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September 20, 2006
“There is progress everywhere” —Frank O. Gehry
Picketing Henry Ford
Stuart Schrader explains how Gehry's use of aerospace engineering tools as architectural design tools has changed the relationship between the architect and tradesmen. The future doesn't look as bright for Atlantic Yards's most vociferous supporters.
As Andrew Friedman reported in his evisceration of the Gehry spectacle in The Baffler a couple years ago, Gehry once said that his achievement has been to thrust the architect into a position of power over the myriad parties involved in construction of large projects because of his technological advances, specifically CATIA. ...
The workforce for a mega-project such as this one will be significantly smaller than it would be if Gehry were not the chosen architect. Rather than an army of Brooklyn locals engineering and building the project on-site, the buildings will be designed on computers, under Gehry’s direction, in California. Many pieces of the buildings will be prefabricated elsewhere (in China?) by subcontractors that have demonstrated their fidelity to Gehry’s economic and technological vision.
Posted by lumi at September 20, 2006 7:01 AM