Pritzker Award-winning architect Renzo Piano told the NY Times he was "totally in agreement" about the New York Times' decision to remove ceramic rods from the building's exteriors. The rods acted as rungs for three climbers to scale the building's exterior; Piano said, "I’m frankly quite worried about this new fashion of going up on buildings. This is what I call an inappropriate use of the building.” He added that the building was "built to......

Photograph, above, of the New York Times Building--as designed by Renzo Piano--by WallyG on Flickr; below, photograph of workers removing the rods by David Dunlap/NY Times After a third person managed to scale up its ladder-like exterior, workers went to work removing a number of the horizontal "rungs" gracing the New York Times Building. The NY Times dutifully reports this decision "represented a reversal for The Times, which had insisted that it would not......

Renderings of the Whitney downtown provided by the Whitney Museum. In March it was announced that The Whitney received a generous donation from Leonard A. Lauder (to the tune of $131 million). The donation came with a caveat -- they wouldn't be able to sell their Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue; however, it looks like they received the funding they needed to move forward with a satellite museum in the Meatpacking District. The......

It's been a busy month for NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. After tackling Jean Nouvel's skyscraper, Renzo Piano's Times building and the West Side Rail Yards designs, today he turns to the feverishly celebrated New Museum, previewed yesterday by Gothamist. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japan-based SANAA, the highly refined seven-story, 174-foot building succeeds, says Ouroussoff, on a "spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle......

A rendering of Brooklyn's proposed City Tech Tower, designed by Renzo Piano, at Tillary and and Jay Street sent some into speculation mode, especially since its height seemed to be up to 1,000 feet tall. Which would make just about twice the height of the 512-foot tall Williamsburgh Savings Bank, currently the tallest building the Brooklyn. However, the rendering of the building is apparently old. A representative at Forest City Ratner, the development company which......

Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for the NY Times, enjoys working in his employer's new headquarters, he writes today, but the building designed by Renzo Piano falls short of the best skyscrapers in the city. For one, it allegedly harbors a streak of nostalgia, which in the world of architectural discourse amounts to an aesthetic identity crisis. The nostalgia in question is a longing not for neo-Gothic frills and cornices, but for the 1950s era......

Designer Michael Bierut has details over at the Pentagram blog on how he and his team created the recently installed sign at The New York Times Building, the 52-story tower designed by Renzo Piano and FXFowle. At 110 feet, the sign, located on the building's Eighth Ave. facade, is a 10,116-point version of the paper’s Fraktur font. It is comprised of 1,000 custom-designed pieces, each a painted extruded aluminum sleeve a little more than......

He made his name in London, Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo, and now he's making his mark on New York, too, with four major projects in development. Richard Rogers, one of Britain's handful of architect-knights, has just been awarded the 2007 Pritzker Prize, architecture's top honor. For many people, Rogers' most iconic project is still the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he completed in 1977 while partners with Renzo Piano. The inside-out building lasciviously exposed......

"Across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal" is becoming the new benchmark in swank office location. Crain's reports that the New York Times Building (pictured right) designed by Renzo Piano and FxFowle has "breathed new life into the formerly moribund area" across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The proof? Sky-high rents from high-end corporate tenants. While Class A office space in the formerly "tawdry" district rented for about $30 per square foot in......

Last night, Streetsblog noticed that the City University of New York had just announced that Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall was appointed Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning, Construction and Management. A few hours later, there were press releases about Weinshall's resignation from the DOT and the Mayor. The Mayor said:When I became Mayor, the people of New York were already very fortunate to have an innovative thinker like Iris Weinshall leading the Department of......

The conflicting interests of Columbia University and the West Harlem community continue to spawn new polemics from both sides, as the university inches ahead with its proposed 17-acre, $7 billion expansion. As the land-use contest heats up, so has the quest to find the perfect metaphor. The high-stakes name game begins with the conflicting designations of the territory in question. While Columbia has used the term "Manhattanville" to describe the area, which lies between 125th......

Newsweek is reporting that architect Renzo Piano is drawing up plans for a downtown addition abutting the High Line even though the Whitney’s board of trustees hasn’t made a final decision. Piano first heard word of a possible relocation in September. “My first reaction was sad, when you spend a couple years struggling, and dreaming, about a scheme, and finally you may end by not doing it,” he told architecture critic Cathleen McGuigan. There was......

The Whitney's third expansion plan in 20 years may be abandoned if it moves its addition to a site at the southern tip of the High Line. The space opened up after the Dia Art Foundation announced last week that it was not building a museum there. The interesting backstory is the Renzo Piano-designed Madison Ave. addition, a nine-story tower that would have connected to the original 1966 Marcel Breuer building through glass bridges. Located......

A family of three was injured when a three-foot pipe falling from the new New York Times construction site at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street slammed through the sunroof of their Honda. Luckily, the injuries were not too serious: Heather El Sayed's head was cut, while her husband Abdelazim was hit on the shoulder and two year old son Blaze were scratched (probably by the shattered sunroof glass). What's interesting is that the netting......

We stopped by the reopening of the Morgan Library yesterday to check out the blockbuster Renzo Piano renovation. The new space looks great-- particularly the entrance on Madison Avenue (between 36th and 37th), and the towering central court, with its glass windows. The old buildings along 36th Street look pretty much the same, but a second story with galleries has been added above the west-facing one. If you go, be sure to go down......

The Javits Center is like the stepchild of the city's development projects: No one really cares - they want flashy architects or scary renderings of what a Jets stadium might look like. But now the Javits Development Corporation has selected an architect to design a new expansion, British architect Richard Rogers. Not only is he knighted, he designed the Centre Pompidou in Paris (with Renzo Piano) and the Millennium Dome in London, making Gothamist wonder......

Develop Don't Destory Brooklyn will be protesting outside of the New York Times' offices at 1PM today to protest coverage of developer Bruce Ratner. DDDB's claim is that because the Times' coverage of Ratner's plans for downtown Brooklyn has been "misleading" and "inaccurate" because Ratner's company is building the Times' new skyscraper. DDDB wants consistent coverage about the Atlantic Yards project from the Times, and you can read the report here. Hmm, wonder if the......

Developer Bruce Ratner has tapped celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz to photograph the development of the new New York Times building on Eighth Avenue. Why? To attract other tenants for the building. The Post calls the 700,000 square feet available in the building "an entire speculative building," and says the photographs, which will be taken periodically, will be plastered in the area. Could photographs by Annie Leibovitz really attract new tenants? Maybe photographs of cash, but......

Upper East Side residents near the Whitney Museum are opposed to the proposed demoliton of townhouses on East 74th Street. The NY Post says that city officials are looking at a petition that suggests that razing the buildings "is irresponsible and unnecessary." The problem: The Whitney does own the buildings, but they are in a landmark district. You'd think that someone on Renzo Piano's team would have checked that out! Anyway, the main complaint from......

With news that Frank Gehry is among the selected architects to design cultural buildings at Ground Zero, it marks the presence of one of America's foremost architects at one of the most high profile sites, which will make design fiends' mouths water. Gehry did not submit a plan for Ground Zero saying the $40,000 fee wouldn't cover his costs. This made Gothamist think about Gehry's recent post-Bilbao fame, and what that's meant in NYC: His......

Opening today at MoMA QNS: Tall Buildings, a showcase of 25 high-rise buildings designed in the last 10 years. The exhibit takes a look at the evolution of the architectural genre for the 21st century, exploring innovations in structure and program as well as social and urban implications. Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers are some of the architects represented in this exhibit. Many of the buildings featured......