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March 3, 2010
Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough
Design Observer
by Alexandra Lange
Alexandra Lange — journalist, architectural historian, architecture criticism professor, and Brooklynite — offers a withering, detailed and spot-on (and not just because she cites NoLandGrab) critique of New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. The prime evidence: Ouroussoff's fawning treatment of Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards design.
Exhibits A and B in this critique are Ouroussoff’s reviews of the massive Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. It was unclear from his first review whether Ouroussoff had ever been to Brooklyn, so grateful did he think we should be for the services of (Los Angeles) architect Frank Gehry. On July 5, 2005, he wrote:
Frank Gehry's new design for a 21-acre corridor of high-rise towers anchored by the 19,000-seat Nets arena in Brooklyn may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades. If it is approved, it will radically alter the Brooklyn skyline, reaffirming the borough's emergence as a legitimate cultural rival to Manhattan.
To which the proud Brooklyn resident could only respond: We need Frank Gehry’s affirmation?
There are those — especially acolytes of the urbanist Jane Jacobs — who will complain about the development's humongous size. But cities attain their beauty from their mix of scales; one could see the development's thrusting forms as a representation of Brooklyn's cultural flowering.
Here Ouroussoff performs a neat trick, (mis)characterizing the opposition as a bunch of Jacobsian sentimentalists, and informing us that Gehry’s new architecture would be the borough’s best representative. Those brownstones are apparently so retrograde that they and the rest of the project’s existing context warrant only a three-sentence paragraph. Ouroussoff never bothered to orient his readers to the importance of the site, the windy, well-trafficked corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. Naturally the Brooklyn bloggers had a field day with this piece, for reasons valid and conspiratorial. ←NoLandGrab reference!
Later, much later, Ouroussoff would try to make amends, when, in one of the more scathing reviews of his Times career, he told Gehry to walk away from the compromised vision.
Posted by eric at March 3, 2010 12:10 PM