The building sits grandly on Grand Army Plaza across from the beloved Brooklyn Public Library and diagonal from Prospect Park West. To me it represents the affluence and luxury mentality of this decade's real estate madnes. It is also a gorgeous building as far as I'm concerned and it manages to blend into its surroundings with admirable grace. Indeed, I have fantasized about having a little pied a terre in there for me and only me.

And maybe that will be possible if, as reported in today's New York Times, the prices are being slashed and the glass building remains half full. Here's an excerpt from the Times article:

But
10 months after the much-publicized — and much-debated — Meier building
opened, most of that stage remains devoid of actors. On the side of the
building facing their terrace, Mr. Vader and Mr. Henderson said, there
is not a single person living on the 9th, 10th, 12th, 14th or 15th
floors. While the developers say half of the building’s 99 units have
been sold, the real estate Web site StreetEasy.com
documents only 25 closings through public records. When the sun falls,
the view from Mel and Bob’s terrace — or, for that matter, from the
storied Grand Army Plaza — is not unlike a Christmas tree stripped of all but a handful of lights.

“You see that there are people there,” Mr. Vader said. “But you don’t see the amount of movement that you would normally see.”

When
Seventeen Development L.L.C. announced in 2005 that Mr. Meier would
erect one of his elaborate glass and steel sculptures on a $4.75
million parcel in Prospect Heights, it was seen as a test of New York’s
real estate boom. Could the starchitect best known for designing
Manhattan condominiums for the likes of Calvin Klein and Martha Stewart sell $1 million one-bedrooms in a still-gentrifying zone without a reliable public school?

Today, the Meier building — officially, On Prospect Park — is a wall of windows into the real estate bust.

Faced
with anemic sales, the developers have slashed prices by as much as 40
percent. They combined units — there were originally 114 — to boost the
percentage sold in order to ease the path to mortgages. But potential
buyers have walked away from at least $20 million worth of contracts.