« Times critic Ouroussoff says Gehry should pull out of the truncated “eyesore” AY may become | Main | Revealed: Atlantic Yards Is A Sham »
March 21, 2008
What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn?
The NY Times
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Frank Gehry fan and Times architecture critic Nicky O digests the grim realities of Bruce Ratner's controversial Atlantic Yards plan:
The growing possibility that much of the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn will be scrapped because of a lack of financing may be a bitter pill for its developer, Forest City Ratner. But it’s also a painful setback for urban planning in New York.
So if the decision to proceed with an 18,000-seat basketball arena but to defer or eliminate the four surrounding towers is defensible from a business perspective, it also feels like a betrayal of the public trust.
Mr. Gehry conceived of this bold ensemble of buildings as a self-contained composition — an urban Gesamtkunstwerk — not as a collection of independent structures. Postpone the towers and expose the stadium, and it becomes a piece of urban blight — a black hole at a crucial crossroads of the city’s physical history. If this is what we’re ultimately left with, it will only confirm our darkest suspicions about the cynical calculations underlying New York real estate deals.
After offering an unsubstantiated narrative about Gehry's evolving aspirations for the project, including one careless claim about the eastern portion adhering "to the street grid" (they are, in fact, superblocks), Ouroussoff concludes:
No development at all would be preferable to building the design that is now on the table. What’s maddening is how few options opponents seem to have.
We could wage a public campaign to stop it. We could pray that Forest City Ratner comes up with more money. But given that the city approved the plan, we cannot prevent the developer from building the arena. Nor is there any way of preventing Forest City from selling off pieces of the property to other investors, who could then come up with any design they liked, as long as they abided by zoning and density guidelines.
Mr. Gehry, on the other hand, could walk away.
NoLandGrab: "We COULD wage a public campaign to stop it." Why didn't we think of that?
Regarding the public outcry, it would seem like a good time for BrooklynSpeaks to get behind public sentiment and strongly reject Atlantic Yards, which is pretty much gonna be an arena with an enormous "temporary" surface parking lot.
As for Gehry, we've been saying for a long time that this project was going to be a blight on the aging starchitect's legacy. Now that mission creep has set in, any "legitimate architectural hero" would get out before it's too late.
Posted by lumi at March 21, 2008 6:05 AM