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June 9, 2009
Battle Between Budget and Beauty, Which Budget Won
The NY Times
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Calling it "a shameful betrayal of the public trust"," The Time's architecture critic blasts Bruce Ratner's arena bait and switch.
Whatever you may have felt about Mr. Gehry’s design — too big, too flamboyant — there is little doubt that it was thoughtful architecture. His arena complex, in which the stadium was embedded in a matrix of towers resembling falling shards of glass, was a striking addition to the Brooklyn skyline; it was also a fervent effort to engage the life of the city below.
A new design by the firm Ellerbe Becket has no such ambitions. A colossal, spiritless box, it would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis. Its low-budget, no-frills design embodies the crass, bottom-line mentality that puts personal profit above the public good. If it is ever built, it will create a black hole in the heart of a vital neighborhood.
Ouroussoff later adds:
A massive vaulted shed that rests on a masonry base, the arena is as glamorous as a storage warehouse.
...
Building this monstrosity at such a critical urban intersection would be deadly. Clearly, the city would be better off with nothing.
Refreshingly, instead of taking the simple-minded tack of blaming project opponents, Ouroussoff acknowledges one of the early criticisms of the arena:
I suppose we should have seen this coming. The scale and location of the project posed serious challenges — challenges that could not be solved by the conventional development formulas. Arenas are notorious black holes in urban neighborhoods, sitting empty most of the year and draining the life around them. And in this case, the arena would dominate a major intersection and anchor a dense 22-acre residential development several blocks to the east.
The Times also published a closer preview of the arena design (above) than the rendering released late last week.
Atlantic Yards Report, NYT critic Ouroussoff wakes up, calls new arena design a "stunning bait-and-switch" and a "shameful betrayal of the public trust"
Norman Oder chronicles Ouroussoff's conversion:
OK, in July 2005 New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthused that Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards plan "may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades." (I thought he missed a few things.)
In June 2006, he wrote a more pensive if hardly tough assessment of the project,
In March 2008, he wrote something of an elegy, urging Gehry to leave the project, predicting blight (accurately, it terms out), and even seeming to emerge as a project opponent.
Today, however, he pulls out the big rhetorical guns, calling Forest City Ratner's decision to trade Gehry's arena for a more pedestrian design by Ellerbe Becket a "stunning bait-and-switch" and a "shameful betrayal of the public trust."
Posted by lumi at June 9, 2009 6:40 AM