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October 11, 2006
Ouroussoff on Gehry?
Recently, criticism of Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards design has inexplicably found its way into The New York Times's reviews of Richard Meier's Ara Pacis Museum in Rome and Norman Foster's design for a new residential tower on the Upper East Side. Both reviews are by the Times's architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff.
Mr. Meier’s building is a contemporary expression of what can happen when an architect fetishizes his own style out of a sense of self-aggrandizement. Absurdly overscale, it seems indifferent to the naked beauty of the dense and richly textured city around it.
That kind of insensitivity tends to reinforce the cliché that all contemporary architecture is an expression of an architect’s self-importance.
The tower’s height, roughly 30 stories, hardly helps its cause; as with other luxury high rises reshaping the Manhattan skyline, its scale is clearly driven by economic considerations. Defenders will point out that the Carlyle Hotel across the street is slightly taller, but the reality is that the Carlyle’s setbacks make it virtually invisible when viewed from the street. Lord Foster’s tower would have a far stronger visual presence, soaring above the apartment buildings flanking it to the north and south.
But the tower’s outsize height is a problem. Manhattan was shaped by the hubris of developers struggling against the constraints of the street grid, and its beauty is a result of wild juxtapositions of scales, styles and architectural periods. But I’m not sure a luxury high rise should be allowed the same freedom as a major civic building.
This is proof that Ouroussoff is thinking about context and architectural hubris as much as the rest of us. The question remains: why does Ouroussoff give architectural genius Frank Gehry a free pass?
Posted by lumi at October 11, 2006 12:15 PM