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February 9, 2007
Sizing up Ms. Brooklyn
BrooklynSpeaks.net sizes up the redesign of the new Miss Brooklyn and makes some of their own suggestions:
A last minute deal before the PACB vote saw Forest City Ratner agree to reduce the height to below the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, a reduction of 100ft. But was the problem with Ms. Brooklyn just its height?
The original Ms. Brooklyn would have been an enormous building – not just tall, but bulky. Under the original version of the plan, the building would have contained 1.1 million square feet. That’s the equivalent of 3 Williamsburgh Savings Banks combined, or the same amount of square feet as the Chrysler Building in Manhattan – a building that is far taller than the proposed Miss Brooklyn, but much more slender.
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Interestingly, the Department of City Planning and the Borough President agreed that Ms. Brooklyn was too big – but provided different recommendations. DCP requested that Ms. Brooklyn be slimmed down, rather than reduced in height, while the Borough President requested at a Public Hearing on August 23rd that the building be made shorter so that the Williamsburgh Savings Bank would remain Brooklyn’s tallest building. While Forest City Ratner is apparently accepting both recommendations, Ms. Brooklyn will still remain enormous unless it is scaled down further.
BrooklynSpeaks also takes the starchitect to task for the insipid name given to the main tower:
Finally, Gehry has described how he drew his inspiration for Ms. Brooklyn from a bride he once saw in Brooklyn. This is not the first time he has described his work as being inspired by images of clothed women: the inspiration for some oddly similar buildings he’s designing in Brighton was apparently Victorian maidens. This anecdote and the name of the building has irritated critics: Paul Goldberger has written that the name of the building is “foolish” while novelist Jonathan Lethem called it “metaphorically impoverished and…slickly patronizing”. Let’s hope that the new building is not only dramatically more slender but also rechristened.
The one bit of info that still hasn't been revealed is the revised square footage of the smaller Miss What's-Her-Name.
Posted by lumi at February 9, 2007 10:17 AM