Skip to main content

Featured Post

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park infographics: what's built/what's coming/what's missing, who's responsible, + project FAQ/timeline (pinned post)

Clueless Charlie Rose asks about "Brooklyn Yards;" Gehry says "it hasn't stopped"

On the Charlie Rose show Wednesday, architect Frank Gehry, on the occasion of the publication of the Conversations with Frank Gehry, met up with an interviewer even less clueful about Atlantic Yards than author Barbara Isenberg.

But Gehry dropped some hints, at least, that the Atlantic Yards plan of the past is not the AY plan of the present.

The exchange starts at about 6:38.



CR: Well, what's happened to Brooklyn Yards, we'll come back to other things in New York--

Rose couldn't even remember the name of the project.

FG: Well, we've spent a lot of time on that--

CR: --But is it being nickled and dimed to death?

FG: No. Today, in this world we're in, every developer I've worked with, or am working with, is looking at tightening up, because financing doesn't exist, the banks are looking at things differently.

Note how Gehry seems to edit himself from the past tense to the present tense; is this is a clue that he's working less or not at all on AY?

CR: Commercial real estate they say is going to get worse.

FG: I think we did a very interesting master plan, which has been vetted by City Planning, and I think 's going to go-y'know, it's in one of those stages, but it's going--it hasn't stopped.

Gehry's syntax leaves room for a lot of ambiguity. We still don't know if he's designing the arena. And the master plan sure sounds like a thing of the past. 

(Btw, the Chair of the City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning, Amanda Burden, has been long been involved with Rose, though some reports have that relationship as "intermittent.")

Comments