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May 23, 2006
Time to catch the wave
NY Newsday's review of the Atlantic Yards project describes Gehry's ego trip to Brooklyn, as reviewer Justin Davidson gets Brooklyn as well as Gehry understands it's body language.
The developer Bruce Ratner wants to import the New Jersey Nets and erect for them a majestic yet intimate arena on the arrowhead-shaped lot where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues cross. Stretching to the west [um, it's east] would be a high-rise Xanadu of offices, apartments, stores and restaurants, turning a dingy-chic wedge of city into a bright new campus.
Typical architectspeak describes brownstone neighborhoods as a dull canvas in want of a stroke of genius:
All those mud colors, all the weighty Victorians and mile upon square mile of squat brick boxes will do nicely as a monochrome backdrop to his star turn.
Meanwhile, it's people who are the bedrock of this place called Brooklyn, hip and stodgy people who have resisted the anonymous grandeur of the most well meaning urban design.
Ironically, Davidson falls for the bride story, recycled from Gehry's Victorian maiden narrative, which was the part of Gehry's recent press conference that elicited the loudest collective groan.
He rode around the borough searching for inspiration and came across not a neighborhood or a civic structure, but a bride, a slow-motion vision out of a movie. Gehry, the auteur of place, had found the protagonist for his fantasy.
Gehry's fantasy could be Brooklyn's B movie, if Bruce Ratner lands the role of Moses:
Rather [Gehry and Ratner] are selling the borough on a new boast. Manhattan may get a building or two, but only Brooklyn will have a whole New Jerusalem, signed Frank Gehry.
When you're done "dancing about architecture," cruise on over to Atlantic Yards Report, where Norman Oder clears up some of Davidson's confusion over the facts and most pressing issues.
Posted by lumi at May 23, 2006 8:40 PM