A residential addition is planned for the four-story, mid-block, commercial building that formerly housed the Dia Art Foundation at 548 West 22nd Street in Chelsea.

The foundation sold the building to 548 West 22 Street Realty LLC, which is part of Kilian LLC of which Sophia Ravit is a member, for $38,555,000 November 29, 2007, according to city records.

The Dia foundation was founded in 1974 by Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil and initially had space in SoHo and then moved to West 22nd Street in 1987 where it pioneered the transformation of Far West Chelsea into a mecca for contemporary art.

It planned to open a new gallery at the southern end of the High Line elevated park at 820 Washington Street at Gansevoort Street, but scrapped those plans in October 2006 and that space was then planned for an expansion of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dia officials have said they are still interested in having a presence in Manhattan.

In February 2006 Michael Govan reigned after 12 years as the director of the Dia Art Foundation to become the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and in May 2006 Leonard Riggio resigned as chairman of its board.

In 2003, Dia opened a facility in a former Nabisco factory building in Beacon, New York and last fall it began presenting exhibitions at the Hispanic Society of America in upper Manhattan.

Over the years, Dia has held important exhibitions of the work of such famous artists as Dan Flavin, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Alfred Jensen, Bridget Riley, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Robert Gober, Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Jenny Holzer, Robert Ryman and Blinky Palermo.

It has supported long-term installations such as Walter De Maria's Lighting Field near Quemado, N.M., Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and it also help to found the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston.

An article in today's on-line edition of The New York Observer by Lysandra Ohrstrom reported that Joseph Pell Lombardi, one of the city's leading architects and developers of preservation projects, sent it a rendering, shown at the right, of the proposed addition to the 22nd Street building.

"The existing 38,100-square-foot structure will house 'high-end gallery space,' and an additional two and a half stories is slated for construction of 22,380 square feet of residential space," according to the article.