What’s Happening: With the opening of Gansevoort Peninsula last week, Manhattan has welcomed its first official public beachfront. Swimming isn’t allowed, but beachgoers can gaze at a soaring sculpture envisioned as an ode to New York City’s artistic heyday.

The Download: Shorelines are often the centerpieces of major cities. Hong Kong’s gleaming supertalls tower over the South China Sea; the Seine and Thames wind past postcard-worthy scenes in Paris and London; parklands and pieds-à-terre line Chicago’s Gold Coast. The situation is drastically different in New York City, which has a staggering 578 miles of shores that, for decades, conjured images of derelict piers, gridlocked highways, and seedy impound lots. Though recent efforts have revitalized sections of the shore with lively parks and tourist traps, we still wouldn’t recommend swimming in the East River. New Yorkers craving a beach day need to schlep upwards of an hour to Coney Island or Far Rockaway.

Until last week. Located in Hudson River Park across from the Whitney Museum is the newly completed Gansevoort Peninsula, a fixture of the four-mile-long Hudson River Park that’s being touted as Manhattan’s first public beach, complete with picnic tables and Adirondack chairs. Granted, the sandy strip only comprises a small portion of the “green oasis” designed by Field Operations, the powerhouse landscape firm behind game-changing urban green spaces like the nearby High Line, Miami’s Underline, and San Francisco’s Presidio Tunnel Tops. The firm packed a large sports field, boardwalk, seating lawn, and kayak launch point on the square pier—a step up from its past life as the site of a Department of Sanitation building.

Of course, the Hudson River still isn’t sanitary enough for swimming, which is strictly off-limits; Gansevoort Peninsula is better suited for sunbathers. There also won’t be restrooms until a new building by nARCHITECTS wraps up soon. Until then, visitors can sit for an art history lesson without coughing up $30 for admission to the nearby Whitney. The institution and Hudson River Park Trust donated Day’s End, a permanent steel skeleton of a building by David Hammons, that soars over the pier’s southern reaches. He envisioned it as an homage to the his late contemporary, the conceptualist Gordon Matta-Clark, who in 1975 excised a giant crescent from the facade of its predecessor, a warehouse, as a protest against the rapacious urban renewal that was displacing his artist community in Lower Manhattan.

In their Own Words: “Converting this former Sanitation facility into the sparkling public open space it is today has been a decades-long endeavor,” Noreen Doyle, the president and CEO of Hudson River Park, said in a statement. “Gansevoort also connects communities to their Hudson River, completing a gap in the Park’s four-mile footprint, and making it infinitely more pleasurable to travel between our surrounding west side neighborhoods.”

Surface Says: Hopefully Day’s End doesn’t come with the era’s sketchy “syringetides.”

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Attending Frieze London (Oct. 11–15) in Regent’s Park this year? Good news: Dorsia is launching there just in time for the fair. Tables are available for Sept. 27 and beyond. Be one of the first to experience exclusive access at London hotspots Chiltern Firehouse, Dorian, Evelyn’s Table, LPM, Taku, and more.

Dorsia is a members-only platform with access to coveted reservations at the most in-demand restaurants in New York, Miami, L.A., The Hamptons, London, and San Francisco, with more markets coming soon.

Gensler’s new office building Signal House is flashier than one might expect from the buttoned-up capital. El Presidente, a new restaurant anchored inside it, doesn’t shy away from the maximalism. James Beard Award–winning Stephen Starr pays tribute to Mexico City in his massive, 6,000-square-foot Union Market District restaurant, with a sense of theater that extends to the menu’s Grand Seafood Tower and Prime Tomahawk Redeye with guajillo demi-glace. The beverage program’s agave-forward tequila and mezcal cocktails, like Put Me In, Coach’s mix of tequila blanco and blue glacier gatorade, only heighten the intoxication.

AvroKO have devised a suitably theatrical environs for Starr’s more-is-more menu. A trio of dining rooms are inflected with Deco flavor, while the 60-seat patio is sure to buzz all year long. Annelisa Leinbach painted the 33-foot mountainscape mural that wraps around scarlet velvet seating and banquettes like a cinemascope screen. But the bar is its true heart: the red-and-pistachio palette was inspired by Mexican social clubs, and is topped by its Silver Hill Arts diorama with views of tropical landscapes, at once underwater and overhead.

Nicole Lawrence channels her background in lighting and jewelry design into fabricating free-flowing home essentials—fluid-like shelving, geometric desk lamps, swooping coffee tables—that are, as she describes, “solid in structure but soft on the eyes.” In the hands of Lawrence, who hails from Melbourne, metal’s rigid qualities are masterfully manipulated into fluid forms that beckon interaction and ponder the equilibrium between strength and delicacy. Her latest, the Oro Lamp, is no different, recasting the Ouroboros into a statement luminaire whose iconic symbology is tempered by gentle sculptural gestures.

Earlier this year, in the front corner of Friedman Benda, a grove of little trees gathered. Their canopies of washi paper suspended maple and bamboo leaves mid-flutter; their trunks were also lengths of elegant bamboo, secured to rings of patinated aluminum or marble or Belgian Bluestone. They floated, summoning childhood memories of pressing foliage between wax paper. Their glow softened in the gallery’s natural light, conjuring connections not only to Noguchi’s paper lights but also to our affinity for biophilia that floated like puffballs from avant-garde galleries into health care, user experience, and product design.

The floor lamps form part of “Contemporary DNA,” a show of new works from the architect, theorist, and designer Andrea Branzi, who recently died at age 84. The legendary Italian had a hand in most of the past century’s seminal design movements. In 1966, he co-founded Archizoom Associati, which launched Italian Radical Design. A decade later, he, Ettore Sottsass, and Alessandro Mendini opened Studio Alchimia, pushing the former’s pop sensibility into a highly referential and irreverent postmodernism.

It may seem hard to believe that Pink Floyd’s best-selling 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon turns 50 this year. We don’t need to explain why the era-defining opus remains a fixture of the rock canon, but now there are even more ways to take it for a spin. The latest installment of Pro-Ject Audio Systems’ Artist Series of album-themed turntables is a limited-edition device replicating the album’s iconic sleeve that depicts white light elegantly refracting from a prism. The Austrian brand essentially rebuilt Storm Thorgerson’s artwork and George Hardie’s prism image: records spin on a slim, triangular glass platter, and emanating from the tonearm is a dimmable LED-backlit rainbow for a dash of ‘70s glamour. It’s round and round and round from here. $1,999

New & Notable is a cultural catchall that highlights interesting new products and projects from our brilliantly creative members of The List. With new releases, events, and goings-on, the below moments indicate the power they have to move the needle in realms like architecture, design, fashion, and art.

Holly Hunt: Executive creative director Jo Annah Kornak collaborated with founder Holly Hunt on HH40: an 18-piece collection spanning a sofa, lounge and dining chairs, tables, bedroom furniture, a chandelier, a pendant and sconces, all in celebration of the furniture brand’s 40th anniversary. Several key pieces, including the Torus pendant and High Tide side table, pay homage to the ebb and flow of water; others, like the Strata chandelier and Déjà Vu dining table, are a study in angular geometry.

Phillip Jividen: For his latest launch, the Cincinnati-based furniture maker drew inspiration from the virtuosic sculptor Constantin Brancusi and the interdisciplinary prowess of painter Lucio Fontana. The Slit mirror, executed in patinated brass, first seems to center the viewer in a dreamy vignette before swallowing them into a cavernous void that erupts from the midpoint.

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Cass Calder Smith Architecture + Interiors is an interdisciplinary, bi-coastal practice with offices in San Francisco and New York City. Celebrating 30 years in business, the firm practices boldness balanced with simplicity, innovation balanced with functionality, and power balanced with precision. The studio’s award-winning modern designs have an attention to detail, materiality, and authenticity that exhibit an artfulness uniquely tailored to the client.

Surface Says: Cass Calder Smith may call New York and San Francisco its home bases, but the reach of this interdisciplinary firm extends far beyond thanks to the expertise of its principals and more than three decades in the business.

This artist makes mesmerizing miniatures of Tokyo’s common housing stock.

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Scientists recently discover Zealandia, rumored to be the eighth continent.