Warning: the 2009 documentary Casa Bronfman is guaranteed to arouse severe real estate envy in even the most sanguine New Yorkers. The 38-minute film—which is being shown this weekend at the 28th International Festival of Films on Art, in Montreal—takes viewers on a leisurely tour of the Manhattan townhouse of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and family. Their 12,800-square-foot home was designed in the 1990s by the architect Peter Rose (who also designed the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its founder and director, Phyllis Lambert—the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Edgar, Jr.’s grandfather.) Rose took a 1918 townhouse that had been converted into apartments and returned it to a single-family home, organizing the interior around two vertically-stacked central courts. This allowed for ample natural light in the middle of the building—traditionally the darkest part of a New York townhouse—and also created an interesting arrangement of space, with a large semi-private event/entertainment core surrounded by a warren of private family rooms. (And, on top of the lower court, an outdoor garden designed by Dan Kiley.) For a quick tour, check out the three-minute sample of the charming-if-jealousy-inducing film above.

Update, 10/19: Due to a technical glitch, the video is now unavailable; we’re working to restore it as soon as possible.

As much as we love to read around here—and even though we rely on the printed word (and the e-printed word, or whatever you want to call it) for our livelihoods—by some Friday afternoons, we’ve reached our limit; it’s all we can do to drag our text-saturated eyeballs across another line of type. If you’re feeling about the same—and a quick nap isn’t an option—then perhaps a video diversion will help. And we think we have just the thing: a collection of time-lapse architecture videos from around the Web. Read more…

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…

Attention, New York artists and designers: the city’s Department of Transportation just announced  that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for “a series of economical, temporary surface treatments” to keep these spaces looking good until it’s able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other “use zones.” The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here’s a direct link to the RFP.

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city’s Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City’s historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it’s also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city’s historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC’s approval. You would be wrong. “Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out,” the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? Read more…

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…

Images: courtesy WORK Architecture Company

With its startling lack of parks, community gardens, or farmers’ markets, the Gravesend neighborhood of southern Brooklyn is currently one of the least green sections of New York’s most populous borough. That is set to change this fall, however, when a neighborhood public school—P.S. 216—launches the first East Coast incarnation of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed in 1995 by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation to teach schoolchildren about food, farming, and nutrition. For the new venture, Manhattan’s WORK Architecture Company designed a solar-powered farm—complete with classrooms, a pizza oven, and a chicken coop—scheduled to be built over the summer on what is now a parking lot beside the school. The firm’s founders, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, have previous experience with urban gardens: in 2008, they created Public Farm 1 (P.F.1), an undulating cardboard bridge filled with vegetables and herbs, for the annual MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program. Recently, I talked to Andraos and Wood about the Edible Schoolyard and their longstanding fascination with the intersection of architecture and farming.

Why was P.S. 216 chosen to host the Edible Schoolyard?

Dan Wood: John Lyons, president of production at Focus Features, is on the Chez Panisse Foundation board. He was in New York City’s Principal for a Day program and the last school he went to was P.S. 216. He became a huge fan of the school and its principal. The school is amazing. In a district where one hundred percent of the students are eligible for the free-lunch program, she is running an amazing school: they have art classes, healthy snacks, a new library. It’s a real neighborhood with a mix of different students from many parts of the world.

Amale Andraos: The idea, as well, is that we will, hopefully, be able to expand the Edible Schoolyard to all five boroughs. So everybody felt this was a great school to test the first prototype.

DW: And the school has a huge parking lot! Read more…

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s executive editor, Martin Pedersen, deconstruct the “strange, almost mutant form” of a building in his Yorkville, Manhattan, neighborhood—one that appears to have been designed entirely by real estate lawyers. (Click here to watch the first installment of “My Banal Neighborhood.”)