The New York Restoration Project, a non-profit founded by Bette Midler dedicated to bringing private resources to under-resourced communities citywide, launched the EDGE/ucation Pavilion Design Competition. — bustler.net

When MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll gives up his post at the end of the summer and returns to his tenured lair at Columbia University, the museum will lose a quiet crusader. MoMA can feel corporate and aloof, but in his domain, Bergdoll has displayed an uncanny sense of timing, using each exhibition to set a real-world agenda that frequently outlasts its run. — vulture.com

Almost invisibly in her own day, Natalie de Blois, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, helped guide the design of three of the most important corporate landmarks of the 1950s and ‘60s — the headquarters of Lever Brothers, Pepsi-Cola and Union Carbide — whose suave steel-and-glass facades still exude the cool confidence of postwar Park Avenue. — New York Times

Yesterday, led by Speaker Christine Quinn, the New York City Council voted to limit Madison Square Garden’s permit to operate on top of Penn Station to just 10 more years.

Building a new Penn Station and the next Madison Square Garden will not only improve the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who use the station every day – it will revitalize the surrounding area and bring tremendous long-term economic value to the region. — mas.org

Antiterrorist paraphernalia litter parts of nine square blocks, or at least a dozen acres -- all to protect the New York Stock Exchange from attacks.

Where Broadway opens to Wall Street, jaw-like truck barriers and a plastic-tent guard booth block the street. A fence squeezes pedestrians into one narrowed sidewalk.

Concrete Jersey barriers posing as planters are particularly hideous, part of a new antiterrorist aesthetic that afflicts courthouses and City Hall. — bloomberg.com

In the end, that may be the most astonishing feature of the hub; that a structure of such colossal proportions should be devoted to unobstructed public use. The main transit hall is 365 feet long — a block and a half — making it 90 feet longer than the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal. It is 115 feet wide, or just 5 feet narrower than the Grand Central concourse. — NYT

Four finalists have just been chosen from Phase I of the two-phase “For a Resilient Rockaway” (FAR ROC) design competition. The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), L+M Development Partners, The Bluestone Organization, Triangle Equities, American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIA New York) and Enterprise Community Partners, Inc. (Enterprise) made the announcement at the Center for Architecture in New York City. — bustler.net

The last several years have seen a series of tall towers sprout from the Downtown Brooklyn skyline, but [...] these new edifices leave much to be desired in the looks department. The title of the borough's tallest building keeps passing from one development to the next, but none of these buildings—the Brooklyner, 388 Bridge Street, or Avalon Willoughby West, to name a few—offer any architectural integrity. — Curbed NY

The 11-story development will feature approximately 37 residences of up to 5,500 square feet, focusing on expansive, gracious layouts with 11-foot ceilings, thoughtful technological integration and state-of-the-art finishes and features. Designed with multiple elevator cores, a majority of the residences will have a private vestibule and entrance that adds to the intimacy of the building. — prnewswire.com

If the design, by the firm of Tippets Abbott McCarthy and Stratton, wasn’t as sophisticated as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal a few hundred yards away—surely one of the great buildings of its era, transportation hub or otherwise—the Pan Am terminal was the second-best piece of architecture at JFK, and in some ways it captured the feeling of the moment more directly. — vanityfair.com

Steven M. Davis, a partner in Davis Brody Bond, which designed the museum, said he and his colleagues had been guided by the principles of memory, authenticity, scale and emotion.

The museum will not open to the public until next spring, but officials have begun taking reporters through the unfinished galleries, confident that what was a construction zone a year ago, and a disaster area after Hurricane Sandy, now looks more like a museum. — nytimes.com

The Empire State Building starred in first-ever music video over the weekend as the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s released their latest single, “Despair.” High atop the observation deck from 2 a.m. to sunrise (the only hours that the tourists are at bay), the quintessential New York band rocked the quintessential New York building — blogs.artinfo.com

Wright’s bijou, as he described it, was the architect’s first permanent work in the city, his first constructed automotive design, and one of his few interior-only projects. Realized during New York’s post-World War II commercial construction boom, it was the architect’s single gesture along the corporate corridor of International Style buildings designed by his rivals, the “glass box boys.” The showroom’s signature ramp was also one of Wright’s several design experiments with the spiral... — metropolismag.com