Developer Durst Fetner Residential and architect Bjarke Ingels made a presentation last night of their proposed, 700-apartment warped pyramid building on 57th Street at 12th Avenue to the Hell's Kitchen Land Use Committee of Community Board 4 last night, according to Tara Kyle of DNAinfo.com.

The building's townhouses, which would rise above a first level of retail shops and a cultural space likely to be occupied by the International Center of Photography, would bear bay windows and balconies staggered in a "fish bone structure," Ingels said, the article said.

City Councilwoman Gale Brewer and members of the community board pressed Mr. Ingels and Douglas Durst, the developer, to add more green space accessible to the public as the large elevate courtyard in the center of the building is slated for private use only, the article said.

Mrs. Brewer also asked Mr. Durst to confirm that the largest retail space on the ground floor would not go to a Costco, some form of "urban Costco," or a "fake grocery like Walmart," the article said, adding that Mr. Durst said they would not bring in a tenant like that, and instead were looking for an actual grocery store, which would fill a need in the neighborhood.

Several board members, the article continued, asserted that they wanted the project's affordable units, 20 percent of the total, to be made permanently affordable.

The developer plans to seek a LEED Gold Certification for the 467-foot-high project, which is to the west of its large Helena rental apartment tower at the 11th Avenue end of the same block.

Mr. Ingels is the principal of BIG (The Bjarke Ingels Group, which is based in Denmark). Mr. Ingels is a 36-year formerly worked by Rem Koolhaas.

Renderings that were published yesterday at ny.curbed.com and in New York Magazine this week indicated that from the south the building would appear as a light-colored pyramid with a large scooped out open atrium. Its profile from the west, however, will reveal is very thin profile with a north facade that rises straight up from the sidewalk across from the handsome power station designed by McKim Meade & White on the north side of 58th Street. The north facade will abound in balconies as well the open atrium on the south facade.

The swooping southern facade will have large inset balconies.

The site is one block south of Extell Development's large, planned Riverside Center complex that has been designed by Christian de Portzamparc.

In his article on the project and Mr. Ingels in this week's edition of New York Magagazine, Justin Davidson wrote that "For the desolate juncture of 57th Street and the West Side Highway, he has designed an utterly unexpected form, neither tower nor slab nor even quite a pyramid, but a gracefully asymmetrical peak with a landscaped bower in its hollowed core. It looks wild, but it's born of logic; true originality is the inevitable endpoint of rigorous thought."

Mr. Ingels has been a visiting professor at Rice University, Harvard, and Columbia, and Mr. Davidson noted that one of his projects in Denmark has "a steel facade [that displays a perforated image of Everest, adding that, "for a native of a little platelike country, Ingels sure has alpine cravings: BIG has just won a competition to build a waste-to-energy plant that will loom over Copenhagen's lagoon - and double as an artificial ski slope."