Last July, Spansh tile maker Porcelanosa, one of that nation's largest producers of tiles and ceramics, purchased 202 Fifth Avenue for $40 million. Better known as the Commodore Criterion Building, the six-story granite structure once housed the Commodore Manufacturing Corp. and Criterion Bell & Specialty Co., two Brooklyn-based Christmas ornament makers (hence the building's best known feature, a troupe of carolers permanently affixed to the second-story facade). Now, the 18,000-square-foot building will house Porcelanosa's U.S. flagship, with interiors designed by Foster + Partners.

Lord Foster said the biggest challenge with the project was figuring out how to enliven the space to create the ideal showroom.

"Like many Neoclassical New York City structures, the former Commodore Criterion which dates back to 1918 has a repetitive stack of six identical floors–not an ideal arrangement for spaces to showcase contemporary products," he said in a statement. "The main design challenge has been to work within the protected shell to transform the interior. The design will create new visual connections vertically through the building and will introduce a greater variety of spaces, with a series of dramatic interlocking levels."

Among the other design changes, the Commodore Criterion name topping the building will be replaced with the same signage, but bearing the Porcelanosa name. As renderings show, the famous carolers will be staying put. Any exterior changes must be approved by the city's Landmark's Preservation Commission, as the building, designed by Ely Jacques Kahn and Alan Buchman and completed in 1918, is a city landmark.

It has been a busy few months for Foster + Partners in New York. The firm won a high-profile competition to build a new office building at 425 Park Avenue and its first U.S. residential project, 50 U.N. Plaza. The New York Public Library is also moving ahead with controversial plans to remake the Schwartzman Building.

Lord Foster's World Trade Center tower remains on hold for the foreseeable future, though. These projects come some years after the success of the new Hearst headquarters on Eighth Avenue, opened in 2006, as well as the Sperone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery.

This is also not the first time Lord Foster will have to go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission. He and Aby Rosen failed to get an apartment tower atop 980 Madison approved and had to scale back the project into a box set atop the original building, rather than a slender tower perched atop it.

Hopefully the Brits and the Spaniards will have an easier time here, but given the unostentatious design—they're keeping the carolers!—it seems like there will be little to complain about.

Fostering fancy apartments. (dbox/Zeckendorf Holdings)

Those Zecekendorfs sure do love their starchitects.

From William Zeckendorf's work with I.M. Pei and Minoru Yamaski in the 1960s and '70s to his grandsons' projects with the likes of  KPF and, most notably, Robert A.M. Stern, who created both the brand new 15 Central Park West and the newly renovated 18 Gramercy Park South, the Zeckendorfs have a thing for high design.

Add to that now 50 UN Plaza, a 44-story condo tower on the East Side that will be Lord Norman Foster's first residential commission in the United States. Mr. Foster is well known for his work on the Hearst Tower, World Trade Center Tower 2 and the new Sperrone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery, as well as a new commission for 425 Park Avenue for L&L Holdings. With this latest commission, he cements his place as an all-around architectural power in the city.

Tomorrow morning, Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, real estate scions like few others, will break ground on the project at 345 East 46th Street, on the corner of First Avenue. The location will afford the project prime river views, as well as a prominent place on the skyline right between the United Nations headquarters and the Trump World Tower. The Observer has obtained an exclusive rendering of the project, which shows a glassy building of in the high-tech vein for which Foster + Partners is best known.

More demure than buildings like Hearst or the so-called Gerkin in London, 50 UN Plaza seems to strike the proper balance of brash understatement the Zeckendorf's so seem to favor.

The project holds special significance for the Zeckendorf family, since they got their start at the United Nations. William Zeckendorf, Sr., assembled the land that Nelson Rockefeller than bought to build the United Nations complex, and Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf's maternal grandfather was Trygve Lie, who served as the first secretary general of the United Nations.

A special announcement of a gift to the neighboring Daag Hammarskjold Plaza park is expected at the ground breaking, with Borough President Scott Stringer in attendance, as well as local Councilman Dan Garodnick and Eyal Ofer, head of Global Holdings and a partner in both 50 UN Plaza and 18 Gramercy Park South.

The project will include 87 units, ranging from one-bedrooms as large as 1,100 square feet to three bedrooms as big as 3,000 square feet. There will also be a number of full-floor residences twice that size, as well as a penthouse duplex measuring some 10,000 square feet. Like at 15 Central Park West, one of the marquee features will be a private driveway. It is Lord Foster's first American apartment tower, following on the success of work he did in Vancouver, at Jameson House, completed in 2004.

The development of 50 UN Plaza is expected to cost $500 million to build, with completion by the end of 2014. If it is even close to the success of 15 Central Park West, which sold $2 million worth of units when it first came on the market (and is worth probably twice that now given a gangbuster market for resales in the famed building), then the Zeckendorfs and their partners should have no problem making an easy return on their investment here.

It looks like have just wrested the crown of New York's most luxurious development back from Gary Barnett.

Bring it up. (dBox/L&L Holdings)

Who needs the Midtown East Rezoning to transform the area when you have intrepid developers and unlikely circumstances? O.K., so both of those are super-rare, so bring on the rezoning,

In the meantime, though, we can occupy ourselves with David Levinson's daring plan to tear down 75 percent of 425 Park Avenue and replace it with a dynamic new tower by Lord Norman Foster. Foster + Partners have emerged victorious from a competition Mr. Levinson's L&L Holdings held over the past few months between some of the world's most high-profile designers. The British Pritzker Prize winner beat out fellow starchitects Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers (no Americans, unfortunately).“We are grateful to each of the firms for the thoughtfulness and creativity they demonstrated throughout the process,” Mr. Levinson said in a release. “There is no doubt that each group was fully capable of helping us realize our vision of a 425 Park Avenue tower that redefines the modern office environment while also respecting and enhancing the timeless allure of the Plaza district.”

The project poses an unusual challenge. Because the existing 32-story building was built in 1957, it is larger than current zoning (created in 1961) allows. Were Mr. Levinson to demolish the entire building, he would be forced to replace it with a smaller structure. But his clever real estate attorneys have determined that they could retain the base of the building, building a replacement up from there, and, through some zoning wizardry, maintain the new building at the current one size, 650,000 square feet.

425 Park today.

The new building as currently conceived will reach 687 feet, considerably taller than the 370-foot structure it will be replacing. The design by Foster + Partners is interesting in part because it looks somewhat like a midcentury office tower in the Seagrams/425 Park vein, except that it has been judo-chopped in two spots and is now held up by giant trusses. This not only breaks up the scale of what would likely be a massive building but also creates two terraces, an increasingly popular amenity in office towers. On the street, a rendering shows a vast plaza, providing much-needed open space (even if there is a building overhanging it) in the heart of Midtown.

Should the Midtown East Rezoning be approved, it would allow Mr. Levinson to potentially build a tower 50 percent bigger than what he already can do, but he would have to wait until 2018 to do so, because of a special provision in the rezoning to protect the development of projects at Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center, where millions more square feet of office space is already poised to come online.

Lord Foster is best known for his pioneering work on what became known in the 1970s and '80s, when he began to build serious projects such as the  HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong and London's Stansted airport, as high-tech or high modern architecture. In New York, he has built the new Hearst Building and the Sperrone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery as well as designing 2 World Trade Center, the second tallest building on the site that is indefinitely stalled at the moment.

For those eager to get a look at all of Foster + Partner's designs for 425 Park, as well as the three losing proposals, they will be on display Oct. 18 and 19 as part of the Municipal Art Society's annual MAS Summit, to be held at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated the new building would be not much taller than the existing one. In fact, the new building is almost twice as tall. It also credit Lord Foster with designing the Pompidou Centre with Richard Rogers. It was he and Renzo Piano that built the Paris museum. The Observer regrets the errors.

The Post's Lois Weiss got word that Eric Hadar is in talks with Foster for a 300,000-square-foot office/hotel/condo project of some sort built on an assemblage of properties on West 40th Street, on the south side of the park. Weiss' sources suggest that two of the buildings would go, while a third, an annex to the landmarked American Radiator Building at 50 West 40th Street, would likely be preserved in some capacity.

The L-shaped lot also includes 54 West 40th Street and 43 West 39th Street, with 50 West 40th located at the crux of the site. Though majestic, the building is not currently landmarked. The decision to preserve it anyway is a worthy one, though it probably also helps stave off an outcry.

This is familiar territory for Foster, as his best-known building in the city is the Hearst Building, the crystalline tower on 57th Street that rises from the historic six-story base of the original Hearst headquarters. Foster is also familiar with the challenges facing this latest project, having contended with preservationists and annoyed neighbors on his 980 Madison addition and the still uncertain timeline on his 2 World Trade Center tower.

Similar challenges appear to be facing this project. Weiss reports that at the same time Hadar is negotiating with Foster, he is also in talks with CUNY to put a new community college into one of the buildings that has already been built out as a school, raising questions about when or even if the new building would get built.

And yet this could simply be a shrewd move on Hadar's part, getting the building occupied and generating income in the short-term while he goes through the city's onerous approval process. Plus, construction financing limited as it is right now, this project probably won't be beaking ground for years.

Still, the possibility is tantalizing. Hopefully this isn't the last we'll be hearing of this project, as well.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo