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December 12, 2006
Sailing With Frank Gehry
The NY Sun
By James Gardner
The NY Sun architecture critic pans the first NYC building designed by the architect of Atlantic Yards:
There are those who will assure you that the arrival of Frank Gehry’s office building, at 18th Street and Eleventh Avenue, signals that New York City has finally come into its own as a center of architecture, if not of culture in general. For such critics, the absence, until now, of a large-scale project by Mr. Gehry (or by Rem Koolhaas, for that matter) has been a standing reproach to Gotham, proof that we lacked the cultural sophistication of Chicago,Paris,and Los Angeles.
But when New Yorkers finally see this work up close the result is likely to be a kind of aesthetic dissonance. After all, your mind keeps telling you that the Sails (as the building is called because of the swelling undulations of its pale façade) is a great and important building, but your eye refuses to co-operate. Once you admit into the realms of possibility, however, that the building might just be a mess, you may find that those mists of perplexity dissipate ever so slightly.
NoLandGrab: Unfortunately for the building dubbed "The Sails," it looks more like a cruiseship in the photo from the Sun.
Posted by lumi at December 12, 2006 9:34 AM