Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

I recently listened to the 3/22/17  Leading Voices in Real Estate podcast  interview with MaryAnne Gilmartin, then CEO of Forest City Ratner, to be renamed Forest City New York later that year.  Most of the interview, by Matt Slepin, covered professional and biographical matters covered in other interviews/podcasts--real estate as "Rubik's Cube," comfort with uncertainty, "I always say 'I slay the dragon every day'"--but a couple of things stood out. About the arena After host Slepin asked placemaking, that gave Gilmartin entree to talk about "Pacific Park Brooklyn, which is a neighborhood that we've been creating for well over a decade... there's such responsibility on the part of the developer to build in one of the finest neighborhoods in the country at the confluence of some of the most historic and deeply diverse neighborhoods in Brooklyn." She said that meant not just creating a "great place," but also "weaving thi...

From a 2/22/18 interview in the Commercial Observer by Alison Statement, Let’s Get Frank: Gehry on New York, LA and the Future of Design , subtitled "As he approaches his 89th birthday, the famed architect has no plans to slow down." Q. You were working on Pacific Park [formerly Atlantic Yards] in Brooklyn originally, but that didn’t go forward. They switched gears.  A. That didn’t go [forward] because it hit the recession. That’s a complication that has nothing to do with architecture. I don’t know what the economics of having a basketball team, basketball stadium are and the difficulty of building over the tracks, but the difficulties of that became exacerbated by the economic drop. They had to punt, as it were, and look for a different way. They were very polite to me. They were fair and gentlemanly about it. They brought in some local guys.  Q. What do you think about the project as it stands?  A. I haven’t seen it. I can’t do it because I loved that project ...

Remember that 5/15/06 Daily News editorial headline, "A Super Design for a Great Project" , regarding Frank Gehry's newly-released renderings? Those were the days, weren't they? (Remember, the project was supposed to be done in 2016! Gehry was supposed to design every building!) That boost for Atlantic Yards (now Pacific Park). It sure was useful for developer Forest City Ratner (now Greenland Forest City Partners).

Exhibit at LACMA; photos by Norman Oder When the massive Frank Gehry retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2014,  Los Angeles Times  critic Christopher Hawthorne  suggested  the exhibit drew a "sociological blank," as it omitted controversy, including "the political uproar that greeted his plan, sponsored by Bruce Ratner, to drop more than a dozen separate buildings and an NBA area into the middle of Brooklyn." After observing the re-mounted and expanded retrospective  (open through March 20) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and perusing the accompanying 2015 book,  Frank Gehry , I'm afraid that Gehry's Atlantic Yards (mis)adventure is even more ill-treated. LACMA exhibit panel Sure, it's but one episode in Gehry's vast, mostly lauded career, one that went unnoticed in recent reviews. But the failure to describe Atlantic Yards clearly thus obscures the mutually beneficial relationship between architects and re...

I published a version of this image in November 2014, after the Frank Gehry retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but the shot below, from the updated Gehry exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that I recently visited, provides new perspective on the 2008 version of what was then called Atlantic Yards. Atlantic Yards image approx. 2008; Site 5 at far left; photo at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by Norman Oder Not only does the model depict the B1 office tower looming over the arena--instead of the temporary-but-helpful-to-operations--arena plaza, it shows a cousin of sorts at Site 5, the tower aimed to replace the low-slung cinderblock building now home to P.C. Richard and Modell's. It's at the far west end of the the site (uh, "neighborhood") When developer Forest City Ratner in 2008 released new renderings of the arena block, with the titanium-clad arena Site 5 was omitted. But Gehry, apparently, had designed a building. Arro...

It’s no surprise that the New York book party  Oct. 21 for Paul Goldberger’s very impressive (but flawed) biography Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry was held at the architect’s curvy 8 Spruce Street apartment tower in Lower Manhattan, and hosted by the building’s developer, Forest City Ratner. After all, it’s not just Gehry’s most successful New York commission, boldly branded by Forest City as “New York by Gehry.” Biographer Goldberger, who even admirers call “the voice of the urban elite,” also treats the developer with kid gloves, thus buffing the building’s backstory. Indeed, this substantial book is flawed not merely because Goldberger, as several reviewers have pointed out , mutes his own critical voice when describing works like the Bilbao Guggenheim or Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It's also flawed because the book--despite describing Gehry choose work over family, jettison longtime lieutenants, and hunger for fame--still sandpapers (or misses) ...

In 2005, some two years after the Atlantic Yards project was announced, the celebrity architect, Frank Gehry, said more than once said he didn't want to design the entire project, an arena and 16 towers. “How do you make a complex that doesn’t look like a project even though one architect’s doing it?” he asked rhetorically at one event. "Normally I would’ve brought in five other architects, but one of the requirements of this client is that I do it," Gehry declared at another event. Developer Forest City Ratner claimed one firm would be more efficient, but surely Gehry's stature--and the presumed higher prices it would reap--drove that decision/claim. In February 2007, the original landscape architect, Laurie Olin,  predicted  to the New York Observer 's Matthew Schuerman that Gehry wouldn’t design every building. Forest City executive Jim Stuckey responded that Gehry “will be the architect on every one of them.” A changing project Well, Stuckey fam...

A reader visiting Paris sent me the photo below, a model of Atlantic Yards that's part of the Frank Gehry retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. (It's from the 2008 iteration of the arena block, though, interestingly enough, the blue titanium wrapping the arena is less wavy and thus far less flamboyant than in the renderings .) It's astounding, of course, to recognize the difference between the original (and approved) project plans, with an enormous tower at the tip of the project site, and the version as currently built, with a plaza providing the "high-low" city . According to a listing , from the website of the Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau, ParisInfo: Frank Gehry, the exhibition runs from 10/8/14 to 1/5/15: Architectural genius.This exhibition is an exceptional event, as this is the first time the Pompidou Centre has organised a retrospective of the work of Frank Gehry, one of the great figures of contemporary architecture. His visual and ...

Updated to clarify that a model of Atlantic Yards is included, just no context. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne yesterday wrote,  Comprehensive 'Gehry' retrospective in Paris draws sociological blank : The exhibition is an impeccable vacuum. The curators have worked strenuously, if invisibly, to keep at bay the full range of issues that have given the rest of the architecture world a full-on identity crisis in the last decade or so. The curators cast Gehry in a well-worn mold: as one of the Great Men of contemporary architecture, a lone creative genius who has navigated a path from teenage Canadian immigrant in postwar Los Angeles to global superstar, churning out unorthodox houses, museums and concert halls all the while. ...Other banished subjects include Gehry's complicated relationship with Los Angeles, his adopted hometown; the uncertain fate of his proposed memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower near the Mall in Washington, D.C.; the politi...

Photo from New York magazine shows one end of rink squeezed into seating area for basketball Last week, the Barclays Center made a big deal out of welcoming the New York Islanders to the arena and displaying the changes made to (somewhat awkwardly) accommodate major league hockey, beginning with an exhibition game this Saturday and continuing through the Islanders' move to Brooklyn, scheduled for 2015 (though it could come sooner). The Barclays Center, designed by AECOM (formerly Ellerbe Becket), with a facade and finishes by SHoP, was built for basketball, modeled on the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The earlier versions, designed by Frank Gehry, were larger, designed to accommodate both basketball and hockey. Not only does that imply a larger space, it apparently suggests different configurations regarding the placement of luxury suites. While for basketball, it's advantageous to have the suites relatively close to the floor, for hockey, it's not necess...

A little revisionism, perhaps, from the team that worked on Frank Gehry's 8 Spruce Street, aka Beekman Tower. Nice .@ juliesatow piece on #NYC development: pace of current skyscraper competition is breathtaking nyti.ms/1bdNgsr — Julia Vitullo-Martin (@JuliaManhattan) June 8, 2013 @ juliamanhattan @ juliesatow “It isn’t as if tall towers are some great statement of testosterone,” says MaryAnne Gilmartin re 8 Spruce 1/2 — Norman Oder (@AYReport) June 8, 2013 @ juliamanhattan @ juliesatow But what did 8 Spruce architect Frank Gehry say at topping-out ceremony? "No Viagra" observer.com/2009/11/gehry-… 2/2 — Norman Oder (@AYReport) June 8, 2013

The 5/14/13 New York Observer's article, PATH/Fail: The Story of the World’s Most Expensive Train Station , addresses the endless cost overruns in the Lower Manhattan project and presents a purported counterpoint: In the private sector, these things often turn out differently. Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn is one example. Despite Bruce Ratner’s “man crush” on Frank Gehry, in the words of one of his employees, and the nearly $100 million in fees that he paid for the design of the undulating apartment towers and stadium, Mr. Ratner didn’t hesitate to drop the starchitect from Atlantic Yards when the costs got too high—costs that were partly the result of Mr. Gehry’s insistence on designing the interior elements down to minute details like the stadium seats, something that should sound familiar to the Port Authority. While it's quite possible Ratner would have paid Gehry $100 million for the entire project, I highly doubt Gehry took in $100 million. Looking more closely More ...

"How do you make a complex that doesn’t look like a project even though one architect’s doing it?" asked Frank Gehry, then the architect of Atlantic Yards, in a 10/31/05 interview , describing some of the challenges he faced. Modular construction does not seem to be the most likely solution. (The developer is still aiming at modular, but has not reached agreement with construction unions, even though an effort to finance the first building is in process.) But by now Forest City Ratner's goal is cutting costs--not to mention that speedier construction would avoid arena snags. So Gehryesque architecture is not the priority.  Looking northwest from the corner of Sixth Avenue and Dean Streets, with three towers around the arena. Note that the rendering, by SHoP, is from that curious hovercraft perspective that architects often favor, though it bears no relation to how pedestrians would experience the buildings. Also note the building in the lower right,...

An exchange between architecture critic Paul Goldberger and architect Frank Gehry, during an interview April 12 at Yale University , suggests that the architect only slightly acknowledges the controversy over Atlantic Yards, the one that in May 2006 led him to crack that protestors "should have been picketing Henry Ford." The discussion begins at about the 1:00 mark. Here's the key exchange. FG: I think Atlantic Yards had a problem--it was just right at the moment the recession started, everybody panicked, everybody was cutting back. PG: But there were issues about the scale, too--very, very big, and there was a lot of opposition, not to the specifics of your design, but to the overall scale of the project. FG: Yeah, I guess. (Pause) But they're gonna build--they're building parts of it. We established the guidelines, so, for better and for worse, it's going to be an irregular skyline. Goldberger is writing Gehry's biography , so he has lots of...

In the New York Observer, Jonathan Liu's essay, Times Art Critic Michael Kimmelman to Take Over as Paper’s Architecture Critic , does a good job of sketching the importance of the post, occupied by just four critics since 1963: The late Herbert Muschamp (he passed away in 2007) took over in the early 1990s...  Muschamp celebrated favorites like the Bilbao Guggenheim with the florid prose and omnivorous interests that might best be called fin de siècle. Nicolai Ouroussoff, a Muschamp protégé, has held the post since 2004. He announced his resignation June 6. A month later, The Times named his replacement, Michael Kimmelman, the paper’s chief art critic, who will be returning to New York from four years in Europe. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Kimmelman, who takes the reins at the end of this month, doesn’t have formal training in architecture, or much of a track record as an architectural critic. He will continue to cover art... “[Kimmelman’s] profiles of architects have been very...

A book that includes conversations between architect Frank Gehry, and his longtime collaborator and friend Ernest Fleischmann, former managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, shows Gehry, in the early days of Atlantic Yards, optimistic about the project and developer Bruce Ratner. Gehry, who called himself a "liberal do-gooder" as he has done at other points, seemed to have convinced himself that doing Atlantic Yards fit into that self-conception. He had to work under what he termed a "tight budget," but that budget, of course, became ever tighter, eventually causing his 2009 ejection from the project. And when Ratner told Gehry "You understand how to put a neighborhood together, and that's what I need you to do," was he just buttering up the architect so as to ensure his participation? After all, Gehry's gone and, despite Ratner's claims and Gehry's aspirations, the architect's strength is in more in constructing strik...

In the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic, under the rubric How Genius Works, several innovators are interviewed, among them architect Frank Gehry. The brief interview focuses on the design for the building for the New World Symphony in Miami, but there are resonances for those of us who remember his role in Atlantic Yards. Gehry begins: ARCHITECTURE IS A SERVICE BUSINESS. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art—or at least people call it that. After discussing his methods, Gehry concludes: Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. “The client made me do this.” “The city made me do this.” “Oh, the budget.” I don’t believe that anymore. In the end, you have to rise above them. You have to say you solved all that. You’re bringing an informed aesthetic point of view to a visual problem. You have freedom, so you have to make choices—and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look lik...

In a 9/10/05 letter to the editor of the Brooklyn Paper, headlined Watch for Ratner’s 'bait and switch' , Boerum Hill resident Dan Wiley was prescient: I commend architect Frank Gehry for trying to make buildings wiggle like fish in developer Bruce Ratner’s arena/office/housing mega-complex. However, how many times have we seen renowned architects come up with early innovative designs for projects needing zoning and other approvals and than see those designs fade with the stamp of approval? ...But even if we were to accept these architectural promises at face value, would they be so great anyway? Isn’t this Gehry project simply putting a slippery skin on what is really at heart a dehumanizing Modernist series of super blocks? Maybe what we need are not whales or sharks (eminent domain) but rather smaller fish that have some respect for the coral of Brooklyn. That’s what Gehry should work on. Of course Gehry's now gone, with the arena designed by sports specialist Ellerbe Be...

On the Glass House Conversations web site (connected to the Philip Johnson Glass House), writer Mark Lamster recently raised a question about architectural ethics, and of course Frank Gehry and Atlantic Yards came up. Lamster posed the question: How do we choose our clients? On this subject, Philip Johnson, self-professed "whore," was apt to quote H. H. Richardson's admonition that the "first principle of architecture is to get the job." That is rather cynical, perhaps, and in fact there were some clients (the mafia, for instance) for whom even Johnson would not work. But how do the rest of us know when and where to draw the line? Is it acceptable to work for a government with a spotty record on human rights? How about a corporation with a poor environmental history? How do we balance commercial imperatives with a desire for a moral practice? To be a design professional is to navigate ethical territory that is rarely black or white, but some shade of gray. Wha...