Garber and Novello have proposed a series of mobile docking platforms that would be added onto New York's current docks to provide more green space, in a city best known for its greyness. Underneath the mobile platforms would rest a series of unidirectional turbines, designed harness power from the natural ebb and flows of the East and Hudson Rivers to power streetlamps in New York.

They told Metropolis Magazine:

Docking Stations literally "plug-in" to the conventional piers of New York City, extending them further into the river to optimize clean energy generation while increasing public green space and tidal pools for wildlife. Energy awareness is encouraged by increased visibility of the connection between water's edge and the city's interior.

Each docking stations — and Garber and Novello propose at least six — would generate enough energy, just by floating in the river, to power 350 LED streetlights. The top parts of the docking stations would provide public access in the form of micro-parks, in their vision.

With windmills falling more and more out of favor with environmentalists concerned with bird deaths, and oil and coal reserves becoming ever more depleted, could coastal communities like New York get back into water power? And if scientists develop a method of building atop New York's waterways, would it remain green space or become a haven for those wealthy enough to be able to afford the newest waterfront property?

Next Gen Notables: Docking Stations [Metropolis Magazine]
Next Gen Notables: Docking Stations [Metropolis Magazine]

Here you can see the three stages of the elevated train tracks. At top, the train as it was in the 1930s, chugging along on its elevated track with the Empire State Building in the distance. In the middle, you can see what happened to the tracks after the train stopped running in the 1980s. It did exactly what the New York disease apocalypse movie I Am Legend predicted for the city: The giant industrial creation slowly grew a layer of grass and flowers. Today, the track is in the process of being reclaimed as a public park. In five years, as you can see in the bottom image, the tracks will be covered over by wooden walkways, flowers will be planted, and people will stroll along a mile and a half of elevated parkway through lower west side Manhattan. The project to turn the tracks into a park was managed by Friends of the High Line.

New York's Historic Elevated Train Line [via UK Guardian]

Images of the Highline today via Joel Sternfield/Friends of the High Line.

The houses are part of an art installation for the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.” According to the New York Times:

The exhibition, which opens July 20, examines factory-produced, or prefab, houses from 1833 to today, through 60 projects shown inside the museum and five full-scale houses outside. These houses address issues of mass production, digital fabrication, sustainability and portability, using a variety of manufacturing techniques and aiming at several points along the price spectrum.

Below, you can see the house server rack being built. I can't wait to live in a server farm. Maybe there will be a big screen mounted on my wall that shows me all the search queries I'm crunching, or all the ads I'm serving up. Photos by Librado Romero for the New York Times.

Prefab Five in Midtown [New York Times]

The city contained:

Lofty office buildings 250 stories high, canals carried overhead on suspension cables, airplanes that land on a few square feet of flat space on the side of tall structures, streets with nine lanes and nine levels of traffic . . . Although the model city is futuristic, its construction violates no engineering practices. It is really engineering skill carried a bit farther than today.

New York, 1980: airplanes have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food, government-arranged marriages have replaced love, and test tube babies have replaced ... well, you get the idea. Scientists revive a man struck by lightning in 1930; he is rechristened "Single O". He is befriended by J-21, who can't marry the girl of his dreams because he isn't "distinguished" enough — until he is chosen for a 4-month expedition to Mars by a renegade scientist. The Mars J-21, his friend, and stowaway Single O visit is full of scantily clad women doing Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers and worshiping a fat middle-aged man. (Jon Reeves, IMDB)

[Modern Mechanix]

"Let the reader imagine a cylindrical tube eight feet in the clear, bricked up and whitewashed, neat, clean, dry, and quiet," explained Scientific American in early 1870. The car itself fit snugly within the tube (there was an inch and a half clearance) and carried eighteen passengers at a cost of 25 cents each. "The weirdest thing about the subway project . . .," opined the New York Times in 1911, "is that the car was to be blown to and fro . . . by means of a big blowing machine." (In 1911, you could write things like that with a straight face.) The vacuum created when the air current was reversed pulled the car back in the opposite direction.

Over 400,000 New Yorkers took a joy ride underground during the three years the pneumatic subway was open for demonstration. But public enthusiasm couldn't protect inventor Alfred Beach and his Beach Pneumatic Railway from the wrath of Tammany Hall. Even though a bill proposing extension of the subway for the entire length of Broadway as originally planned was supported by state lawmakers, Governor Hoffman caved in to Tammany interests and vetoed the project. (In his exhaustive and fascinating history of the Beach Pneumatic Railway, Joseph Brennan suggests that Beach himself may have started the now-accepted-as-true story that Tammany Hall forced the closure of his railway.) When Beach finally gained approval in 1873 (after Tammany Boss Tweed's death and a new governor's inauguration), a stock market crashed killed financial support and thus the pneumatic subway.

In 1912, workers on the new BMT subway line reached Broadway and Warren Street, where they found the pneumatic railway tube, intact and well preserved. According to NYCSubway.org, the tunnel was almost certainly destroyed to make way for progress.

Remember this last shot in the film of our intrepid heroes at Coney Island, enjoying a post-coital day of amusement? Apparently something huge splashes down into the ocean in the background. We missed it, but if you couple it with the translation from the graphic novel that says the Japanese Tagruato corporation's satellite fell from orbit, then bingo. You've got the alarm clock that woke up the monster from its deep-sea slumber. We have no idea if it's true or not, but there you have it. We now promise you a Cloverfield free week from here on out. Well, maybe.

We know about J.J. Abrams going into the toy store in Japan and seeing all these Godzilla figures and being inspired to make this film, but at what point were you contacted and asked to come onboard to direct?

Basically, J.J. and Drew were talking about the story, and they went in and pitched it to Paramount and they immediately said "Okay, we'll make it." It wasn't like, okay write a script and then we'll put it into development. They were like, We love the idea, we'll make it, we know where it goes, we know when to open it. Apparently Drew walked out of that meeting and turned to J.J., because they'd pitched it as if they had everything, and he said "J.J., that's all we have!" J.J. said, "No no, we're gonna do it."

It all happened very, very quickly, so Drew went off and wrote a 60 page outline which we called a "scriptment" because it was a weird hybrid between a script and a treatment. That was what they showed me. J.J. and Bryan Burk, who has been his producing partner for years, came to me and showed me the treatment. I read it and they said I should meet Drew. The thing is... it was clearly filled with a huge amount of special effects. I was thinking, "We can't just go out on the streets of New York and film this as is. There's going to be a lot of effects work." I'd never done effects work before, and I was also in the middle of of putting this film together that I'm hoping to do now called The Invisible Woman, and we were in the middle of a casting snafu and J.J. was like "I want you to do this! Do this first and you can do that film right after." So I said to him, "Why do you want me? It's such a heavy visual effects thing." And he said, "Because I know that you love character, and that's what we want. We want a sense of realism."

Then I got very excited, because I was reading it and I was seeing all of the crazy detail, I thought if we could really do this, against this epic scale... on the page it read like a Roland Emmerich-sized Independence Day kind of movie. But I thought, if do it in this kind of intimate, naturalistic style... And I wanted to do some improvisation and other things to make it feel real. That was very exciting to me, and they said great, so J.J. and Drew and I got together and started talking about the direction to take the outline and we fleshed it out further.

That's basically how I got involved. I'm going to guess they had their pitch around January or February, and then Drew wrote up that very extensive treatment very quickly. By the end of February I'd already read it and was on board, and we started developing the treatment further and going into production on the teaser trailer. There was no script when I got on-board, so from when I got on to the release date, is still under a year, which is crazy. In fact, we didn't even have a script until four weeks before we started shooting. Drew was still working on Lost, and we were working on weekends and talking about how to rework the story, coming up with the structure of the flashbacks and all that stuff. It was all madly coming together because we knew that we had this release date, and we also knew we wanted to finish this teaser trailer and get it onto the front of Transformers.

We thought for a movie that didn't have any recognizable people in it, we thought it would be great to tease people with that trailer on the front of a huge movie like Transformers, and we had no idea what kind of a reaction we'd get. All of that, working on the script, readying the trailer, was all happening at once.

How different was this experience vs. your other feature film, The Pallbearer?

It was very different, although it's funny because the casting process was very similar in that... it's funny, because when we did that film I wanted the main character to be someone you didn't recognize, and who you'd meet as that new character. When we cast David Schwimmer at the time he was on the first season of Friends. We thought it was this show that had just begun, and he was part of a huge ensemble, and in it's first season it wasn't a hit, it was only sort of a middling success. However, right when it began filming it became this monster smash, and we knew this because we'd be out on location filming and kids, little kids, would come out and surround where we were shooting, and then we realized, "Oh, we don't have an unknown cast."

In this case, we thought it was critical to cast people you didn't realize, because in trying to create this "reality," and create this illusion that you're watching found footage. If you're supposed to be looking at someone's camcorder, you don't want to end up seeing Will Smith, because as great as he is, that immediately tells you that you're watching a movie.

The actual process itself was different, and not just for me, because I'd never done effects before, but also for the visual effects people as well. I went to them and I said "Okay, I don't know how this is done, but this is what I want to do. I want it to look handheld, and I want it to be continuous takes." I thought it was critical that this needed to look like a handheld film. Our escape route has always been that we could put in a jump cut, but I felt if we used that in this, people would feel cheated. So when we met with the vfs people, they suggested shooting on steadicam and then adding shake later, but the problem with that is that anyone who is doing these kind of videos that you see on YouTube every day, which is really our audience, will say "Hey, that's not authentic." So they had to figure out a way that it could all be done handheld.

Also, in most films you have all these shots that are like a small shot here, a few seconds there, and it would all be very containable and the visual effects people would know exactly how many shots they'd be working on. But, with this film since we were doing everything in continuous takes, we'd shoot a scene and I'd ask them "How many effects shots is that?" and they'd say, "Well, we don't know." Instead of doing many shots, we did one long shot that would basically take in all the effects of many shots.

It was also really different for the crew, because I was having the camera operators run the cameras as unprofessionally as possible. And the focus pullers as well... focus pullers lose their job if they're not dead on when someone walks into a room and hits their mark. I'd be saying "No! You're too dead on! This is autofocus on a handheld consumer camera, it has to go past them, and come back." They'd say, "Well, this is the kind of thing that gets me fired." I told them, "Not on this movie!"

I also wanted to be able to use the handheld camera as a basis for improvisation as well. Instead of shooting the scene a normal way where you'd have several angles, I'd only have one angle. I would also shoot the rehearsals, because you never know if something great was going to happen. Then after we'd done the scenes a bunch of times, I'd say "Okay, forget the words and lets just try something else. You know what the scene is about." I'd let them go and improv the scene, and a lot of times those ended up in the movie, because they felt more understated and natural.

Were you inspired at all by the original 1954 Gojira film?

Yeah, absolutely! That's actually an incredible film, and we've seen the bastardized version here in the United States. Most people are familiar with the film and have seen the Raymond Burr intercut scenes, but that movie is far inferior to the original. It came out the same year as Seven Samurai, and is considered to be a masterpiece in that country. It is a great movie, and it's very haunting.

There's no question that we were aware of the fact that the monster in that film was really a metaphor for the anxiety of that time. That was definitely the idea here that we wanted to create our own national monster the same way Godzilla did to create a monster of our time.

When you worked with artist Neville Page who designed the monster, what inspirations did both of you draw from? What was that like?

We wanted it to be totally original. He is really amazing, he has this thing I affectionately call his "Wall of Terror." You walk into this office and there's this very colorful wall of pictures, and immediately you want to walk over to it and check it out. However, the closer you get to it, the more quickly you want to look away. They're images of intestines and body parts and all these different things because there's a very biological, evolutionary logic to his work. He was coming up with all of these different features for the monster, and drawing from nature for this.

In working with him I was very interested in what the creature was going through, and we came up with the secret that the creature was a baby. It was this enormous baby that was going through terrible separation anxiety, it didn't know what was going on, and it was pissed. I wanted a creature that would be ferocious and angry, but also that there would be fear in the eyes. He showed all these sorts of fearful eyes, like how horses have a lot of white showing under their eyes when they're scared. He would always come up with these diabolical features that the creature would have. He has a singular talent, and he's really amazing.

So, at the end of the film, after the credits, a walkie-talkie crackles to life and you hear... something. What is it?

Yes, you do hear something! That's another sort of radio chatter moment. I don't actually want to give that away at this point, because it is decipherable. That's the very last thing we did on the mix, I sort of jumped up to the microphone and did this thing. I know someone will figure it out, but I don't want to give it away yet.

• Planet of the Apes: Probably the most famous image from this film is ol' Chuck Heston riding up the beach and finding the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, which means New York City is buried under a ton of coastline. "You blew it all up. You really did it. Damn you... goddamn you all to hell!" Sorry, Charlie.
• Escape From New York: While there's still a few people kicking it around New York, Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison, and of course they haven't been kind to the Statue of Liberty either. Director John Carpenter shot the film in St. Louis, Missouri and was able to convince city officials to turn off the power to ten city blocks each night to simulate the desolate city.
• Independence Day: New York City is bustling and full of life... until a giant flying saucer comes and zaps the place to hell. As expected, the Statue of Liberty buys it in this one, although it just looks like she might be taking a nap in the Hudson River, but the city didn't look fare quite so well.
• Deep Impact: New York City gets taken out by chunks of a comet that has been split in two in this 1998 movie. Several other U.S. cities supposedly get decimated as well, but it's Manhattan that we see getting blasted. A tidal wave created by the impact also takes out the Statue of Liberty, and pushes her head through the streets like a giant pinball.
• Armageddon: Two months after Deep Impact, Armageddon slammed into theaters, taking a good sized chunk of New York City with it. While the Statue of Liberty's plight isn't shown, we do get to witness the top of the Empire State Building coming off and slamming into the streets and bringing the observation level down to the ground floor. What a view.
• Artificial Intelligence: A.I.: Even the combined might of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg couldn't manage to put any intelligence into this film about artificial intelligence, nor could they save New York City from being flooded and smashed up like some child's Lego toyset. Although bonus points for having the Statue of Liberty survive, even though she's buried underwater up to her torch.
• Vanilla Sky: Tom Cruise wakes up to a bad day where he's the last person in New York City, resulting in a pretty spectacular shot in a desolate Times Square. The production was given unprecedented access to the location for filming, and the city let them shut everything down and empty it out one early Sunday morning just for this scene.
• The Day After Tomorrow: Director Roland Emmerich wasn't satisfied with blowing New York City to smithereens in Independence Day, so he decided to give the place a good going over in this film. New York gets battered by tidal waves, flooded, and then frozen to absolute zero in order to show you the dangers of global warming. Even the Statue of Liberty gets iced with sideways icicles.
• Cloverfield: All we know about this J.J. Abrams-produced movie is that some sort of giant creature starts tearing the city apart, and the Army tries to fight back. Plus, the thing whacks the heads off of Lady Liberty, and it goes sliding down a city street taking out cabs. For a thing built in 1886, she sure is pretty damned resilient.

The same architecture firm that's making this carousel, Weisz + Yoes, already improved Battery Park with its strange spiral fountain that shoots right up from the sidewalk. Image by Weisz + Yoes

Weisz + Yoes Architecture (Studio main page)

We've found out that it is a lot more sinister than that. In fact, it's a giant humpback whale with legs, with a bad case of poor hygiene. No wonder the denizens of New York City are running in fear. A giant marine mammal that we've been hunting to extinction grows mutant huge and can't scratch? You'd probably be pretty mad too.

We're not quite sure what's weirder, a whale with legs or the fact that whale pubic lice is for real. While we certainly hope that the monster is a lot cooler than a big whale, this animated image from the trailer that shows a glimpse of the monster has us still wondering.

Spoilers for 1:18:08 Cloverfield [XGenStudios]

and that the monster definitely isn't Godzilla. We also know there will be a lot of hand held shakycam footage in an effort to seem real and gritty. But you've gotta show a little more skin on that creature in the shadows if you want movie-goers to take notice.

Now if only Abrams could maintain the same veil of secrecy around Star Trek. We really don't need to know every time an additional background character is cast.

Cloverfield image gallery

12 New Cloverfield Photos [/Film]

French architect Jean Nouvel envisions this 75-story concrete-and-glass irregularity to be the perfect filler for the vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art in midtown. When completed a decade or so from now, it's going to house a luxury hotel, some condos, an underground restaurant with a glass ceiling, and additional art galleries for its neighbor.

This is a much more realistic phallic symbol than the obelisks in Paris and Luxor or the Washington Monument. It's shiny, silver, hard, slightly curved, and it even has veins. Even the ancient Egyptians didn't pay that much attention to detail.

Next to MoMA, a Tower Will Reach for the Stars [NY Times]