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February 23, 2007
Lehi project shares the Gehry 'look'
Deseret Morning News
By Amy Choate-Nielsen
Here's the idea: provide an iconic skyscraper, five-star hotel, upscale-but-affordable housing, sports arena, shops, restaurants, plenty of park space — and have it all designed by a world-renowned architect.
It sounds a lot like the proposed Frank Gehry project in Lehi, right?
It also sounds like the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Grand Avenue project in Los Angeles, Calif., and the King Alfred project in Hove, England.
Those projects are also being designed by Gehry and, except for some specific details, they are surprisingly similar.
Aside from being met with some opposition from each of their surrounding communities, the projects outside Utah all feature hotel and residential towers, a mixture of retail, restaurants and entertainment, variations of a glass structure, upscale apartments and an emphasis on promoting an active, urban lifestyle.
And while coincidences among the projects could seem like some kind of architectural conspiracy, local entrepreneur Brandt Andersen, who commissioned Gehry to build his Point of the Mountain project, insists the similarities are purely happenstance.
"There are a lot of elements (of the projects) that are strictly coincidental, but there's no silver bullet there," Andersen said in an interview with the Deseret Morning News. "There's no smoking gun connecting them all."
A spokesman from Gehry's firm reinforced Andersen's statement, saying that glass is a common material that is used in contemporary architecture and the projects' likenesses are merely conceptual, not marketed copies of one design.
NoLandGrab: We don't know about the conceptual/design coincidences, but the marketing of the Brooklyn and Hove projects as being inspired by irrelevant female icons starts to smell like serial bad taste.
Keep reading the article because it gets funnier as the clients insist that their visions are "individually unique." Forest City Ratner recasts Atlantic Yards as "the result of years of discussion on how to address New York's housing crisis, according to a spokesman for Forest City Ratner Companies," and an architechture critic defends Gehry by noting "Mozart's music is pretty much the same, but it doesn't mean it's bad."
Posted by lumi at February 23, 2007 6:28 AM