From the June issue: Few blocks in Manhattan are changing as rapidly, or as fundamentally, as 102nd Street between Madison Avenue and Central Park, an area dominated by Mount Sinai Medical Center. The hospital, which currently occupies a superblock stretching from 98th to 102nd streets between Fifth and Madison avenues, has three simultaneous projects in the works. These include two striking, brand-new buildings that are eventful for the neighborhood: Mount Sinai’s new Center for Science and Medicine, a research building, and a 43-story residential tower at 4 East 102nd Street. Together with the third project — a 16-story prewar rental building at 1212 Fifth Avenue that’s being converted into condos — the changes considerably improve the quality of the area’s building stock. [more]

The High Line (courtesy of Architectural Record)

Phase 2 of the High Line opened yesterday, and it is a great advance on the already substantial achievement of Phase 1. While the latter, which opened in 2009, two years earlier to the day, stretched from Gansevoort to 20th streets, the new extension takes us half a mile further, all the way up to 30th Street. Much is the same and much is different.

The Mod aesthetic favored by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro is exemplified
in both cases by the grayish concrete pavers flanked by plantings and relieved by wooden
benches in odd shapes and a variety of coves. But while the earlier and more southern stage
generally stands apart from the large neighboring buildings, even as it passes under them, the
newly unveiled segment skirts so close to the generally diminutive buildings in its stretch that
the idle stroller can peer impertinently into the windows of the inhabitants [more]

The New Amsterdam Pavilion

There are few parts of Manhattan that have gone through as much hell
as Peter Minuit Plaza, which cozies up to Battery Park to its west as
it expands due north of the newish Staten Island Ferry Terminal. For
years now, thanks to a fundamental overhaul of the South Ferry subway
station, the place has looked like a war zone. And even when the
station itself was completed about a year and a half ago, Peter Minuit
Plaza remained in chaos as construction crews mulled about behind
their impenetrable fences. [more]

77 Reade Street

The diminutive stretch of Manhattan known as Bond Street has seen some feverish development over the past few years, including Deborah Berke’s 48 Bond Street and Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond Street, developed by Ian Schrager. And yet, the best building on the block is 25 Bond Street, by a somewhat less well-known firm, BKSK Architects. The virtues of their design, its energy and its classical calm, are in evidence in one of their newest projects, at 77 Reade Street, developed in the Tribeca South Historic District by S. Myles Group and Harshad Lakhani. [more]

949 Park Avenue

In the dreary world of New York City architecture, one is rarely surprised, let alone pleasantly surprised.
But so I was the other day when I passed a new building that has just arisen at 949 Park Avenue,
between 81st and 82nd streets. Designed by C3D Architecture, it is being developed by VE Equities
and marketed by Prudential Douglas Elliman.

This project is the latest and possibly the best of three similar buildings that have gone up on the east
side of Park Avenue between 81st and 87th streets in the past few years. The other two are 985
Park Avenue,
designed by Costas Kondylis, and
1055 Park Avenue, designed
by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. All three occupy a single lot, but rise to the canonic height, roughly
12 stories, of their neighbors. Whereas 1055 Park occupies the southeast corner of 87th street, the other two buildings are shoe-horned
in between two long-established structures. Comments

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The 57th Street pyramid

From the April issue: Before we allow ourselves to get carried away at the prospect of Durst Fetner Residential’s recently unveiled and startlingly original proposal for a residential development on the far west end of 57th Street, and before we congratulate ourselves on inhabiting a city that welcomes the most progressive strains of contemporary architecture, we should remind ourselves that this is still New York. And, if experience is any guide, the end result of this daring project’s lengthy approval process, involving the community board, the Department of Buildings, and anyone else who wishes to weigh in, may well be a piece of architectural product that is as dull and unremarkable as most others in the five boroughs. [more]

A rendering of the interior of the new Van Alen Books slated for 30 West 22nd Street

Among those people who take a heated interest in such matters, it was a source of no small
sadness when Urban Center Books, the best — and only — New York bookstore devoted exclusively
architecture and urbanism, shut its doors a year ago. One would like to think that New York City,
which probably has more architects and urban planners, not to mention more buildings, than any
other metropolis in America, if not the world, would be able to sustain a bookstore devoted to this
vital area of interest. [more]

From the March issue: In the past generation, few areas of the five boroughs have developed faster or more fundamentally than the three-quarter-mile stretch of 42nd Street that extends from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. Some of the high-rises that have sprung up along that stretch are fairly good, at least by the rather low expectations that one brings to New York real estate. The parti-colored, Bozo the Clown façade that the firm designed for the Westin Hotel, completed in 2002 at 42nd and Eighth, is so incompetent in conception, and so poor in execution, that the only thing more astounding than its having been realized in the first place is the fact that the very same firm has now been suffered to design a brand-new hotel, the so-called Yotel, only two blocks west, at 440 West 42nd Street. [more]

As though the release of the 200-page 2011 Zoning Handbook were not sufficiently exciting for wonkish sensibilities, the agency responsible, the Department of City Planning, has just released “Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan,” which is an update and extension of a similar study published in 1992.

It takes stock of what has been accomplished and what still needs to be accomplished along the nearly 520 miles of waterway that surrounds the five boroughs. As the report points out, four of those boroughs are on islands, and the fifth, the Bronx, is on a peninsula.

It would not be exactly fair to say that Vision 2020 is a deeply original document. [more]

Stuart ElliottFrom the March issue: With more resilience than one might have anticipated, New York City developers are still thinking outside the glass box. Pundits said the recession was supposed to mean the death of good architecture in Manhattan, as developers sought to do more “value engineering” on their projects. Fancy design was expected to be the first thing to be eliminated from the budget. But recent projects — led by 8 Spruce Street, Manhattan’s new tallest residential tower — show that’s not the case. Not only vital for New York’s competitiveness among world cities, this sort of forward-thinking architecture is great news for the real estate world — and for real estate values. [more]