- Next City showcases this year’s winning design from the Philadelphia Center for Architecture’s Better Philadelphia Challenge. Asked to consider the optimal regional use for New Jersey’s 292-acre Petty Island, which faces Fishtown and Port Richmond, a team of landscape architecture and regional planning graduate students from Cornell University envision— a century hence—an agriculturally purposed isle known as “Delaware Valley Foodworx,” with an agricultural college, seed bank, 10-story sky farm, a farmers’ market, and a discovery center.
- South Kensington’s American Street—a broadly drawn vestigial from that neighborhood’s manufacturing heyday—is fast becoming the next focal point of the Lower North’s redevelopment, says Naked Philly. With SoKo Lofts and Liberty Square, “there’s an incredible amount of development in the pipeline” in the area. At its intersection with Jefferson Street, American may soon even see a mixed-use art gallery rise in the place of an auto garage.
- In celebration of its 350th anniversary, the French building material firm Saint-Gobain is freely exhibiting “Future Sensations,” a series of “five distinct ephemeral pavilions which reportedly take visitors on a journey of science, storytelling and art that celebrates the past three and a half centuries and sets the stage for future innovations,” says CBS Philly. “Future Sensations” will be at Philly’s Oval from May 30 through June 6; the only other cities in this international tour are São Paulo, Paris and Shanghai.
The Friends of Squirrel Hill Park have started another petition drive to bring about the reopening of the long-shuttered community space at 48th & Chester, reports the West Philly Local. Designed by local artist Danielle Rousseau Hunter, Squirrel Hill Park first opened in September 1996.
