« Can’t See the Forest | Main | Preserving the 'sanctity' of free markets »

May 15, 2006

The News Interview: Frank Gehry

NY Daily News

Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin are taking their dog-n-pony show on the road, visiting editorial boards at the local dailies.

A short "softball" piece from the Daily News still manages to reveal that Gehry channels Jane Jacobs during his ego trip, in which he imagines he's "listening a lot to the neighbors":

There are some buildings that are background, some that are foreground. Miss Brooklyn (the tallest building), I call my ego trip. The rest of it is city planning, city organization, and we're having a lot of public input. We're listening a lot to the neighbors.

I spent a lot of time looking around Brooklyn, seeing what it is, what it has been in the past. And there's a kind of friendly messiness that I found. This is a way of expressing that.

link

NoLandGrab: Jane Jacobs used the term "messiness" to describe the chaos endemic to the organic development of livable neighborhoods. Lucky for Frank Gehry, Jacobs has passed, for surely she would bristle at the arrogant notion that "messiness" could be engineered and planned by a single architect for a single client.

Is the self-professed "liberal do-gooder" pretending that he met with the community, or has he actually met with them and is pretending to listen?

Posted by lumi at May 15, 2006 8:08 AM