The commission had twice asked the developer, Vornado, to revise its plans to respect the historical fabric.
Over the years, the building, an embodiment of the romantic skyscraper, became part of the historical fabric of the city.
The Chelsea Society, an organisation created in 1927 to protect the "historical fabric" of the area, described it as "extensive and unwarranted".
The image of Le Corbusier hovering godlike above Paris ready to wipe aside entire districts and replace them with glass towers remains an emblem of Modernism's attack on the city's historical fabric.
What swept Mr. Uris along in his narratives was a passionate determination to work his own experience and that of his European forebears into the historical fabric of his fiction.
The Municipal Art Society, among others, worries that the plan could lead to the demolition of valued older buildings — like the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue, the Graybar Building on Lexington and the Yale Club on Vanderbilt — they believe are important to the historical fabric of the area.
By the 1950s, the utopian visions generated in the early decades of the 20th century had calcified into a dogmatic formula: the functionalist city of high-rise residential blocks, distinct commercial and residential zones and a near total disregard for the neighborhood's historical fabric.
How people are moulded by cities and their authorities is also captured in Will Eisner's Life on Dropsie Avenue and The Building, both of which unpick New York's historical fabric; and the interests of Chris Ware's Building Stories and Karrie Fransman's The House that Groaned take that to a very local level.
At the same time local architects and preservationists began a campaign to preserve the layers of historical fabric that had been damaged by or lost in the storm, including downtown's Art Deco Charity Hospital, some early Modernist schools, New Deal-era public housing and the Ninth Ward's shotgun houses, as well as the Spanish-influenced architecture of the French Quarter.
After the announcement Mr. Perrault, whose designs include the French National Library in Paris, said his idea was not only "to present the theater building as a wonderful instrument for the Maryinsky troupe but to intertwine it into the historical fabric of the city".
