THE New York Aquarium is a notoriously unwelcoming structure: a walled seaside compound with no sea view and a parking lot for an entrance.

All that seemed about to change in October 2006, when the city announced three finalists in a design competition to reshape the aquarium’s exterior. “The aquarium can be iconic,” Joshua Sirefman, then interim president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, said at the time. “We want to change it into a 21st-century institution.”

Early last year, the city chose a winning design: an airy, whalelike shell, spangled with thousands of pinpoint lights, that seemed to engulf the aquarium.

But last week, city officials said the whale design was essentially dead. “We are not proceeding on that concept,” said Madelyn Wils, the agency’s executive vice president for planning and development. Instead, she said, the city will contribute about $50 million for a new shark exhibit. Aquarium officials said their shark population would more than triple, to at least 40, and the exhibit would include an arching, 300,000-gallon tank that visitors could walk beneath. The aquarium, on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, is operated and partly financed by the Wildlife Conservation Society, a nonprofit group.

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