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September 6, 2007
Frank Gehry Plays Ball
H&G Blog: The Itinerant Urbanist
By Karrie Jacobs
An urban-planning critic notes the similarities between Frank Gehry's Lehi project and Atlantic Yards:
The scope of the project calls to mind the four-billion dollar, 22 acre Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards project here in Brooklyn which is tied to an arena for the New Jersey Nets, now owned by the project's developer Bruce Ratner. Except that, at the moment, the good people of Lehi, Utah, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, seem more enthusiastic about this sort of big ticket scheme than we Brooklynites. I suspect that the Utah plan doesn't involve the always unpopular practice of taking people's homes and businesses through eminent domain. Or maybe the young Utah developer just did a better job at wooing the locals.
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I do think it's telling that Gehry has moved well beyond the world of highbrow architecture, the meticulously sculpted museums and campus buildings that made him famous, and has plunged headlong into the mosh pit of major commercial development. In an ideal world, this would suggest that American developers are aspiring to greatness, but the view from here, a few blocks west of the Atlantic Yards site, is less overtly sunny; it appears that Gehry's firm (now called Gehry Partners) has simply grown to a size where it needs those big developer-driven projects to maintain cash flow.
Posted by lumi at September 6, 2007 9:05 AM