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March 21, 2006
Gehryland, USA
Should one architect--even the world's most famous architect--be responsible for all of the buildings in two massive developments?
Metropolis, April, 2006
By Christopher Hawthorne
Posted March 20, 2006 (login required)
It is surely a sign of America's current state of philosophical eclecticism--or maybe just our deep confusion--that the architectural news in this country has been dominated in recent months by two contradictory developments: the success of the New Urbanists in helping shape the post-Katrina reconstruction and the stunning revival elsewhere of the megaproject.
Since the floodwaters receded, Andrés Duany, Peter Calthorpe, and others have been charretting much of the Gulf Coast into submission, preaching the gospel of walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented development (and front porches). The more fascinating story, frankly, is taking shape on the other side of the cultural divide, in the territory where Robert Moses and Le Corbusier once tread. In each of the two biggest cities in the country, Frank Gehry has been handed a commission whose size and scope would lead both of those men to sit up and take notice.
In Los Angeles it is the entire first phase of the $1.8 billion redevelopment along Grand Avenue for the New York-based Related Companies, replacing a bunch of--what else?-- parking lots across the street from Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. In Brooklyn it is a $3.5 billion Atlantic Yards project for developer Bruce Ratner's Forest City Ratner Companies, which will include not just the 18,000-seat arena for the NBA's Nets but also more than a dozen different buildings, the tallest of which tops out at about 60 stories. Both projects will be helped along by a substantial public subsidy.
More than four decades after the revelatory appearance of Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, two of the greatest have charged ahead with a gargantuan building effort, thick with skyscrapers designed by a single architect. You might think of them as outposts of a new theme-park approach to architecture and development: Gehryland Brooklyn and Gehryland L.A.
Posted by lumi at March 21, 2006 7:11 AM