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......

With September at a near close, we hereby pronounce it the month of 40 Bond. While stories on hotelier Ian Schrager's second foray into residential development started appearing in 2006, interest ratcheted up this month with a slew of closings (Ricky Martin's moving in). Then this week, NY Magazine and The New York Sun devoted even more ink to it. 40 Bond reinforces Schrager's knack for reinvention. In a city where glass condos are the......

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......

If you've ever wondered what the big deal is with fear-mongering over "big-box stores" and anonymous-looking architecture, The New York Sun directs your attention to Union Square. Once an aesthetically vibrant town point of commercial assembly, and it will probably always remain as such, the square is developing a severe style deficiency with all the warmth of a mall food court. James Gardner assesses the latest development around 14th Street:The larger of the two,......

The unveiling of the new buildings - Towers 2, 3, 4 - that will accompany the Freedom Tower at the redeveloped World Trade Center was met with excitement yesterday, proving there's nothing that beautiful computer renderings, a who's who of architects, and a healthy dose of optimism can't do. The NY Times updated its article about the announcement yesterday and also has an article about the pink elephant in the room: How slow progress......

The Whitney Biennial opened yesterday, and the big news is that it isn't shocking. The Times Michael Kimmelman calls it "the most cogent and layered biennial in years." The Post finds that problematic, since everyone loves to hate the Biennial (James Gardner's description of "amphibious art" is also interesting). Gothamist would have to agree - there's nothing more refreshing that damning "modern" art during a walk down Madison Avenue...and by its nature, provocative work stirs......