In an effort to gin up publicity for Frank Gehry's first Manhattan residential cloud-buster, the so-called Beekman Tower, developer Forest City Ratner will unveil the design in a ceremony on Friday afternoon.

The development will be Mr. Gehry's second in Manhattan, following his wildly succesful design for the IAC headquarters on 11th Avenue.

The Beekman Tower is slated to rise 76 stories between Spruce and Beekman streets, with 903 market-rate rental apartments inside.  read more »

Livable-city activists celebrated the latest, coolest additions to the city’s urban landscape on Thursday inside the stark white interior of Frank Gehry’s first building in New York City, the IAC headquarters on 11th Avenue.

The occasion was the Municipal Art Society’s 2008 MASterwork Awards, which, according to the program, “honor the year’s top projects for their excellence in architecture and urban design, and their contribution to New York’s built environment.”

A motley assortment of New York bold-faced names showed up for the event, including Diane Von Furstenberg, there to receive a Best Historic Preservation award for the DVF Studio Headquarters at 440 West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District.

So did developer extraordinaire Jerry Speyer, who served on the awards committee and who presented the Best Building awards; and Ann Buttenwieser, who accepted a Best Neighborhood Catalyst award for her Floating Pool Lady, that pool-in-a-barge parked last summer at the foot of Brooklyn Heights.  read more »

Lawsuits against architects must be as plentiful as plasterboard, but when the client is Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy and the architect is Frank Gehry, well, even the Boston Globe takes notice.

MIT is saying that “deficient design services and drawings” have led to leaks, cracks, mold and a $1.5 million reconstruction of the amphitheater at the Stata Center.

Most surprisingly, the construction contractor for the building, which was also sued, is publicly blaming the architect as well:

"This is not a construction issue, never has been," said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA. He said Gehry rejected Skanska's formal request to create a design that included soft joints and a drainage system in the amphitheater, and "we were told to proceed with the original design."

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Forest City Ratner is looking to compete for some of New York’s scarce tax-exempt bonds to finance a Frank Gehry–designed tower in lower Manhattan.  read more »

When City Planning urged an 8 percent reduction in scale, it was merely asking the developer to adopt something like Option 20B, which was the least dense of the four Frank Gehry versions that developer Bruce Ratner had shown commissioners. What's surprising isn't so much the back-room negotiations as the fact that City Planning did not push for anything substantially smaller than what Ratner was apparently comfortable with.

Stormin' Lord Norman

• 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]]> http://www.observer.com/node/35209#comments Real Estate Frank Gehry Nicolai Ouroussoff Norman Foster The New York Times Company Tue, 10 Oct 2006 04:30:44 -0400 Observer Staff 35209 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/node/35194


Our claim from July that Atlantic Yards would be the densest census tract in the country seems to be sowing some confusion, which is just as well, because we never really said that.

What we said was that Atlantic Yards would be twice as dense as the densest census tract in the country, but nothing about it being its own census tract. The 22-acre project spans four census tracts, as you can see from the map above, which we have borrowed from NoLandGrab, an opposition blog. The red parts are where Frank Gehry's skyscrapers and arena will go.  read more »

Because all of this confusion made us curious, we went ahead and calculated what effect the new population would have on the densities of those four census tracts. No, none of those tracts will become the densest in the nation, but one of them, 129.02, which will host the basketball arena and three skyscrapers, would apparently leap into the ranks of the 100 densest tracts. ]]> http://www.observer.com/node/35194#comments Real Estate Atlantic Yards Forest City Frank Gehry Ron Shiffman Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:30:00 -0400 Observer Staff 35194 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/node/39036 This is what’s missing from so many of the restaurants I’ve been to lately: the feminine  read more »]]> http://www.observer.com/node/39036#comments Arts & Culture Bill Buford Donatella Arpaia Frank Gehry Michael Psilakis Sun, 25 Jun 2006 20:00:00 -0400 Moira Hodgson 39036 at http://www.observer.com