INHABITAT: LEESER Architecture Transforms Brooklyn's Historic Strand Theater Into a Cultural Space for the Digital Age →

The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Cultural District in Fort Greene continues to grow into a destination for the arts with the addition of Leeser Architecture's $40 million expansion and renovation plans for the historic Strand Theater. Built in 1918 for vaudeville acts, the theater has also functioned as a movie palace and bowling alley and will now become a 21st Century, state-of-the-art facility for BRIC Arts Media, a non-profit that presents arts, music, and educational programs for the borough's diverse cultural community, and UrbanGlass, an organization dedicated to glass making and teaching...read more at INHABITAT >>

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Designing Brooklyn's Future →

The old Strand Theatre, sandwiched between the bustle of the Fulton Mall and the brownstones of Fort Greene, has never impressed preservationists enough to gain landmark status. Its neo-classical facade with four Ionic columns has been viewed as an ornament slapped on a relic from a bygone age, evocative of the silent-film era, newsreels and the velvet-curtained silver screen. The rest of the building is woefully bare, as if someone...read more at the Wall Street Journal >>

INHABITAT: Leeser Architecture Finishes LED-Lit Luxury Lobby for the Mercedes House →

LEESER Architecture has just put the finishing touches on the super cool south lobby of the incredible new West Side development, the Mercedes House. The 2,500 square foot space will be the gateway to 29 stories of luxury living developed by Two Trees Management and designed by Ten Arquitectos. With a fantastically patterned terrazzo floor, LED lights, and digital displays, this entryway is an experience for the senses. The giant space is dynamically angled into sections that make it no ordinary residential lobby...read more at Inhabitat >>

THE ARCHITECT'S NEWSPAPER: Out of Thin Air →

Omi International Art Center’s Architecture Omi program will be using cutting-edge mobile technology in an unconventional exhibit, “Augmented Reality: Peeling Layers of Space Out of Thin Air,” to open July 9 at its namesake location just north of Hudson, NY. The show will host fantastically layered structures and environments by nine commissioned studios—among them, Vito Acconci, Asymptote, SHoP, Daniel Libeskind, and SITE—without touching a twig of an idyllic, twenty-some acre landscape of wetland, forest, and rolling farmland...read more at The Architect's Newpaper >>

NEW YORK TIMES: Immersed in Images and an Age of Blurred Boundaries →

Designed by Thomas Leeser, the swollen baby-blue form, which has been grafted onto the back of a 1920s building, effectively blurs the boundaries among architecture, film and viewer. In doing so it immerses you in the kind of fantasy world you usually get only when the lights are turned off...read more at New York Times >>