tell the architects out there who think they are hot stuff what you think of their designs by voting in the BQDA 2017 People's Choice Awards. Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island are represented in these entries. Here's a sample, but go to this page to vote.

A Frank Lloyd Crap special?

You might want to check out the progress of the construction of the Hunters Point Library over at Curbed. The photos are quite something.

Interesting old Woodside house to make way for crap

Sunnyside Post

From Sunnyside Post:

Plans were filed with the Dept. of Buildings Tuesday for a six-story mixed use building at 54-21 Roosevelt Avenue. The structure will consist of ground floor retail, second floor health care facilities and four stories of apartments. The development would include seven dwelling units.

Demolition permits were filed in March.

The owner of the building, Al Zhu Lu, did not want to comment for this story.

New law proposed to protect old neighborhoods

From the Times Ledger:

State Sen. Tony Avella (D-Bayside) has announced plans to introduce legislation that would create special architectural districts throughout the state. The move was prompted by the Broadway Flushing neighborhood’s losing battle for city landmark status.

The bill, still in draft form but to be introduced in the new legislative session, would create a process allowing residents to petition for their neighborhood to be protected by their local zoning authority from non-contextual architectural styles, Avella said.

Avella said under his bill, petitions for architectural district designation would require residents to detail a plan with the special design characteristics reflected in their neighborhood, which would have to be approved through a public hearing process.

Under the concept, the city Department of Buildings or any equivalent agency in other municipalities would be made to enforce the design limits set by the architectural district designation.

A unique piece of architecture

Take a look inside Rockaway's wedding cake house, courtesy of the Rockaway Times.

Love it or hate it, it's story is pretty interesting.

More and more houses of worship disappearing

From AM-NY:

As the city looks for ways to contain its ever-growing housing problem, historical and architectural experts say New York's religious institutions become targets for elimination to make room for the new guard.

Over the past few decades, hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship have been shut down due to higher costs and declining attendance only to be replaced by condos, small shops and, in one case, a nightclub.

Although some of these buildings retain a facade or some other physical remain of their religious presence, preservationists say their absences create a void.

"Every time something like this happens there can be a cause for concern and introspection of the changes in the neighborhood," said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Experts say it is hard to calculate how many religious institutions are in danger because such decisions come from their respective orders.

In many cases, their closures aren't announced until the eleventh hour.

Colin Cathcart, an architect and associate professor of design at Fordham University, said religious buildings in the city are the few major examples of long standing history traditionally impervious to the constantly changing cityscape.

"One thing that [closing places of worship] does is that it cuts off the community from its past," he said.

What passes for award-winning architecture in Queens

From the Queens Courier:

The Queens Chamber of Commerce hosted its 99th annual Building Awards on Thursday, recognizing architecture and design of new buildings around the borough.

Out of 100 total entries, just 19 new construction, interior and rehabilitated use projects were selected as winners from various categories, including public use, office space, commercial and residential.

City Planning Director Carl Weisbrod was the keynote speaker at the event in the LaGuardia Marriott Hotel. The Chamber’s President’s Award was given to College Point-based developer Mattone Group.

In terms of new construction, the modern, glassy, three-story commercial building by K.O.H. Architecture at 215-15 Northern Blvd. in Bayside was among the winners. The building is home to a Tiger Schulmann, a Pizza Hut and a day care.

I heard that Frank Lloyd Crap is jealous.

A gem of a building changes hands

From the Queens Courier:

A Woodhaven Village relic is trading hands after its owner went bankrupt.

The historic 124-year-old Wyckoff Building, which is known for its old-style architecture, was sold for $2,801,188, according to city records filed Wednesday.

The Ozone Realty LLC, which bought the property on the corner of 95th Avenue and 93rd Street in 2007, filed for bankruptcy last year after failing to meet the mortgage on the building, which was held by New York Community Bank, according to city records. SDF30 93-02 Ozone Park LLC is the new owner of the building, records show.

The building has six residential apartments and two commercial units throughout four floors and more than 13,000 square feet of space.

Its architecture has characteristics of Queen Anne masonry and Romanesque Revival style semi-arched windows— features found in few properties in the area.

Silvercup project may resemble deformed horseshoe

From Curbed:

As it turns out, the expansion of Long Island City's Silvercup Studios to include Silvercup West, a mixed-use extension of the famed production studio, hasn't been a dormant project after all; in fact, LEESER Architecture has been busy creating a plan as an alternate to the originally-proposed Richard Rogers design. LEESER's proposal was created in 2013 for a "potential investor," and one-up's Rogers's design by working within the site's existing zoning restrictions. Rogers's design recently resurfaced when Silvercup filed a special permit renewal extension for the design that includes a 2.2 million-square-foot complex with eight sound studios, an office tower, 1,000 apartments, a 1,400-space parking garage, and cultural and retail space.

The latest crap that architecture nerds think is cool

From Curbed:

Only one rendering—and few details—has been revealed for the ODA-designed apartment building that's rising next to 5 Pointz (RIP), but the eagle eyes over at New York YIMBY spotted another one on the architect's website.

Wow. I hope the cab will be permanently parked on the sidewalk. Provides a nice touch of authentic LIC.

Ecclesiastical architecture is threatened citywide

From the NY Post:

Preservationists are raising hell to protect the city’s historic churches as parishes in desirable areas close and developers snatch up the holy properties.

Chelsea neighbors are fighting a proposed 11-story tower above the 150-year-old French Evangelical Church, which has struggled to pay for repairs and sold its air rights to survive. Residents say the plans are “atrocious” and want the Presbytery of New York City to try a Hail Mary.

“It’s not just about the preservation of this block — it’s about all the city’s historic churches,” said Paul Groncki of the 16th Street Block Association.

“They’re an important part of the fabric of our neighborhoods, and we don’t want to see them disappear. This church will disappear if it’s encased in concrete.”

The New York Landmarks Conservancy surveyed 1,200 significant religious sites across the city and found that more than two dozen historically or architecturally important churches have been shuttered or destroyed in the past decade. And Brooklyn parishes are especially in danger, said Ann Friedman, who runs the conservancy’s Sacred Sites program.

“We are going to see a lot of development and loss,” she said. “We can’t just sit back and wring our hands.”

The Queens Museum. Just "museum".

Hey, folks, if you want to see what people are saying about the "new" Queens Museum (of art?), you should read this review from New York Magazine, which I found courtesy of Brownstoner Queens.

The mother of all Fedders?

Forgotten New York found "The Perfect Fedders" in Corona:

I was stopped on the railroad on Tuesday right in front of what may be the most iconic, emblematic Fedders building I’ve seen in Queens, on 44th Avenue in Corona facing the LIRR embankment.

It’s all here… the concrete lawn with sport utility vehicle parking, the Fedders AC cutouts, the meters front and center, the bland blond brick, the rusted fire escapes. The only nod to any design at all is a little flourish in the brickwork. Bars on the windows just add to the whole package.

We call this look "prison moderne".

Making new architecture fit in

From City Journal:

One of Dickens’s villains boasts that he’s never moved by a pretty face, for he can see the grinning skull beneath. That’s realism, he says. But it’s a strange kind of realism that can look through life in all its vibrancy to focus only on death.

Much of today’s architecture brings that misanthrope to mind. Beauty? For our advanced culture, it’s as spectral as classical philosophy’s two other highest values: the good and the true. A building might be cutting-edge, boundary-breaking, transgressive. But simply beautiful? The arts have transcended such illusions.

A pity. Part of the pleasure of metropolitan life is the pre–World War II city’s manifold loveliness. When you see the illuminated Chrysler Building glowing through the evening fog, or walk by the magnolias blooming in front of Henry Frick’s museum, ravishing outside and in, or gaze up at the endlessly varied historicism of lower Broadway’s pioneering skyscrapers, you know you are Someplace—someplace where human inventiveness and aspiration have left lasting monuments proclaiming that our life is more than mere biology and has a meaning beyond the brute fact of mortality. Like all our manners and ceremonies, from table etiquette to weddings, beauty in architecture humanizes the facts of life. So we don’t want a machine for living—a high-tech lair to service our animal needs—but rather a cathedral, a capitol, a home, expressive of the grandeur, refinement, urbanity, and coziness of which our life is capable.

Two recent Manhattan buildings gracefully exemplify the life-affirming architectural humanism I have in mind. First is a gemlike house at 5 East 95th Street, just east of Central Park, by celebrated London architect John Simpson, designer of the enchanting Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Completed late in 2005, it looks like an independent townhouse but is, in fact, an extension of the landmarked Beaux-Arts mansion at 3 East 95th Street that Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer designed in 1913 for Marion Carhart, a banker’s widow, who died before she could move in. In 1935, the Lycée Français bought the house, and years of high-energy students left the structure battered by the time the school sold it to a Hong Kong–based developer in 2001. Layers of battleship-gray paint covered the first floor of its grimy limestone street wall; the interior, with its institutional bathrooms and fire doors, had grown shabby; and a jerry-built, three-story 1950s annex, resembling an auto-body shop, adjoined it at 5 East 95th.

Everything old is new again

From CBS News:

They may not make 'em like they used to -- but that doesn't mean no one's trying.

Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch are founders of the design firm Roman and Williams. In an age of generic glass buildings, their designs evoke a sense of personality . . . and permanence.

"We feel like we could build a building right now with current labor and materials that could last four or five hundred years," said Alesch.

"It's a breakthrough to do a brick building -- to do a really good brick building, with wood windows, right now, is a breakthrough," added Standefer.

Take for example Elizabeth Street in Manhattan: Other buildings on the block are well over a hundred years old, except for the seven-story building on the corner of Elizabeth and Prince. It's nearly new, but built the old-fashioned way, with old-fashioned bricks.

"All of our bricks were dead stock," said Standefer, which means, "they hadn't been used since 1950. No exaggeration."

And when the place was finished, people thought it had always been there.

"When we took the scaffolding down, they just thought we had cleaned the building," Alesch said.

"But you built it from nothing?" Smith asked.

"Totally. Ground up," said Standefer.

Queens Library must have found money

From The Real Deal:

Sometime in the spring, a glamorous new branch library will open in the unlikeliest of places, at 255-01 Union Turnpike in Glen Oaks, Queens. Designed by Scott Marble and Karen Fairbanks, who founded Marble Fairbanks in 1990, this blast of neo-mod zazz will rise in the midst of what is akin to a strip mall. Replacing an older brick-faced structure on the same site, the new library will be an 18,000-square-foot, LEED certified space on three levels — one of them below grade — that will contain a circulating library, a cyber center and communal meeting spaces.

Weren't we threatening to close Queens Library branches recently due to lack of funding? Why is a glamorous new hoidy-toidy branch being built in Glen Oaks?

Recognizing a Bayside Avenue gem

From Forgotten New York:

Bayside Avenue is home to a number of eclectic houses, some of which are on wide plots. This one is a Second Empire-ish jewelbox shadowed by a much taller conifer. Other similar buildings are scattered around Flushing, but some have been sacrificed to the Great God Progress, which demands bland, multifamily buildings.