About 350 train enthusiasts weathered this past Sunday’s thunderstorms to board the New York Transit Museum’s vintage Independent Subway System (IND) fleet Nostalgia Ride. The tour began at the Transit Museum’s headquarters in downtown Brooklyn and made its way up the A line to the MTA’s 207th Street overhaul yard in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Transit Museum conducts these exclusive vintage-fleet tours a few times during the summer (although the next one isn’t until June 2010, you can expect surprise runs in December) as a way for the community to experience what old New York was like—with overhead fans swinging, electric circuit smells galore, and clever advertisements. Check out more photos from Sunday’s tour after the jump. Read more…

Click the image to begin the slide show

Last Sunday, despite the nonstop rain, Metropolis’s associate art director, Dungjai Pungauthaikan, and its picture editor, Sarah Palmer, joined an estimated 30,000 other hearty souls on the 42-mile TD Bank 5 Boro Bike Tour. The ride began in Lower Manhattan and made its way into the Bronx, through Queens and Brooklyn, and, finally, over the Verazzano Bridge into Staten Island. The tour traversed bridges, roads, and highways not normally accessible to cyclists, and provided exciting views and a sense of community rarely felt in the crowded streets of New York City. Here, Dungjai and Sarah present a slide show of images from their water-logged trek.

The tour kicked off Bike Month NYC, which includes such events as National Bike to Work Day, commuting and repair workshops, and a variety of other tours in New York City and beyond.

Every year Design Industries Foundation Fighting Aids (DIFFA) brings together innovative and talented designers from the fields of fashion, interior, art, and architecture to create one of a kind dining experiences. Even future designers from schools including Parsons and FIT also get to dish out the design at this one-of-a-kind-event. DIFFA will take these amazing rooms on tour and host a number of dining events to help raise money in support of HIV/AIDS victims and preventive education. Last night, Metropolis joined the designers in celebration of their creations at the kick off of the 12th annual Dining by Design national tour in New York. Some rooms were elegant and beautifully styled; others were more funky and outrageous. Check out what we found!

Michael Tavano for New York Design Center
A fun graffiti inspired disco meets clown creation. What would a dining room be without a magnificent chandelier?

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Left: The November cover designed by Jeffrey Lai
Right: Alternate cover with photograph by Michael Wolf

As financial markets crashed and the future of our economy remained unclear, we decided not to make Michael Wolf’s photographs of the American office our cover. Though timely and powerful, his almost Hopperesque images didn’t evoke the inspiring and empowering message that we felt our readers needed during this time of uncertainty. But Eero Saarinen’s firm was our perfect cover story. His office spawned a revolution in thinking that continues to influence firms all over the world. Since Saarinen’s architectural education began at Yale, we felt it was appropriate to pass off this cover design to a fellow alumnus, Jeffrey Lai. He used a wonderful historical photo by Balthazar Korab showing Saarinen working on the TWA model with a very young Cesar Pelli and Sam Luderowski.

Illustration for Metropolis by Ellie Clayman

Last weekend, Yale University’s students, alumni, faculty, and the design community gathered in New Haven, CT, to celebrate the rededication and renaming of Paul Rudolph’s 1963 Art & Architecture Building (now called Paul Rudolph Hall) in addition to its new Arts Complex neighbor designed by Charles Gwathmey. During the historic two-day event filled with lectures, exhibitions, and panel discussions, many former students were excited to see their old stomping ground turned upside down and cleaned to a sparkle-the dingy grey walls were restored to their original grey and everyone loved the “paprika” orange carpet. The excitement surrounding the restoration of Paul Rudolph Hall overshadowed the skepticism of its sterile counterpart. Metropolis caught up with a few of the attendees to gather their thoughts on the renovated and restored modernist landmark and its slick new neighbor. Read more…

Early on, it was decided that our cover story would be about activist-design—what we’re calling ‘public-interest architecture.’ We wanted to convey the power architects have on their local communities, and ultimately on the world. But visualizing this idea was not easy—there was no single image in the story that captured it. So we contacted Chris Ro, of the graphic-design studio ADearFriend, whose ability to illustrate conceptual ideas had long impressed us. He came up with a slew of possible solutions, but in the end we all agreed on one: his illustration of an architect’s hand holding up our fragile planet is both striking and thought-provoking. As the earth opens up—like a hopeful version of Pandora’s box—the world is remade by a new generation of activist architects.