This plan from the New York Public Library to have Sir Norman Foster gut its beloved central building and rework it, getting rid of the pesky "books" there in the process, all in the name of modernization and The People and prudent money-management—Michael Kimmelman, holder of the office of New York Times architecture critic, has reviewed the plan, and he has delivered the verdict, and the verdict is: DEATH. The library and its "celebrity architect," Kimmelman writes, have cooked up a plan for a "money pit," an "Alamo of engineering" that will pointlessly deform a vital and important structure to no good or useful end.

• Jewelry designer Lorraine Schwartz has a new home at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue. The woman who's been called "the Queen of Bling" (and been namedropped in a Beyoncé song) paid $4.7 million for a 2,900-square-foot duplex on the building's 39th and 40th floors. [Cityfile]
• Steven Oesterle, a managing director at Giuliani Partners, and his wife Nancy, have sold their three-bedroom apartment at the Park Imperial on West 56th Street for $4.9 million. [Cityfile]
• British architect Lord Norman Foster has closed on the purchase of a second apartment at 912 Fifth Avenue. The eighth-floor pad, which Foster was first reported to be buying back in July, was bought for $6.7 million. [Real Deal]
• Christina Ricci is reportedly looking to unload her home in LA. The three-bedroom house is on the market for $1.549 million. [Real Estalker, Movoto]

• Investor Gerhard Andlinger has sold his penthouse at the Time Warner Center for $37.5 million, making it the biggest residential deal the city has seen in nearly a year. Not that this should necessarily be interpreted as a sign the real estate market is back. The 8,300-square-foot apartment, which was sold to an anonymous buyer, had been listed for $65 million when it first hit the market last year. [NYO]
• Keiko Ibi, the Tokyo-born filmmaker who won an Oscar her 1999 documentary The Personals, has put her condo at 15 Central Park West back on the market less than two years after purchasing it for $1.8 million. The one-bedroom is now listed for $3.75 million. [Cityfile, BHS]
• German-born billionaire Juergen Friedrich has taken $10.5 million off the price of his 18,000-square-foot Southampton manse. The Grosvenor Atterbury-designed home, which went on the market for $67 million last year, is now priced at $49.5 million. [Curbed Hamptons, Corcoran]

• The 25-foot-wide townhouse at 11 East 82nd Street, which was purchased up by billionaire Ron Perelman as a home for one of his executives back in 1996 and was later bought by private investor Keith Gollust, has been reduced for a second time since hitting the market in February 2008 for $40 million. Most recently priced at $35 million, the limestone manse can now be yours for a mere $29.5 million. [Cityfile, Sotheby's]
• British architect Lord Norman Foster and his wife, Elena, paid $7.2 million for a 2,725-square-foot co-op at 912 Fifth Avenue. [NYO]

Construction has finally begun on the last of the boom's media skyscrapers, a tower for Hearst, owner of Cosmopolitan and much else. We would make some superstitious remark about business nemesis, inevitably follows real estate hubris, with a nod to AOL Time Warner. But the Hearst tower, designed by Norman Foster, is rather stylish. It's hard to think of a better waste of investors' money.
Foster's Hearst building [Wired New York]

The Norman Foster design for the WTC site is the favorite contender but, if the British architect wins, the final building won't look much like the plan. David Galbraith, who used to work at Fosters, opines.
David Galbraith

Steven Berlin Johnson, he of Emergence, weighs in on the designs for new towers in Lower Manhattan. SBJ votes for the lattice structures of THINK because, after all, no one would actually want to work in teetering towers that just beg to be toppled.

Steven Berlin Johnson for THINK

New York Post readers prefer Foster

The LMDC site is besieged by fantasy architecture fans, so we've posted up on Gawker's robust servers some of the best designs. Click the thumbnails to enlarge. The quick take: the Foster [the first] is the most striking, though it vaguely resembles the Bank of China building in Hong Kong; the Meier [last two] looks like a mad French housing project.

Now that's better. The LMDC, mandated to rebuild the Twin Towers site, has picked six architectural teams for the design...