One World Trade Center (WTC) was awarded the 2015 Best Tall Building Award for the U.S. from The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). WSP, a global engineering and professional services organization, served as structural engineer for the 104-story office tower on behalf of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Skanska stopped work on the world’s tallest modular building last week over a dispute with the project’s developer Forest City Ratner. Skanska feels that the delays to the project have resulted from the modular designs for the buildings. They feel that Forest City Ratner should be held responsible for the cost overruns.  Richard Kennedy, co-chief operating officer of Skanska USA, told the Wall Street Journal, “it [the design] just doesn’t work the way it was sold to work. It was represented to be a complete and buildable modular design,” he said. “That simply was not the case and that’s what we’ve been struggling with.”  Forest City Ratner, however, stands by their design and believes the dispute is based on financial reasons.

Construction has started on one of Manhattans newest skyscrapers. Located at 53 W. 53^rd St. the MoMA Tower, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, is to be completed sometime in 2018. Featuring a tapered profile with a roofline staggered across three irregular levels, the 1050-foot tall (82-storey) structure will house 139 apartments and is Nouvel’s first skyscraper in NYC. The tower will also have new public gallery spaces on the second, fourth and fifth floors, into which the neighboring Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will expand its galleries.

The first 3D printed estate in the United States is set to be complete by the end of 2017. The ambitious project is being undertaken by New York City architect Adam Kushner, alongside partners including 3D-printing pioneer Enrico Dini and his D-Shape firm. The estate will feature a swimming pool, Jacuzzi, carport and a 2,400 square foot house in upstate New York.

The 11.2km-long seawall, stretching from Fort Wadsworth to Oakwood Beach, will protect communities from severe coastal flooding, while creating new wetland habitats and recreational amenities.

New York City, like other older urban communities, is largely serviced by a combined sewer system where storm water and wastewater are carried through a single sewer line to the city’s 14 treatment plants. These facilities can manage and treat all the wastewater produced in the city on a dry weather day (1.3 billion gallons on average) and also have the capacity to clean more than twice the dry weather flows on a rainy day. But during intense precipitation events, the storm water exceeds this capacity and overflows can be discharged into local waterways. In an effort to improve water quality, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is building rain gardens, designed to absorb polluted storm water that would otherwise end up into the sewer system.

The proposed towers could survive 6ft(!) of sea level rise at Manhattan’s Pier 40

This newly thriving ecosystem may become a model for other places that have been irrevocably changed by human interference

A recent report links high salinity in Seneca Lake, the largest of New York State’s Finger Lakes, to the storage of Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) in nearby salt caverns. The lake, which holds 4.2 trillion gallons of water, has for decades seen levels of salt concentrations greater than those regulated by the state for sensitive populations such as infants and those on low-salt diets. The highest concentration, in the village of Waterloo, has concentrations nearly four times the state limit.

Around 250 firefighters responded last Thursday after a gas main leak caused an explosion that demolished three buildings in Manhattan’s East Village. 22 people were injured, four critically, and two people are thought to still be missing.

The explosion comes only a year after two buildings in Harlem collapsed after a gas leak last March, which killed eight and injured many more. The buildings were served by a 127-year-old gas main. Following the incident in 2014, industry experts warned that utilities in many parts of the U.S. were struggling to maintain or replace antiquated and leaky gas mains in older urban areas. Mains composed of cast iron or steel are the most vulnerable.