New York City was amply represented during last night's National Design Awards at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Landscape Design award went to PWP Landscape Architecture, the firm that won the World Trade Center Memorial design competition (with Michael Arad). PWP Principal Peter Walker thanked Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki and described the last four years as "difficult," presumably for the number of redesigns and challenges with moving the project forward, but he......

The NY Times takes a careful, detailed look at the rising Museum of Arts and Design building at 2 Columbus Circle more than two years after preservationists failed to stop plans to radically alter the 1964 Edward Durell Stone building. Yale School of Architecture dean Robert AM Stern was one of the better-known critics (after novelist Tom Wolfe, of course), arguing that the original structure was an important Modernist landmark. The fight helped paved the......

Officials announced that victims names will be arranged at the World Trade Center Memorial, instead of being placed randomly. WTC Memorial designer Michael Arad's original plan was for a random listing of victims. From his winning submission:The names of the deceased will be arranged in no particular order around the pools. After carefully considering different arrangements, I have found that any arrangement that tries to impose meaning through physical adjacency will cause grief and anguish......

WTC leasholder Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority are suing comapnies for withholding funds which are keeping them from starting work on the World Trade Center. Naturally, in surance companies don't want to pay out, but to prevent the building of something as symbolic as the new World Trade Center sounds like a PR disater. And the construction union members rallied in support of the lawsuit - one carpenter told NY1, "The question everywhere I......

Ever since one contractor estimated it would cost $1 billion to build the World Trade Center Memorial, it's been a downhill process at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Actually, it was probably downhill from earlier than that, but the $1 billion price tag helped prompt cover stories about the memorial mess, create more teams to figure out a solution, and lead to the resignation of the WTC Memorial Foundation president. Anyway, the WTC Memorial's builder,......

If there's something politicians know how to do, it's to convene a committee! The NY Times focuses on how everyone wants new plans to bring the WTC Memorial budget down - there's that much agreement. But the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has one committee working on it...and Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg created another committee to work on ideas! Double the thinking, infinite times the resentment! The LMDC team includes the builder Bovis, whose......

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests.......

On Sunday's Gothamist publishes opinions submitted to us by readers, in this case Andrew Bast. These opinions do not necessarily represent those of Gothamist LLC or its editors. Almost two years ago, Governor George Pataki helped to lay the 20-ton, Adirondack granite cornerstone for the Freedom Tower. And it wasn't until just this past month that the financial bickering between Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority were finally sorted out so construction could begin in......

It'll be an alley of cray architectural all-stars downtown! After turning over Freedom Tower reins to the Port Authority and getting a pretty sweet deal, given everything, developer Larry Silverstein has annointed British architect (and Sir) Richard Rogers to design Tower 3 and Japanese Pritzker-winner Fumihiko Maki to design Tower 4 at the World Trade Center. Rogers is making a splash in New York lately - he'll be designing the Javits Center expansion, the......

Tomorrow will mark the third anniversary of the attacks on September 11th. The city announced their plans to commemorate the day last month, with the day beginning at 8:46AM (when the first plane struck the North Tower) with a moment of silence. Names will be read by parents and grandparents, and others will be able to lay flowers at the lowest level of the WTC site. Other moments of silence will follow at 9:03AM (when......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced that the WTC rebuild "would necessarily involve significant traffic, noise and short-term air quality impacts during its construction period." Thanks for pointing that out! Gothamist guesses that it's the LMDC's job to put it on the books that they know these things, but we feel that most people might infer that building an almost 2,000-foot high skyscraper, a new PATH station, a memorial, new plazas, parks, streets, etc., would......

The Times reports that a slew of top design firms have applied to beomce the "associate architect" of the WTC memorial, Reflecting Absence, alongside Michael Arad and Peter Walker. Reporter David Dunlap says this could be a sign that the project is too huge in scope for Arad Walker (or any small team). And let's face it, NYC design firms have been wanting to get into the redesign of the WTC, given the democratic process......

While the purpose of the Times article about selected WTC memorial Reflecting Absence is to explain how landscape architect Peter Walker joined original designer Michael Arad, the real story is about designer and WTC memorial juror Maya Lin. Lin, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial as well as the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL, as well as a dreamy Wave Field at University of Michigan, was a supporter of Reflecting Absence. The article......

The design, Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad and new collaborator, Peter Walker, was selected to be the WTC Memorial. This design incorporate two submerged pools in the space where the towers once stood. Arad, an architect with the City Housing Authority, worked with Walker, a landscape architect who formerly headed the Harvard Landscape Architect Department; the Times has more about both designers. Mayor Bloomberg is especially proud that Arad is a city employee. The......