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May 16, 2006
In Favor of Building — Just Not These Buildings
NY Sun arts critic James Gardner takes the view that something will be built, but takes Gehry's design to task.
The implication is that it is the manifest destiny of Brooklyn to be built up and that Luddite reactionaries should not stand in its way.That may indeed be the case, but surely we can come up with something better than what Mr. Gehry has conceived.
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Rising some 20 to 30 stories, these particolored buildings rear up over the Brooklyn skyline in wobbly set-backs that are simply too adorable to join at right angles. The conflict between the typology of the 1930s skyscraper, with its drably regular windows, and the ohso-contemporary betrayal of that regularity is to be taken, apparently, as a hallmark of Mr. Gehry’s rebellious integrity.Worst of all is the projected centerpiece of the development, which bears the overly cute name of Miss Brooklyn. To say that this ill-kempt, misshapen and misbegotten vulgarity is poorly composed is to do nothing more than to acknowledge the stated aim of Mr. Gehry himself.There is supposed to be something bawdy and daring and rough-and-tumble about it — qualities that, we may suppose, Mr. Gehry associates with his mythologized view of Brooklyn. But the jazz and jauntiness fail to materialize in this out-sized and inert structure, which itself recalls the populist postmodernism of the early 1980s,a style that has long since ceased to amuse.
NoLandGrab: Gardner betrays some bias towards Bruce Ratner's spin when he writes that he's in favor of, "replacing the massive rail yards that now occupy the site to be developed."
Either Gardner actually knows that the 8.4-acre railyards is only a fraction of the 22-acre site and doesn't care, or he has just received an earful of spin from the Gehry-Olin dog-n-pony show making the rounds at an editorial board near you.
Posted by lumi at May 16, 2006 7:20 AM