Almost 17 months to the day after the Landmarks Preservation Commission sent the developer Aby Rosen and the architect Norman Foster back to the drawing board, the two are seeking approval to erect a new, substantially shortened tower above the Parke-Bernet Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Despite presenting a significantly scaled-back plan that would create a five-story residential tower with an additional level of set-back penthouses at 980 Madison Ave. between 76th and 77th streets, the local community board’s landmarks committee voted against supporting the proposal.

The plan will be up for public comment at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing scheduled for today and could go to a full vote of Community Board 8 tomorrow.

The new proposal represents a significant reduction from Mr. Rosen’s original plan — a 22-story elliptical glass tower that infuriated preservationists, pitted local residents against one another, and triggered a local press battle.

“We are very, very pleased with the design. We went back to the drawing boards and took the comments in from everybody,” Mr. Rosen said last night during a presentation to Community Board 8 at Hunter College. “The naysayers are impossible to win over, but we think it was received very well.”

A senior partner of the architectural firm Foster + Partners, Brandon Haw, unveiled the new 152,000-square-foot tower that would add a rooftop garden to the Parke-Bernet Gallery as part of an effort to restore it to its original form. He said the new tower would reach a peak height of 118.5 feet and that its color would be somewhere between champagne and terra-cotta.

According to Mr. Haw, because the new proposal complies with the current zoning laws, the revised plan would need approval only from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, because the Parke-Bernet Gallery lies within the Upper East Side historic district. It no longer requires special permits or actions by the City Planning Commission, nor would it be subject to review by the City Council.

Regardless, no one is predicting a smooth approval process.

An attorney for the residents’ group New Yorkers for Responsible Development, Caroline Harris, said the group opposes a number of aspects of the new tower.

Ms. Harris said it was an “inappropriate enlargement” of the building, and that the proposed height and materials chosen for the tower would be out of character for the district.

“We think that the enlargement overwhelms the base. Yes, they delightfully restore the base to its original size, but the massing and the materials overwhelm it. He gives on one hand but takes it away in the next,” she said.

The group said it would be willing to accept a tower that was more set back from the street, with reduced heights and materials and colors more in harmony with the neighborhood.

With its revisions Mr. Rosen’s new building did win the support of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts — one of the leading opponents of the original plan.

“We are not wholeheartedly endorsing it, but we do think it is a new, exciting contemporary design for the Upper East Side,” the executive director of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, Seri Worden, said in an interview. “There is a legacy of Modern and Contemporary designs around this neighborhood, and we hope, with a little tweaking, this could be a piece of world-class contemporary architecture.”

Mr. Rosen bought the five-story limestone Parke-Bernet Gallery for about $120 million in 2005 and said the total cost of adding the tower would be about $180 million.

After renderings of the first proposal were shown in October 2006, hundreds of people piled into the Landmarks Commission hearings to protest, and the writer Tom Wolfe penned an acerbic take-down of the plan in the New York Times. After the Landmarks Preservation Commission sent Messrs. Rosen and Foster back to the drawing board, the two pledged to return with a revised, more community-friendly proposal.

The commission is not expected to take any action on the proposal at today’s hearing.