“The lots that determine the Flatiron shape have previously been avoided since the resultant interiors are unusual and not easy to market,” Patrice Derrington, director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University, wrote last week in an email. “However, ‘as needs be’ developers are attending to these less favorable sites, as they eke out every last possibility.” — The New York Times

With The Frick Collection’s garden saved, the museum is moving forward with a new preservationist-friendly plan for expansion...The Frick Collection, looking to realize a revised expansion for the institution, has put forward a request for qualifications to a chosen group of architectural firms.

The Frick plans to announce its selected finalist later this year, and plans to reveal designs in 2017. — Observer

Beginning on Monday, March 7, 2016, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office will no longer prosecute most violations or infractions, and the NYPD will no longer arrest individuals who commit these offenses – such as littering, public consumption of alcohol, or taking up two seats on the subway – unless there is a demonstrated public safety reason to do so. This initiative will enable the NYPD to devote its resources to investigating serious crimes... — Manhattanda

3 Sutton Place, a planned 950-foot-tall, 68-story Manhattan condo tower, won’t be materializing along the East River. After defaulting on $128.8 million in loans from lender Gamma Real Estate, developer Bauhouse Group‘s site at 426-432 East 58th Street will face foreclosure sale February 29th.

The site currently houses three contiguous five-story apartment buildings, which Bauhouse purchased to make way for the massive Foster + Partners-designed midtown skyscraper project. — BuzzBuzzHome

we rarely talk about how architecture sounds, aside from when a building or room is noisy. [...]

Sound may be invisible or only unconsciously perceived, but that doesn’t make it any less an architectural material than wood, glass, concrete, stone or light. [...]

Acoustics can act in deep, visceral ways, not unlike music ... And while it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly how, there is often a correlation between the function of a place or an object and the sound we expect it to make. — nytimes.com

Amid contentious debate on rezonings across the city, the late 2013 hubbub around an upzoning proposal for East Midtown has, for the moment, abated — but hasn’t disappeared. In a bid to spur significant new development for the first time in decades, the de Blasio administration is currently retooling the Bloomberg-era plan to allow developers to construct much larger buildings [...]

Whether this rezoning eventually occurs or not, the buildings in Manhattan’s core aren’t getting any younger. — urbanomnibus.net

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed. — nytimes.com

Perkins Eastman is taking two of the best-loved urban land-use stories of the Bloomberg era—the High Line and Times Square—and combining them into one.

The Green Line extends the logic of changes that have already taken root along the limited stretch of Broadway running through Times Square. [...] proposal builds on the work of Jan Gehl and Snøhetta, the architects who pedestrianized Times Square. Yet it also echoes the High Line by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. — citylab.com

The digital production studio Visualhouse has released film and renderings of how SL Green’s One Vanderbilt will meet the street, and also remind us just how gargantuan the tower will be. According to the tower’s architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, the tower will rise 1,501 feet to its spire, making it the third tallest building in the city upon completion. — 6sqft.com

When the 70th regular session of the General Assembly convenes on Sept. 15, it will do so in a complex of buildings that hasn’t looked so good or felt so secure in generations.

“We now have a very safe compound,” said Michael Adlerstein, [...] executive director of a seven-year, $2.15 billion renovation, known as the capital master plan, that is nearing completion. More visible than anything else is the robust yet crystalline new glass facade of the 39-story Secretariat building. — nytimes.com

It’s hard to grasp his calculus. One of Mr. de Blasio’s big initiatives, Vision Zero, aims to improve pedestrian safety. Ripping up the pedestrian plazas in Times Square, restoring cars and forcing millions of people to dodge traffic again, runs headlong into his own policy.

As an exasperated Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, put it on Thursday: “Sure, let’s tear up Broadway — we can’t govern, manage or police our public spaces.” — nytimes.com

If it is possible, financially and technologically, to build a three-acre park in the river west of New York City, then why isn’t it possible to construct an artificial island at a higher elevation than downtown Manhattan that would serve as New York City’s sixth borough? Many of the city’s problems—real estate prices, developers purchasing blocks at a time, the astronomical cost of parking a car, or even a bicycle, even shoreline erosion—are problems of space. So why not just build more space? — theawl.com