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September 28, 2008
Weighing Scale
Noticing New York has fun with scale, looking at the differences between renderings from the Municipal Art Society’s “Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots” slide show and the Environmental Simulation Center’s Atlantic Yards plug-in for the Google Earth program.
The MAS renderings do not try to recreate the distracting Gehry/Ratner abstractions and thereby do a superior job of suggesting what the contextual density and extreme mass of this project would be. For instance, in the MAS renderings, surrounding Brooklyn is crisply visible: Each doorway, window frame, existing tree and passing car window provides scale while the stand-ins for the mass of the proposed Atlantic Yards megaproject also has scale-setting windows and floors clearly indicated. The rendering is matter-of-fact-neutral right down to a very restrained daytime depiction of the 15-story animated sign that will be illuminated at night.
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Like the MAS renderings, the Environmental Simulation Center modeling is good in that they concentrate in context on the actual mass and density that needs to be considered, while stripping away distracting glitz. The Environmental Simulation Center modeling is not perfect; it was generated a while ago and doesn’t reflect some of the slight size changes for the project that have been recently discussed. On the other hand it is not certain that this is relevant since it is far from clear that any of our government officials are in the habit of making Forest City Ratner commit to anything, and since nobody really knows what is going on with this project which is obviously in a state of flux. The Environmental Simulation Center modeling also allows you to examine for comparison the much more sensible density and massing alternatives that were offered by the Extel proposal, the Pacific Plan (Slide 36) and the first version of the community’s UNITY Plan.
Posted by amy at September 28, 2008 2:20 PM