Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman finally weighs in with his review of the Barclays Center, saluting the arena for its design, fan experience, and operations--and calling it the antithesis of Madison Square Garden--yet raising significant doubts about the overall Atlantic Yards plan, both as urban design and urban planning. He suggests that, by hiring SHoP to wrap the much-derided Ellerbe Becket design, the architects "have created something tougher, more textured and compelling, an anti-Manhattan monument, not clad in glass or titanium but muscular and progressive like its borough." I think Kimmelman lets the Barclays Center off too easily on some fronts--if the Times had had better coverage of arena operations, that would have been avoided--but I'm glad he waited until after the arena opened 9/28/12 to write, since he does acknowledge some lingering issues. It's by far the most wide-ranging, and thoughtful of the reviews, as it recognizes this...

Michael Kimmelman, the new New York Times architecture critic who seems to care more about context and urbanism than starchitects, is getting a lot of ink these days. At a panel at the Architecture Center last week, as reported in Capital New York , he--along with his predecessors--was the elephant in the room: All of these critics said that the idea that the entire architectural press had become caught up with the star architects, and object architecture, was not accurate; but that to the extent it was true, it was a monster the Times created over the last decade or more. ...The Times' choice of Kimmelman after [Nicolai] Ouroussoff (whose name was never mentioned, despite obvious references to his tenure at the newspaper) was so extreme that it elicited from [ex-Times critic and current New Yorker critic Paul] Goldberger the idea of a pendulum, which in popular opinion about architecture has swung away from star architects, towards something closer to home. And how The New York...

Those of us who've followed the work of urban planner and scholar Alexander Garvin know he likes to talk about "the public realm," what he calls (as he did three years ago) "the quality of life of a great city,” including streets, squares, transportation systems, schools, public buildings, and parks. So it's no surprise he spoke similarly in an walkabout interview, scheduled for the cover of tomorrow's New York Times Arts & Leisure section, with new New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, headlined Treasuring Urban Oases . What is surprising--though less so with each article--is that Kimmelman continues to emphasize the impact of architecture on the city as a whole, rather than focus mainly on spectacular new buildings.  Writes Kimmelman, laying out the fundamentals: “The public realm is what we own and control,” [Garvin] told me the other day when we met to look around Midtown. More than just common property, he added, “the streets...