Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

It's a little late for a review of sociologist Nathan Glazer's 2007 collection of essays, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City , which I wrote about last year ( here and here ), and it's a little late for a blog post pointing to a review published in the spring. Still, Fort Greene-based critic Charles Taylor's essay in Dissent, headlined A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn , is notable in that it connects Glazer's critique directly to Atlantic Yards, just as Glazer has done so in public presentations, albeit not in the text. Taylor, a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger and contributor to several national publications, takes off from the "prosecution’s case," as presented by Glazer: “Modernist architecture began with social aims as strong as its aesthetic orientation, or stronger, but social objectives and interests have fallen away almost entirely, and aesthetic interests and ju...

At every public program these days about urbanism, it seems, Atlantic Yards gets a mention, and Wednesday night, at a panel titled "Modernism and the Public Realm" at the Museum of the City of New York, Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society ( MAS ), offered a striking prediction. It was a passing, middle-of-the-night thought, he allowed, but maybe Atlantic Yards “will be, in its way, like Penn Station,” the 1963 demolition of which galvanized New Yorkers to finally achieve a landmarks preservation law. “Maybe the absurdity with which that proceeded will awaken the desire for a more rational process.” (That begs the question about why Barwick and the MAS have not taken a more confrontational stance toward Atlantic Yards, instead hoping to mend it rather than end it. More on that here .) Fellow panelist Fred Siegel , an urbanist and author, seconded Barwick’s remarks. They were both responding to a widespread belief that something was wrong with the Atlantic Yard...

Nathan Glazer, the eminent Harvard sociologist and social critic, came to New York on April 17 to speak about his new collection of essays, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City --and Atlantic Yards came in for some criticism.. Protest, he said at one point, “is one form of discovering when density is too much,” and that certainly points to Brooklyn. (He spoke at the Yale Club, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute.) But he began with modernism, the 20th-century stripping of ornament and history in the interest of efficiency and currency, failing to match the “complex urbanity” of the past, that failed. In the United States and Britain, it was applied to public housing, and was denounced. The 1972 destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis marked the “end of modernism as a social cause.” Architects, Glazer said, “are really more interested in form than social reform, though they often speak about it.” (Remember Atlantic Yards...