This save-the-date for the Storefront For Art and Architecture‘s 25th Anniversary Benefit recently made its way into our office. The event, honoring architect (and Storefront founder) Kyong Park, and artist Shirin Neshat, will be held this April in the Diane von Furstenberg Studio, a brand-new space tucked inside a landmarked meatpacking building just steps away from the High Line.

One of the more striking features of the Work Architecture Company-designed DVF Studio is a diamond-shaped skylight/conference room called the Jewel. Natural light filters into the building through the glass-ensconced and crystal-studded “stairdelier,” a chandelier/staircase that may give the spiraling Apple store staircase (down the block) a run for its money as the neighborhood’s most visually striking way to travel between floors.

The benefit is coming up April 29th.  Check out Storefront’s web site for more information.

Was Rusty B finally checking herself in, her reps claiming “exhaustion” and “dehydration?”  So it would have seemed on Monday afternoon as paparazzi swarmed beneath the windows of Friends of the High Line.  In fact the paps were there for Isla Fisher, shooting “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” outside Scoop and across the street from Diane von Furstenberg. 

Workers began installing the planks at Gansevoort Street, and are working their way north. These 12-foot-long, tapered planks will become the pathways on the High Line.

The tapered ends of the planks will allow the plantings to push through the cracks, blurring the edges of the hard-surface pathway into the softer planting areas. An early rendering of the concept by design team Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Some of the layers of the new walking surface, which is built on a bottom layer of concrete that sits inside the steel frame of the High Line.

Glenn Collins wrote a great piece for The New York Times in January about the construction going on atop the High Line.

There was also a beautiful slide show by photographer Damon Winter.