Wheel’s Up. A rendering of the New York Wheel, to be built on Staten Island.

Round and round she goes, and where she stops…well, it will be Staten Island. Start overcoming your acrophobia through therapeutic sketch-journaling now, design fans, because New York City is getting its very own London Eye-style “observation wheel,” and at 625 feet—roughly 60 stories—high, it will be the world’s tallest. Mayor Michael Bloomberg (whose name one rarely hears in the same sentence as “world’s tallest”) and other city leaders joined representatives from the company in charge of the project yesterday for the announcement of plans for the New York Wheel, which will be built on the northeastern side of Staten Island and offer riders swell views of the Lower and Midtown Manhattan skylines, the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn, and the New York Harbor. The mega Ferris Wheel was proposed in response to the NYC Economic Development Corp’s request for bids for projects that would increase economic growth, boost tourism, and create jobs on Staten Island.

The wheel will be nestled beside a large terminal building that will feature exhibitions about NYC history, alternative energy, and environmental sustainability—created in collaboration with Cornell’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Johnson and the global relief and development agency CARE. Meanwhile, both the wheel and the terminal building will be constructed with an eye to Platinum LEED certification. Among the architects, engineers, designers, and consultants who have been tapped to work on the project are Starneth (the Ferris Wheel specialists that built the London Eye) and Perkins Eastman. Construction on the New York Wheel is expected to begin in early 2014 with a grand opening scheduled for early 2016. If all goes according to plan, the 36 capsules will carry some of their first passengers on New Year’s Eve 2015.

The King George IV statue in Trafalgar Square wears a new hat designed by Stephen Jones. Below, Lord Nelson in a design by Sylvia Fletcher of Lock & Co. (Photos: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

How does London top an opening ceremony full of dark Satanic mills, dancing ill children, Mr. Bean, a star-crossed love story that may have involved time travel, and the guy who wrote Tubular Bells? With hats, lots of lots hats. The Olympic host city surprised residents and visitors this week with “Hatwalk,” a quirky collaboration between the Mayor of London, Grazia magazine, and sponsor BP that placed giant hats on the venerable public artworks of the capital. With the help of milliners such as Phillip Treacy and Stephen Jones, 21 statues were fitted with elaborate chapeaux (made of plastic or other non-conductive materials). The task of securing them fell to a crew of workers and a fleet of cranes in the wee hours of Monday. It’s not a project we can imagine happening anywhere else. “Around the world, people tend to associate us with hats now,” says Jones. “Historically of course, this was always true. But I think nowadays, thanks to things like the Royal Wedding, and the Jubilee, people around look and see someone with a crazy hat on and think, ‘Oh, they must be British.’ Hats really are representative of British culture.”

In New York, one day you’re in and the next day you’re out. Then, many days later, you’re rediscovered by preservation-minded neighbors, photographed by Joel Sternfeld, saved from demolition, and reimagined by James Corner Field Operations with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. And, just like that, you’re back in again! The abandoned railway-turned-public park that is New York’s High Line becomes even more fashionable this week, thanks to a collaboration with Project Runway. With nine seasons, two networks, and one legal brouhaha under its shiny neon belt, the reality TV competition show returns on Thursday with 90-minute episodes filmed on location in New York (the opening challenge takes place in Times Square). Get a headstart on season ten by heading to the High Line, which is being temporarily transformed into a virtual runway: jumbo digital screens installed along a portion of the Chelsea Market passage will feature interactive digital images of Runway staples Heidi Klum, Tim Gunn, Michael Kors, and Nina Garcia, and fashion photographers, who according to Erika Harvey at Friends of the High Line, “will react in real time as park visitors strut their stuff while walking along the elevated park.” The “Make it Work Moments” installation opens this afternoon and runs through Thursday.
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“The first entry to arrive for the ideas competition was drawn as a cartoon. It turned the High Line into a Mother Hubbard theme park, with the stairs built into a giant shoe. No other entries came in for a while after that. We were worried. We had done all this work for the competition, and we were going to end up with just this fairytale theme park.

In the end we received 720 entries from thirty-six countries….A few famous firms entered, including Polshek Partnership, the Hariri sisters, and 2×4, Michael Rock‘s graphic design firm. But most of the entries were from students and ordinary people. I had two favorites. An architecture student from Austria, Nathalie Rinne, proposed making the High Line into a mile-and-a-half-long swimming pool. The image of a lap pool running right through Manhattan was very beautiful. Another idea was from Front Studio, the firm of Yen Ha and Ostap Rudakevych, the two young architects who had designed our office space at Hudson Guild. They proposed leaving the landscape intact, as in the Joel Sternfeld photos, and putting a roller coaster on the Line. You’d be zooming up, looking into someone’s apartment, zipping down, and doing flips over the city streets. These were not realistic ideas, but they made people think about the High Line in new ways.”

-Joshua David, who founded Friends of the High Line with Robert Hammond in 1999, in High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). David and Hammond will discuss the project with Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel at a talk on Thursday, July 26, at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York.

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Yup, it’s a plane, and it’s slowly turning somersaults all summer. This mesmerizing mechanical marvel, “How I Roll,” a new work by artist Paola Pivi, is the latest project of the Public Art Fund, which has installed the engineless six-seater in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza on the corner of 60th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. It will be spinning slowly there through July 26.

Born in Milan and now based in Anchorage, Alaska, Pivi is fascinated with industrial machines, particularly when they are removed from their usual settings. Before getting rolling with the Piper Seneca, she created works the featured a tractor-trailer turned on its side and an upside-down helicopter. (The artist swears that she had no involvement with the beaching of the Costa Concordia earlier this year.) “‘How I Roll’ reminds me of a famous anecdote about the birth of modernism,” says Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund. “Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger are said to have visited the 1912 Paris Air Show together. Observing a propeller, Brancusi said, ‘Now that is what I call sculpture!’ Paola’s work suggests that the love affair between modernist artists and industrial design is still able to generate remarkable visual poetry.”

Dueling bathing beauties: Boo George traveled to Oslo to photograph Norway’s “It” couple, Iselin Steiro and Anders Danielson, for the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. At left, George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 photograph “The Divers, Paris.”

• Got Polaroids? The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, in connection with MIT and London-based publisher Thames & Hudson, is at work on a major project on Polaroid photography. Slated to open at MIT in late 2015 and then travel internationally, the show will cover Polaroid-related art, science, and technology. “This is a call for submissions,” William A. Ewing, who is curating the art aspects of the project with Barbara Hitchcock, told The Art Newspaper recently. “It demands the best of the best material. This is not a community project, we want the stuff that can hold its own against the art of the period—and it was a long period, from 1950 to 1990.” Deborah Douglas and Gary Van Zante are in charge of the project’s science and technology aspects.

• Five finalists have been selected for the Urban Land Institute‘s Urban Open Space Award, a competition that recognizes “an outstanding example of a well-used public open space that has spurred regeneration and the transformation of its surrounding community.” Two NYC projects—the High Line and Pier 25 at Tribeca Section in Hudson River Park—made the final five, along with Railroad Park (Birmingham, Alabama), RiverWalk Urban Waterfront Calgary, Alberta), and Tanner Springs Park (Portland, Oregon). The winner, to be announced in October, will receive a $10,000 cash prize, and if we know this group, they’ll blow it all on bulbs and shrubs.

• Author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman delivered the commencement address and picked up an honorary doctorate at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Among his advice for the graduates: make mistakes. “If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something,” said Gaiman last Thursday. “And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the ‘a’ and the ‘o,’ and I thought, ‘Coraline looks like a real name…’” Watch the full speech (his first-ever university commencement address) here.

• Event designer extraordinaire David Stark has taken to the web in his search for a star intern. He has partnered with Apartment Therapy on its “Design is not Taught” contest. In addition to a three-month internship with David Stark Design and Production, the winner will have the opportunity chance to work with Stark one-on-one to edit and curate his or her portfolio. The intern’s final project? To single-handedly design Apartment Therapy’s holiday party. Click here for details.
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In the end, it apparently takes a whole lot to topple a famous architect and his heavy pillars. After months of discussion, and an increasingly vocal group of family members speaking out against the project, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission has released a statement (pdf) of full support behind Frank Gehry, who designed the national tribute, set to be built (someday) in Washington DC’s National Mall. As early as last week, Susan Eisenhower, the former president’s granddaughter, had spoken at a congressional hearing, asking for a redesign. However, it was to no avail, at least to the Commission, who write in their statement that they “will work to address the outstanding issues that remain” but seemed to waiver not a touch when it came to Gehry’s plans:

We confirm our selection of him, confirm our enthusiastic endorsement of his design concept, and express our regret and sadness at the tone and nature of the selected comments that have been made on Mr. Gehry’s design for the memorial.

The whole debate hasn’t ended here though. The National Capital Planning Commission, which we learned from the lengthy battle over the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial can sometimes be a tricky group to work with, will have the final say on Gehry’s design. Onward with the battle!

Eager to show your visiting relatives that Matt Mullican mural but can’t remember at which New York City subway station you saw it? Seeking clues to the imminent apocalypse in the Mayan motif-laden ceramic tiles that greet 6 train passengers at 103rd Street? In need of cheering up by the roly-poly crew of Tom Otterness bronzes that frolic beneath 14th Street near 8th Avenue? There’s an app for that. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has teamed with the ace navigators at Meridian to put the 237 works of contemporary art found throughout the New York City Subway, Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, and MTA Bridges and Tunnels in your pocket, provided that said pocket contains a smartphone loaded with this app. The entire collection of MTA-commissioned artwork is organized by subway (or railroad line) and by artist, from Alice Adams to Joe Zucker. In addition to information on the background, inspiration, and significance of each work—and sometimes video and audio clips featuring the artists—Meridian is touting “turn-by-turn” directions, although they won’t be of much use until reliable cell phone service comes to the subway.
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So much for smooth sailing for the “Over the River” art installation in Colorado. But, really, when does a Christo project ever not run into a constant series of hurdles? After all, the artist himself who has repeatedly said, “By discussing the work of art they become part of the work of art. They make it more important.” The latest comes after this past November when the government gave a partial go-ahead for the artist to begin plans to drape large, sweeping panels across 42 miles of the Arkansas River, with stipulations that there were still a bit more paperwork to fill out and more permits to finalize before construction could both begin and end this summer, for an estimated August debut. In a statement issued on the artist’s site, two factors have pushed the project back substantially: first, that some of the reports required before the launch came in later than expecting, thus shrinking the time available for construction by several months. Second, the required Event Management Plans, which in part include details on “traffic, safety and other issues,” will also take longer than expected, which would mean that “the public may not have sufficient time to understand this detailed information before installation begins.” Given that there was an equal amount of those against Christo’s project as there were supporters, it seems like a solid plan not to create new hostilities. That said, “Over the River” has now been pushed by three full years, out into early August of 2015. If you’re a big Christo fan and were expecting swiftness this time, maybe you’d do better finding a new favorite artist, as we’ve entered par-for-the-course territory here.

The Serpentine Gallery, who have learned to master the art of generating buzz about one annual project nearly year round at this point, announcing their pick for who will design the next one just as the one before it is fading from memory, have decided to up the ante even more so this year. They’ve just announced that this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, a temporary structure set up in London’s Hyde Park, will be designed by a reunited Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. The two had previously collaborated on Beijing’s celebrated “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium ahead of the last Olympics in 2008. Weiwei’s gradual coming out against the project over labor and human rights issues was, for those not already in the art world, their first encounter with the artist Weiwei, whose outspoken views and clashes with the Chinese government have made him one of the most well-known and powerful artists today. With the Olympics coming to London in just a few months, and Weiwei now forced to work on projects from his virtual house arrest in Beijing, whatever the two parties come up with is sure to generate some nice press and an increased general interest for the Serpentine. Here’s a bit from the press release about what it’s going to look like:

This year’s Pavilion will take visitors beneath the Serpentine’s lawn to explore the hidden history of its previous Pavilions. Eleven columns characterising each past Pavilion and a twelfth column will support a floating platform roof 1.5 metres above ground. Taking an archaeological approach, the architects have created a design that will inspire visitors to look beneath the surface of the park as well as back in time across the ghosts of the earlier structures.