Welcome : June 2014

Friday, June 20, 2014

Improving Suburbia Portfolio 1, the Riverhead Project

I am pleased to announce the introduction of my first post in my new ISP series. I will soon feature an article that describes my intent with this portfolio, as well as the others and this site in general. This first portfolio features the architecture of a restaurant in downtown Riverhead Long Island, NY theRiverheadProject The creative adaptive reuse of a former (bank?-Please comment if I am wrong) is brilliant and a lesson in how to eradicate strip mall architecture. This is not an advertisement for the restaurant but if the food is as good as the architecture I will eat there often.

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Alternative Portfolio 3, Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant

(Text from Wikipedia)

Naval Weapons Industrial Reserve Plant, Calverton, NY (NWIRP) was a government-owned, contractor-operated (Grumman) facility testing prototype aircraft from 1956 until 1996, located in Riverhead, New York. In 1956 the United States Navy purchased about 6,000 acres by New York Route 25 for the NWIRP. The unit is most associated with test, assembly and retrofitting the A-6 Intruder, E-2 Hawkeye, EA-6B Prowler and F-14 Tomcat. During the Space Race, Grumman built a mock-up of the lunar surface to test its proposed Lunar Module. Many of the lunar astronauts were said to have visited the plant then. In 1996, the wreckage of TWA Flight 800 which had crashed about 20 miles (32 km) south of the airport was reconstructed in a hangar. In 1965, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed converting the airport into the fourth New York City metropolitan airport joining Laguardia Airport, John F. Kennedy Airport and Newark Airport. The proposal was abandoned following opposition from both Grumman and local residents. Grumman merged with Northrop Corporation in 1994, forming Northrop Grumman Corporation and the new firm eliminated almost all operations on Long Island. Grumman vacated the site on February 14, 1996 the facility has since been developed into Calverton Executive Airpark

How Should We Develop EPCAL?

Due to popular demand here are some more photos of the former

Grumman Calverton site including the runway.

This Building on the former Grumman site

kind of reminds me of Le Corbusier at Weissenhof....

Le Corbusier, Weissenhof, Stuttgart Germany
Photo author:Shaqspeare

Runway 32

Here is the tarmac at Calverton back in the glory days.
The source of this photo and a great story about
ferrying these planes from Calverton to Iran can be found
by clicking on the link below:
http://flitetime.net/iran.html