Photo via Hamevugar's Flickr. The Brooklyn Museum housed a Ron Mueck exhibit that we pointed out last year and CubeMe just reported on. The exhibition, now closed, included "about 15 mixed media works on loan from the artist’s collection, major museums, and private collections..that explore the ambiguous relationship between reality and artifice, creating figures that express the contradictions between the real world and the imaginary. The figures seem to be alive: every detail -......

This week, reports the Downtown Express, the Landmarks Preservation Commission recommended that architects incorporate elements of the Battery Maritime Building's original architecture into a proposed plan to renovate and expand the ferry terminal. The Dermot Company seeks to develop a glass boutique hotel (complete with roof lounge) and specialty foods marketplace above the Beaux Arts ferry terminal. The changes at the Battery Maritime Building gives us an inside look at the politics of historic preservation,......

If any business should know about the possibility of dramatic appreciation, it's a storied auction house. And moreso, if any business should know that gentility and collegial understandings often fall by the wayside when huge sums of money are on the line, it would be Sotheby's. When Sotheby's sold the building housing its New York location for $175 million in 2002, it probably seemed like a smart move. The company was finally clearing out of......

The City Council unanimously reappointed four commissioners and appointed a new one to the Landmarks Preservation Commission yesterday (via the NY Observer). Four of the five have ties to the outer boroughs. The newest, Diana Chapin, is the Executive Director of the Queens Library Foundation and a founding member of the Historic House Trust, which protects and preserves historic houses. She has served in various positions in the City Parks Department and was the Queens......

The Landmarks Preservation Commission yesterday stalled Aby Rosen and Norman Foster’s proposed glass tower above the 1949 Parke-Bernet building at 980 Madison Avenue. While the commission didn’t formally reject the plan, it did not approve the addition or support a zoning waiver, two requirements for the project to proceed. All but one commissioner said during the public meeting at the Surrogate’s Court building that they could not support the building because of its scale, massing,......

+ The Landmarks Preservation Commission has been doing its job, but what about the buildings and districts behind the numbers? Meanwhile, 980 Madison developer Aby Rosen says Tom Wolfe “should stick to writing books.” + Speaking of the Commission, it has stripped landmark status from land where a deteriorated 1871 building once stood. That's only happened twice before. + For developers, sluggish condo sales mean only one thing: more upscale hotels, natch. + The......

Yesterday, there was a sprawling editorial (literally sprawling too - it covered two pages) in the NY Times Week in Review by Tom Wolfe. And in it, he ripped the Landmarks Preservation Commission, most of its commissioners, and Mayors Koch, Giuliani and Bloomberg a couple new ones. The essay, The (Naked) City and the Undead, begins with the debate over 980 Madison Avenue and developer Aby Rosen's proposed Norman Foster addition to it. (Which......

+ Community Board 1 Seaport Committee members react to landscape architect James Corner's South Street plaza plans. Some say it's beautiful. Others say it's too beautiful. + The golden domes that once adorned the 1875 cast-iron, Corinthian-columned O'Neill building on Sixth Ave. between 20th and 21st are returning. In the form of fiberglass-reinforced plastic. + 980 Madison Ave. developer Aby Rosen buys Fred Tomaselli's 1992 Colorado River (pictured). It's made of resin, hemp leaves and......

Yesterday's Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing over 980 Madison Ave. was a relatively staid affair. On the second floor of the Surrogate's Court building on Chambers Street, Lord Norman Foster told the 150-plus audience that 980 Madison Ave. was about one thing: regeneration. But Foster, wearing a bubblegum pink tie, took it one step further, characterizing the Upper East Side as a neighborhood with "a tradition of radicalism." He compared 980 Madison Ave.'s role, architecturally,......

Well, this wasn't a surprise: An Upper East Side community board committee moved to reject plans for a 30 floor apartment tower at 980 Madison Avenue. The design by Lord Norman Foster, ballyhooed for his addition to the Hearst Building and a design for the World Trade Center, is shorter than the Carlyle Hotel nearby, but the Carlyle's height is less obtrusive due to set backs. Just last week, the NY Times' architecture critic Nicolai......