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July 25, 2005
Oh Brooklyn, My Brooklyn
It's not so easy being a cheerleader for future-forward architecture when the future is right outside your window
Metropolis
by Karrie Jacobs
Thoughts about urban design are no longer abstract when you can watch big changes outside your own window. Champion of contemporary architecture, Karrie Jacobs, does some soul searching and reflection on her own backyard:
My concern is the potential return of 1960s-style urban renewal. Developer Bruce Ratner--whose accomplishments in Brooklyn include a cluster of truly hideous shopping centers and an Atlanta-style office park--is making headway in his bid to build a basketball arena for the Nets above the Long Island Rail Road tracks behind his malls, along with 17 residential and office towers in the surrounding area. He has retained architect Frank Gehry and landscape architect Laurie Olin to woo the cognoscenti. But do we judge Ratner's intentions by what he's built in the past or what he's promising for the future? When I look out my window I stare directly at one of his projects--a windowless high-rise multiplex with an Aztec-patterned facade--and question whether Ratner should be charged with redeveloping such a substantial chunk of the borough.
But I'm troubled that Brooklyn is being regarded as an opportunity rather than as a place. Ratner's development scheme, the Downtown plan drafted by the city, and the vision for the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront all seem to view the borough as a tabula rasa. It is that old urban-renewal thinking that overvalues the potential and understates the significance of what's already here--exactly the kind of thinking that engendered a 30-year backlash. It's not nostalgia or NIMBYism to want planning that intelligently integrates past, present, and future.
Posted by lumi at July 25, 2005 9:03 AM