Norman Foster

Aby Rosen and Norman Foster are back at 980 Madison Avenue, and Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has the reveal.

The two were beaten back with their 2006 plan to build a much taller 30-story apartment tower atop the 1949 Parke-Bernet Galleries building, also revealed by Mr. Ouroussoff, as it met strong opposition on the Upper East Side.  read more »

Location: You have a number of publicly funded—or at least very public—projects: the Fre  read more »

LOCATION: The controversy over 980 Madison Avenue has yet to be resolved, but the Landmarks Preserva  read more »

A bad marriage or an open door? How best to characterize the reaction from Tuesday morning's Landmarks Preservation Commission meeting on Norman Foster's 22-story tower for 980 Madison Avenue?

The Real Estate called the principal actors for comment, having been unable to attend in person.

"Nine out of 10 commissioners strongly opposed the current project because of the height, the scale, and the materials were inapporpiate for the district," said commission spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon. "They felt the building did not relate well with the Parke-Bernet building."

One commissioner, the Rev. Thomas Pike, even called it a "bad marriage."

But the developer, Aby Rosen, was ready for a lot worse.

"From our perspective, it went quite well," said Rosen's spokeswoman. "Nobody was closing the door and saying, 'Absolutely not. You can't build something on top of the Parke-Bernet building.'"

At least the commission did not take a vote, permitting the Foster-Rosen team to come back in a few months with a revised plan.

- Matthew Schuerman

• Last night, the Upper East Side's resident badboy Jeff Koons tenderly defended Lord Norman Foster's plans for a shiny new Madison Ave. skyscraper. "I think we have an important chance here," said Mr. Koons, "to add to our legacy as New Yorkers with this very, very special building." Then the community board promptly voted against it. (NYT)
• Mayor Giuliani once wished it would be "blown up," and Bloomberg called it the "notorious Kremlin" (and "rinkydink candy store"). But 110 Livingston is headed for 335,000 square feet of bamboo-floored glory. (Sun)
• Gertel's, the Lower East Side's "last kosher bakery," is moving away from its 92-year home on Hester Street. The condo that's taking its place will not be serving challah. (NewYorkology, via Gothamist)
• Williamsburg just got 3% hipper, 18% uglier, and 39% more annoying. And it's all thanks to something called Kiska. (Curbed)
• Peter Marino's tower of "interlocking apartments" on Central Park has received a big award--even though the prize is handed out in Boston, and even though the tower hasn't been built yet. Mr. Marino is a lucky man: his plot on 57th Street doesn't even have height restrictions. (Interior Design)
• Also: those late-night real estate infomercials are probably not a good idea. (Sun)
- Max Abelson
• 0 comments

• Paul Goldberger calls Frank Gehry's new West Side Highway building "serene," "swooping" and "daring." The critic forgot the adjectives "frosty" and "hideous" because he was saving his ire for Mr. Gehry's Atlantic Yards plan. But even at his bitchiest--he says the development isn't "palatable"-- Goldberger remembers his manners. (New Yorker)
• Speaking of manners, Nicolai Ouroussoff gives a full-body massage to Lord Norman Foster's "bold" plan for a 30-story residential tower atop 980 Madison Avenue. Doesn't that rendering look "ingenious"? (NY Times)
• Let's party with city schools like it's 1979! NYC has granted the World-Wide Group a 75-year lease of 1.5 acres at East 57th and Second Avenue--in exchange for a whole lot of dirty work. WWG will raze the two public schools there, replace them with two bigger ones, then develop a 59-story apartment building and plus four wide stories of retail space. (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is designing the tower, which helps make the deal a "win-win.") (NY Sun)
• bartha bartha, coming to a television near you. (Curbed)
• Do New York communities have a genuine say in big-business development? They do in the Bronx: Proposals for developing the kingly Kingsbridge Armory will be "responding to an outline shaped by community organizing and people power." People power is big, and so is the armory--it's 575,000 square feet. (City Limits)
- Max Abelson  read more »
• 0 comments

Lord Norman Foster's double-helix Hearst tower turns out to be good for the environment: it cut the use of steel by 20 percent, and contributed towards the building's certification, long-anticipated and officially announced today, as a gold-level environmentally friendly building under standards from the U.S. Green Building Council. That makes it the second office building in New York to get certified, after 7 World Trade Center, which got a gold "core and shell" rating in March.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

People (perhaps even we did at one time in our lives) like to point out how much Daniel Libeskind's site plan has been abandoned, but today's unveiling of the next three towers at Ground Zero shows there's a lot of Danny left. Compare this after-dark rendering:

... with Libeskind's revised plans from September 2003:  read more »

Office assignments went out yesterday to the more than 2,000 employees of Hearst magazines, with Cosmopolitan getting the highest floor for any individual title, reports the New York Post.

(It's sort of like that moment in the summer when you get the best homeroom assignment, except with Central Park views).

Since two mechanical floors are situated on the top, the 44th floor is devoted to lavish conference rooms, and the 43rd will house Hearst Magazine President Cathie Black. And then, come the top-tier publications.

Cosmopolitan, the most profitable magazine in the empire, has the highest floor for an individual magazine, the 38th. Oprah Winfrey, whose O magazine is the second most profitable in the company behind Cosmo, will be on the 36th.

The Norman Foster- designed tower has been getting plenty of press lately. Last weekend, the 46-story building graced the cover of the New York Times "Arts and Leisure" section, in a piece on green buildings. Move-in starts on May 4th.

But, most importantly, what about the Hearst cafeteria?

Café 57, a full service cafeteria that insiders say plans to offer sushi five days a week - compared to archrival Condé Nast which only has sushi twice a week in its Frank Gehry-designed employee cafeteria in Times Square.

Ouch. That hurts almost as much as the new Condé Nast cafeteria policy.  read more »

- Michael Calderone

Forest City Ratner will begin demolition next month of six buildings for the Atlantic Yards project, says The Times.

Larry Silverstein brought back British architect Norman Foster to design 200 Greenwich Street, a 65-story, 2.4-million-square-foot building down ground zero way. 'Course, we reported that yesterday.

In other ground-zero news, the News reports that Governor Pataki is entertaining other developers for the site; Mr. Silverstein still expects to develop everything.

And The Sun reports that the New York State Court of Appeals will hear an eminent-domain case on Water Tunnel Shaft 30B, at the corner of Grand and Lafayette streets in Soho.  read more »

-Matthew Grace

We read the New Yorker's 10,000-word Bloomberg piece over lunch (as Slate says, so you don't have to). No news in it, though Anthony seems to be trying to convince us otherwise.

But this struck us as an interesting observation (italics added):

"[Bloomberg] pointed to another, less obvious sign that the city was doing well: architectural trends.... 'All the great architects seem to want to work here. For a while, London had every great architect. Hong Kong had them. But they never came to New York. Now, whether it's Sir Norman Foster, or Cesar Pelli, Viñoly, Piano—they all want to work here.'

"It difficult to imagine Bloomberg's predecessors judging their records in these terms, but Bloomberg, who was born and raised in Medford, Massachusetts, is less parochial than most mayors. Like many businessmen who travel a lot, he thinks globally. He often talks about securing New York's place as the world's leading city—a status that Koch and Giuliani would never have thought of questioning in the first place. One reason that he wants New York to host the Olympics—and it is also why he brought the Republican Convention here—is to showcase the city to a worldwide audience.Unfortunately for Bloomberg, most New Yorkers don't much care what people in Europe and Asia think of them.  read more »

"He tries to hide his cosmopolitan tendencies, riding the subway to work, attending Yankees games, dining out on Staten Island, and wearing ethnic headgear when the occasion demands. But not even he takes this pose seriously."

Lost in the soap-opera story line of New York Philharmonic's near-divorce from Lincoln Center-its an  read more »

The Hearst Magazine Building, the stunted Art Deco skyscraper that for 72 years has squatted at the  read more »

Nothing is more ominous in the museum world today than announcements of grandiose bureaucratic ambit  read more »