By Stephen Jacob Smith 4/17 3:59pm

Manhattan Transfers

Try not to get blood on your Annabelle Selldorf-deisgned walls, Marina!

Marina Abramović Buys $2.65 M. Glass Box of Her Very Own

Tilda Swinton may have stolen Marina Abramović voyeuristic thunder at MoMA with her sleeping-in-a-glass-box shows, but when it comes to displaying oneself in glass boxes, Ms. Abramović will not be outdone: the Serbian grand matriarch of performance art just picked up a $2.65 million two-bedroom pad at Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House.

The eighth-floor apartment at 330 Spring Street, in Hudson Square, was asking $2.6 million, but listing broker Suzun Bennet at Town Residential managed to get a bit over the asking price. “It was on the market for quite a while as an investor apartment,” Ms. Bennet told The Observer, but as soon as the rental tenant who was living there moved out, it sold. Unfortunately for seller Eliot Ferguson, though, it didn’t quite fetch the nearly $2.7 million that he paid for the unit at the end of 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble.

The 1,722-square foot condo’s interiors were done by Annabelle Selldorf, an inoffensive choice for a woman who once declared, “Art should be disturbing.” Read More

By Staff 12/11/06 4:16pm

The Afternoon Wrap: Monday

  • Mr. Goodbar‘s bombshell Tuesday Weld is selling her oceanfront Montauk home for about $10 million. She says, “It’s like being on a yacht.” [WSJ]
  • Critic and architect Peter Blake is dead at 86. His books include the well-titled “Form Follows Fiasco” (subtitled “Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked”!). He collaborated on Philip Johnson’s Glass Read More

    • By Moira Hodgson 10/16/06 12:00am

    A High Rollers’ Meat Market Only Does It Medium Well

    How do you like your steak? Corn-fed or grass-fed? Grilled or roasted? Aged 28, 42 or 56 days? Wagyu? Grade 6 or grade 11?

    When I made my first visit to celebrity chef Tom Colicchio’s mega-restaurant in the meatpacking district, there were two dozen categories of steak on the menu. The options have since been Read More

    By Staff 7/20/06 2:57pm

    People In Urban Glass Houses Throw Parties


    Party like it’s 1906

    Any day is a good day to celebrate the life of the sleek Philip Johnson, but July 26 will be perfect. The developers of his final project, The Urban Glass House, are throwing a soiree “to celebrate the building’s completion.” And, lest you’ve already forgotten, it will be the late Read More

    By Staff 5/03/06 1:48pm

    The Frank Gehry Show


    Sydney Pollack and the late Philip Johnson.

    Last night, roughly 100 people attended the unofficial Tribeca Film Festival screening of Sketches of Frank Gehry, director Sydney Pollack‘s documentary on the famous architect (who also happens to be his friend, too).

    Every seat was taken in the DOLBY screening room (formerly the Read More

    By Staff 2/27/06 11:54am

    Johnson, Gehry, Meier: High-Rise Whores?


    Nicholas and Alexandra.

    It was with mixed results that Gabriel Brewer, of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, quoted Philip Johnson: “I am a whore and I am paid very well for high rise buildings,” the line attributed to the late, great Johnson goes.

    Brewer, whose firm has had its hand in projects commissioned by Read More

    By Staff 11/09/05 3:10pm

    Fashionable Living

    “I think it is a departure from the ordinary developer buildings that are hailed as luxury,” said architect Annabelle Selldorf. “I feel strongly that this is going to be an exceptional residential building in lower Manhattan.”

    Today at noon, roughly 40 topping out party-goers donned hardhats and braved the windy rooftop of Read More

    By Adam Begley 11/07/05 12:00am

    Architecture, Power, Gossip: Building Blocks of a Good Read

    Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And yet, what with anti-smoking laws, Bill and Monica’s kinky caper and a universal disinclination to call a spade a spade, the phallic interpretation is still going strong. We’re deeper than ever in Freud’s debt. In fact, this may be the perfect moment for a book called The Read More