In our running series on accessibility issues in buildings and cities, we’ve looked at some ways that New York City in particular may fall short when it comes to providing easy, well-maintained design for people with limited mobility. So when our publisher noticed what appeared to be a dearth of handicap-friendly design at a well-known restaurant—one that happens to sit in a landmarked building—we took it upon ourselves to investigate.

What we found was one small-scale instance of just how complex these issues can be. In this case, the restaurant blamed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) for rejecting its request to install an exterior-stairwell hand rail. The LPC countered that it had never received such a request, and that it would almost certainly have approved one if it had. The restaurant’s architect had only worked on the interiors, and therefore claimed ignorance of the whole situation.

It didn’t seem productive to investigate the matter beyond this impasse—but we did want to take a closer look at the larger issues at play here. What interested us most about this case was the building’s historic status. How do city government and private owners reconcile the desire to protect the character of historic buildings with the need to promote accessibility?

In theory, the solution is pretty straightforward. When asked about accessibility features in commercial spaces, a representative from the LPC said, “We’ve never turned down a request for barrier-free access. Our job is to try to figure out a way to solve a problem without detracting from the historic building or diminishing its significance.” To prove the point, LPC provided us with a list of landmarked buildings where new additions had been approved. Where accessibility features like ramps or lifts are necessary, the agency works with building owners to mitigate the visual effect of those additions, sometimes suggesting an appropriate color or material palette or camouflaging the new design with landscaping.

But exploring the bureaucratic world of design regulation made us curious to know more about which buildings fall under what regulations—and since we’d already started, we decided to follow the rabbit hole of building code just a little further. Here, for those curious about how these things work, is what we learned: Read more…

If things go as planned, the Aircruise might just be the future’s slowest way to get around. For now, however, the 265-meter-tall airship isn’t a finished product; an announcement the other week billed it as a “visionary transportation concept.” Seymourpowell, the design firm working on the project, and Samsung C&T, the construction company helping to develop the idea, present the Aircruise as a luxury cruise, or a hotel in the sky. The decadent dirigible  would stay in the air using hydrogen and solar power. Since the physics of keeping such a structure afloat require a large volume with little weight, the concept necessitates vast spaces and few passengers: a recipe for luxury designed to “appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey.” Our bet is the design won’t get built anytime soon, but who knows—there’s always a chance it could get off the ground.

Related: Our 2007 profile of the French designer Jean-Marie Massaud included a look at his concept for a 700-foot-long airborne eco-hotel.

Update: The folks at Airships.net are denouncing the Aircruise concept for its proposed use of flammable hydrogen and its un-aerodynamic shape.

Images: courtesy Tata Motors

The Tata Nano, on display now through April at the Cooper-Hewitt, looks a lot like a Smart Car, though it’s sold for about a fifth of the price. The Nano is billed as “the People’s Car,” mostly because it retails for around $2,500, and while it’s currently designed, built, and marketed exclusively in India, Tata expects to roll out versions for the European market as early as 2011. It’s likely that the versions of the Nano sold in Europe, and eventually in America, will look more like the car displayed at the Cooper-Hewitt than the ones that have become popular in India; the yellow Nano in the museum’s lobby is the LX version, an upgraded model that has retained many of the features—air conditioning, leather seats, a music system—that were jettisoned to keep down costs in the original.  The luxury version is still relatively bare-bones, but a fuel economy of around 54 mpg might make the Nano attractive even to skeptical American consumers.

Quicktake: Tata Nano—The People’s Car is on view in New York at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, until April 25.

View more images of the Nano after the jump. Read more…

For years, New York City’s electricity grid has strained under the stress caused by peak demand, the times (like midday or, in a seasonal cycle, the summer) when residents are most apt to use electrical appliances and max out the municipal power network. Stress on the aging system will likely only increase in coming years, with some experts predicting a 30 percent uptick in the city’s peak demand by 2030. One strategy to deal with the problem, addressed by a panel on “Smart Grid for Smart Cities” yesterday morning at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, is the creation of a more flexible energy system—one that allows customers to know exactly how much energy they’re using and lets them reduce their load (by, for instance, shutting off their water heaters when they’re not home). For city residents, that will mean smaller energy bills at the end of the month. Other features of the smart grid—like the storage of electricity, harvested during lulls and used during times of peak demand—also increase the reliability and cost-effectiveness of the system, while reducing its environmental impact. Read more…

If you think Thom Mayne designs buildings that stand out for the sake of standing out, you’re only partially correct.

Last week, at the Center for Architecture in downtown Manhattan, Mayne gave a talk on  “performalism,” a portmanteau that describes how architectural form can influence building performance—the way, for instance, the scrim-like façade of Morphosis’s San Francisco Federal Building effectively replaces a traditional cooling system, or the dramatic roof of the still-in-process Phare Tower that doubles as a wind farm and electricity generator, both engineering feats as much as architectural ones. The idea, according to the architect, is to use architectural skins and shape to increase environmental performance, reduce financial burden, and integrate various programmatic and mechanical systems: to create, in Mayne’s words, “layers and layers of performance.”

And, of course, to produce a building that grabs attention. Read more…

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Buildings commissioner, Robert Limandri, announced the winner of the urbanSHED competition,which, last summer, asked for redesigns of the city’s sidewalk sheds (the plywood constructions that shield pedestrians from exterior building renovations). The winning project, Young-Hwan Choi’s* Urban Umbrella, beat out 163 designs, including those by the two other finalists, the New York firm KNEStudio NewYork and the Massachusetts-based XChange Architects. The DOB promises to promote the design as a new standard, and it’s likely that a trial version of the scheme will be erected soon.

*Clarification: Choi created the initial design; after it was selected as a finalist, he teamed up with Andrés Cortés and Sarrah Khan, of Agencie Group, to develop the final, winning design.

Of the three final designs in the competition, Urban Umbrella seemed the most ambitious— which, in all honesty, made us think it had the least likelihood of winning. Read more…

At the newly unveiled Web site Shape Vancouver 2050, users are given a digital model of the Vancouver skyline, the ability to extrude buildings upwards, and a visual gauge of the resulting effects on the city’s downtown. As the user drags the digital towers higher and population density increases, meters at the bottom of the screen go up too—energy saved, carbon use curbed, dollars added to the city coffers.

It’s a neat tool, if a bit of a one-liner: the more tall buildings you insert, the better things get; make nearly all the buildings tall and you’ve created an “Urban Paradise!” (Leave most of the buildings as low-rises and you’re chided for fostering sprawl.) It’s not entirely clear whether the site’s creators—the architecture firm Perkins +Will and the developer Concord Pacific—intended Shape Vancouver as an honest solicitation of planning input from the public, or a sneaky way to educate (or indoctrinate?) residents in the environmental benefits of high density. Either way, their message is clear: Want a better Vancouver? Build tall.

Just before Christmas, the Chicago Department of Environment launched a redesigned Web site for its Chicago Climate Action Plan. The new site details some of the city’s goals for greenhouse-gas reduction (an 80 percent decrease from 1990 levels by 2050, with incremental reduction markers in the meantime), and it provides informational resources to residents: PDFs on the effects of climate change, suggestions for ways businesses can reduce carbon emissions, and a checklist of money-saving energy reductions.

CCAP’s isn’t the only city-run environmental site, and it’s not as comprehensive as, for example, New York’s PlaNYC page, which seems to be the gold standard in the field. But it ranked high in our quick survey of similar Web sites, many of which seemed surprisingly bare-bones; apparently most cities, even big ones like Los Angeles and exceptionally progressive ones like Portland, can’t or won’t commit to high-quality online resources of any type, let alone environmental ones (and you can forget about savvy Web-design). In that company, CCAP fares pretty well—easy enough to navigate, with relatively attractive graphics and a decent amount of information. It’s not spectacular, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Here’s hoping other cities follow suit.

Robert, a new restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design

When Sarabeth’s closes its Whitney outpost in the middle of this month, it will mark the end of the restaurant’s 19-year presence in the museum’s basement (it was the first private restaurant to operate within a New York City museum).

And when Robert, on the top floor of the Museum of Arts and Design, begins dinner service, also in the middle of this month, it will mark the full opening of the city’s latest museum restaurant (the café currently serves lunch and tea).  As Sarabeth’s closes shop—Danny Meyer, of Shake Shack fame, plans to open a new Whitney eatery in the fall and a pop-up café in the meantime—Robert will hope to duplicate the recipe (figuratively, of course) that kept the Whitney fixture in business since 1991.  The food is billed as “American fare,” but, for now, it’s the décor—custom tables and chairs by the architect Philip Michael Wolfson, lighting by Johanna Grawunder, furniture by Vladimir Kagan, and a video installation by the artist Jennifer Steinkamp—that takes top billing.

Previously: We took a quick look at the Guggenheim Museum’s new restaurant and admired a line of  fiberglass furniture by Vladimir Kagan. In 2008, Peter Hall argued that critics of the Museum of Arts and Design missed the real point of the building.

We knew architects liked the Chartwell School after it was voted one of the Top Ten Green Projects for 2009 by the AIA. Apparently, students like it too.

Last week, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) picked Chartwell, an elementary school in Seaside, California, as the recipient of its 2009 Livable Buildings Award. The prize, given for outstanding environmental design, relies on polls of building occupants to gauge happiness with air quality, lighting, acoustics, and a variety of other conditions in the workplace. Those results, along with net energy emission (Chartwell strives for zero) and general design quality, are considered in the jury’s final decision. Read more…