Tribeca Penthouse Apartment, New York via Steven Harris Architects LLP

The Tribeca penthouse apartment designed by Steven Harris, Professor of architecture at Yale - a multi level, 743 square metre, jaw dropping example of architectural design at its finest. 

In my opinion, the stairs are the most spectacular feature of the apartment. Yes, those are 3/4 inch-thick steel treads wrapped in leather and suspended by tension wires spanning across both floor levels. Steel and leather are two of my favourite materials and combined they create something equivalent to a sexy, architectural yeeros. I love how the stairs appear to just float unassumingly within the interior space. Peep the rest of the apartment here

URBAN SPACES

 The latest design concept for the Spur at The High Line via The High Line

 The Spur interior concept via The High Line

 Digital render of the High Line

An aerial view of The High Line, New York 

It's so inspiring to see more councils, cities and municipalities taking the initiative and raising the funds needed to transform mediocre and often unused public spaces into inviting, functional urban spaces.

A remarkable urban reincarnation that best illustrates this transformation is the High Lina at the Rail Yards in New York. The High Line was built in the 1930s, as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. It lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan's largest industrial district. The High Line operated as a freight rail line between 1934 to 1980, carrying meat to the meatpacking district as well as agricultural goods to the factories and warehouses of the industrial West Side.

Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, formed in 1999 when the historic structure was under threat of demolition. Their vision was to preserve the entire historic structure, transforming an essential piece of New York's industrial past into an innovative new public space raised above the city streets with views of the Hudson River and city skyline.

The High Line was transformed into a public park built on a 1.45-mile-long elevated rail structure running from Gansevoort Street to West 34th Street on Manhattan's West Side. This urban space is a monument to the industrial history of New York's West Side as well as a hopeful model for industrial reuse for other cities around the world. 

Communities need to come together and rally for more urban spaces like this. We have to utilise all the visionary designers, architects, planners and artists in our communities and continue to create these urban spaces. These spaces unite and and inspire people to come together and appreciate the environments in which they reside - and i'm all for that.

A kilometre and a half long, the seaside promenade of the Playa Poniente, Spain used to run parallel to a four-lane road and a row of ground-level parking spaces. An intervention in the 1970s covered it with mediocre paving, lining it with a heavy concrete balustrade 1.2 m high, which noticeably obstructed views of the sea. Access to the sand was only provided at two-hundred-metre intervals by way of ostentatious imperial stairways. The new promenade reduces the urbanised surface and constitutes a complex strip of transition between skyscrapers and beach. It is structured on the basis of a sinuous succession of walls of white concrete that delimit terraces, garden plots, stairs and ramps.The esplanade’s colourful surging forms evoke the gardens of Antoni Gaudí or Burle Marx, while its powerful iconic presence unfolds in a forceful embrace with the skyscrapers along the seafront, ordering them into a unitary body via