New Street Furniture Debuts In New York

"The first example of New York City's new 'coordinated street furniture,' as Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls it, was installed last month - a bus shelter on the corner of Queens Boulevard and 82nd Street in Elmhurst, Queens. About 3,300 other bus shelters are to follow, with 330 newsstands and 20 automatic toilets. Will they become as inseparable from New York as its gutsy subway signs? Or will they turn out to be as forgettable as so many of the other well-intentioned civic design projects unveiled round the world?"

"'We had to design bus shelters and newsstands, which would equally be in keeping outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art as in Times Square,' noted Duncan Jackson, who led the project for the British architectural group Grimshaw. 'We didn't want to impose our own aesthetic on the city, and made the structures as simple and as transparent as possible.'"