Toward the bottom of a front-page New York Times article about the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's plan to rename Avery Fisher Hall comes this:
An architect for the new hall has yet to be selected. Although the Philharmonic board voted in 2005 to proceed with a design by the British architect Norman Foster, the thinking has evolved since then, and the orchestra is starting over.
This Times article doesn't mention it, but some readers may remember a dispatch back in May about the New York Public Library's decision to abandon a plan for a major renovation of its flagship building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St.:
This shift is something of a defeat for the library, which had already paid the British architect Norman Foster $9 million in private funds for his firm's work on the plan for the flagship, a 1911 Beaux-Arts landmark.
It'd be a fine moment for either the Times architecture critic or the reporter who wrote both the articles linked above, Robin Pogrebin, or maybe even some harder-hitting investigative types from the metro desk, to take a look at how The Right Honourable Lord Foster of Thames Bank and Chilmark manages to induce these New York nonprofit boards into paying him grand fees for work that they later determine is either impossible or undesirable actually to complete. It is an opportunity for some of the "accountability journalism" upon which the Times prides itself.