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September 16, 2009
Frank Gehry, Writ Smaller
It’s been a tough year for the world’s most famous architect.
Metropolis.com
by Karrie Jacobs
But then, in late 2003, came the announcement of Atlantic Yards, a grand urban-renewal scheme to be erected mainly on a deck over the rail yards dividing two low-rise Brooklyn neighborhoods. It seemed that Gehry, for all his greatness, had become a pawn in a real estate scheme, a device to sugarcoat an otherwise unpalatable development. And that was the moment for me when the idea of Gehry the architectural hero, the transformational genius, evaporated. He had become another big hungry ego in a world of big hungry egos.
But why? Why would someone as socially and politically adroit as Gehry squander his cultural cachet on a boondoggle? Why would he undermine his brand—the one he’d spent a lifetime cultivating—for a developer like Bruce Ratner? Or as Jonathan Lethem framed it in a 2006 letter to the architect, published on Slate.com, “I’ve been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an unfortunate alliance.”
True, I was horrified by the scale of the Atlantic Yards project, the 16 Gehry-designed residential and office towers, but the saddest thing was that the development’s raison d’être, the bait in its bait and switch—the basketball arena—was mishandled. The site of the arena was to be roughly the spot where the Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley wanted to build a Buckminster Fuller–designed domed stadium. Robert Moses had put the kibosh on that plan long ago. So there was a touch of poetic justice in setting a Gehry arena there. But the proposed arena, instead of being a freestanding sculptural object like the Vitra museum, Bilbao, or Disney Hall, was a feverish agglomeration hemmed in by huge towers. Like his less successful works (MIT’s Stata Center and Seattle’s Experience Music Project), the Atlantic Yards’ would-be centerpiece nudged the Gehry aesthetic toward caricature.
In June of this year, Gehry either came to his senses, quit, or was fired from the now troubled project.
Posted by eric at September 16, 2009 1:28 PM