Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

The rendering at right of the Atlantic Yards B2 tower, now under construction, has been used frequently to show what the 32-story, 363-unit building will look like when it's finished in late 2014. The rendering, by SHoP, is but one in a long history of skewed and misleading renderings produced for the Atlantic Yards project and, frankly, in the world of development. There's a lot confounding about it, especially the mysterious and misleading appearance of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower in the background. Note, for example, that, when standing on the southwest corner of Dean Street and Sixth Avenue, as shown in the photo below left, you can't see the bank building and can barely see the Bank of New York tower over the Atlantic Terminal mall. The new residential tower would take up a lot more space on the skyline. Below I'll show perspectives directly across the street from the Dean Street entrance, as shown in the rendering, but first some history about t...

Updated with comments from Daniel Goldstein Architecture critic Alexandra Lange, who wrote a devastating takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff, talked about her new book Writing About Architecture  with Project for Public Spaces. An excerpt from the discussion : In the last chapter of my book I discuss Jane Jacobs, and how she might have reacted to the Atlantic Yards project. I think it needed a Jane Jacobs to stop it — an advocate as eloquent about the costs, and the alternatives, as those seductive Gehry renderings — and for whatever reason, one did not appear. But the activist spirit was by no means dead. It just got diffused into activist non-profits and activist blogs and activist essays. The diffused media landscape made it easier to follow the saga week by week, but perhaps made it harder for any one person to become the voice. My comments: I question whether a Jane Jacobs was possible for Atlantic Yards. She would have needed a big media megaphone, and they were not ...

While most reviews of Battle for Brooklyn have been positive, the influential trade publication Variety comes out with a pan : A battle ordinarily requires two sides, yet this earnest, ungracefully reconstructed saga posits that opposition to the building of the New Jersey Nets' future home took place in a virtual vacuum, and that the fix was in from the start. Failed crusades don't make for very inspiring cinema, and pic seems unlikely to galvanize followers in limited release, kicking off June 17 in Gotham. Reviewer John Anderson, in my view, gets a few things right, but misses some fundamentals. The "fix was in from the start," and that didn't need to be "posited." Did opposition "take place in a virtual vacuum"? No, but that is one potential byproduct of choosing to tell a film as a drama, without the support, however awkward, of talking heads. Missing the railyard Anderson gets some critical details wrong: Billionaire developer Bruce Rat...

According to the Architect's Newspaper, citing an in-house New York Times memo, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff will leave at the end of this month to write a book that, in the words of his boss, "aspires to put a century of architecture into the kind of social and political context he always aimed for within the more limited constraints of newspaper writing." Culture editor Jonathan Landman's laudatory memo cites Ouroussoff's "unfailing intelligence and integrity" and his "discernment, courage and skill" in critiquing the new Times Tower, designed by Renzo Piano and built in partnership with Forest City Ratner. Julie Iovine of the Architect's Newspaper is a bit less laudatory: The sporadic critic was known more for chasing down exotic locations and predictably championing all things Californian than analyzing local conditions and his even-handed voice sometimes had us all missing the impassioned harangues of his predecessor,...

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews (and mostly approves of) Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower, aka 8 Spruce Street, offering this aside: A more recent foray, the massive Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, drew the ire of local activists, who depicted him as an aging liberal in bed with the devil — a New York City real estate developer. Really? Ouroussoff's piece links to Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, but here's what he wrote in June 2006: But if the Gehry-Ratner lovefest has raised an expectation of innovative design, it has also stirred unease. Few would question Mr. Gehry’s talent. The question is whether he has allowed his experimental ethos to be harnessed for the sake of maximizing a developer’s profits. It’s also fair to ask whether Mr. Gehry and other gifted architects have made a pact with the Devil, compromising their values for the sake of ever bigger commissions. (Emphasis added)

In the Los Angeles Times, Notes on a Year: Christopher Hawthorne on architecture begins: If you were looking for symbolic bookends to the year in architecture, you could do worse than to start with the January opening of Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper and finish with the recent run of "In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards," a musical-theater production about controversial plans to build a mammoth Frank Gehry-designed development in Brooklyn. Critic Hawthorne didn't actually see the show, but read the script: After the credit crunch hit the project was significantly downsized and Gehry was fired by Ratner; the only portion going forward is an arena designed by a young New York firm called SHoP. The Civilians' treatment of the story does the work of cultural historians with unexpected flair and an effectively light touch, as when one resident says of the SHoP design, which to put it kindly was produced rather hurriedly, "Some people think i...

No, The Bilbao Effect , Oren Safdie's highly entertaining satirical play, isn't about Frank Gehry, even though the title takes off from the well-known phenomenon of enlisting a starchitect to create a signature civic building, like Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. After all, the protagonist is arrogant Swiss starchitect Erhardt Shlaminger, a man convinced of his own genius, while Gehry can get self-deprecating and defensive. Nor is it about Atlantic Yards, though it is clearly inspired, in part, by the project. After all, the official blurb that states it "tackles controversial urban design issues that New Yorkers have recently encountered in Brooklyn as a result of the hotly-debated plans to redevelop the Atlantic Yards [sic] into an architecture-star mega-development." Architecture on trial The play, staged appropriately at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village, takes the form of a mock trial of Shlaminger, held by the American Institut...

Well, I've written frequently about New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff , including a June 2006 critique of his first major piece on Atlantic Yards. Now, when the critic comes in for a drubbing by a peer, AY is front and center. In a Design Observer essay headlined Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough , Alexandra Lange writes: Should Ouroussoff turn out to be the last architecture critic, that makes it even more imperative to say: He is not good enough. He is not winning hearts or minds. He is not making a case for keeping the breed. The AY example Lange writes: 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. ...Here Ouroussoff performs a neat trick, (mis)characterizing the opposition as a bunch of Jacobsian sentimentalist...

I'll be posting my 2009 round-up in 2010 (sorry), but here are four AY mentions--two pro, two con--worth noting in other publications' end-of-the-year wrap-ups. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle In a column , the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's Dennis Holt asserts that "Few people [at the opening press conference] could have foreseen the bitterness and anger that lay in the future for this project," to which NoLandGrab's Eric McClure responds , "Actually, we think it was probably quite easy to foresee the rancor the Atlantic Yards project would engender, especially once the audacity and magnitude of the land- and subsidy-grab became clear." Curbed awards Curbed, in typically restrained language, targets the "facade architect" of the AY arena: Our Favorite Architectural Sell-Outs Dude, can you believe they're using that Vampire Weekend song in a fucking commercial now? Or that those dudes at that hip architecture firm SHoP scored a commission from fucki...

Last Friday I suggested that the new arena design, involving SHoP Architects, might win back New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who in June called the latest design, trading Frank Gehry for sports facility veterans Ellerbe Becket, a "shameful betrayal of the public trust." Indeed, Ouroussoff is no longer disgusted but rather partly impressed, a bit dismayed, and only partly willing to address the larger, lingering issues. In other words, by expressing measured approval for the design, he ignores the absence of a design for the rest of the project and the likelihood of indefinite interim surface parking and blight. So, Forest City Ratner has to consider his review a win, since--despite the instant appellations of "clamshell," "bottle opener," and "panini maker"--the general reaction is not uniform derision. From new to old? In a review published Thursday, headlined New Yards Design Draws From the Old , Ouroussoff begins: To ...

Someone called me yesterday about scheduling an Atlantic Yards-related event in September. I pointed out that any AY event that month has to be scheduled around the "September surprise," when Forest City Ratner, with fanfare, unveils the next design of the Atlantic Yards arena, wins back certain members of the chattering class, and allows Mayor Mike Bloomberg to look City Planning Commission Chairperson Amanda Burden in the eye. Sure, I speculate, but look at the evidence. Yesterday CEO Bruce Ratner told the New York Times: [CEO] Mr. [Bruce] Ratner said he expected to release new images of the arena before Labor Day. “I think the final architecture will be really beautiful,” he said. Labor Day is Monday, September 7. The final day for people to submit comments to the Empire State Development Corporation on the 2009 Modified General Project Plan is August 31 . When will it be? Presumably the designs will be finished before August 31--but there's no need to flummox the pu...

According to an article in Sports Business Journal (subscription only) Barclays won’t look like leaked rendering, Ellerbe Becket says : The New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff can rest easy. The exterior of Barclays Center, the New Jersey Nets’ proposed Brooklyn arena, will look nothing like the image the Times published last month, according to James Poulson, Ellerbe Becket’s design director... NetsDaily adds some more quotes: the design will be “less barnlike…something totally unexpected” and the design will evoke Brooklyn’s working class industrial history. (DDDB has full text .) Well, the image below wasn't simply leaked to Ouroussoff. It also appeared in a document two weeks later from the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC). From the 6/9/09 Times From the ESDC's 6/23/09 Technical Memorandum

OK, in July 2005 New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthused that Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards plan "may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades." (I thought he missed a few things.) In June 2006, he wrote a more pensive if hardly tough assessment of the project, In March 2008, he wrote something of an elegy, urging Gehry to leave the project, predicting blight (accurately, it terms out), and even seeming to emerge as a project opponent. Today, however, he pulls out the big rhetorical guns, calling Forest City Ratner's decision to trade Gehry's arena for a more pedestrian design by Ellerbe Becket a "stunning bait-and-switch" and a "shameful betrayal of the public trust."  He calls the new design a "monstrosity" and suggests that we "would be better off with nothing." However, he takes Forest City Ratner at its word that the decision was strictly budgetary, with...

The murky news that Atlantic Yards architect Frank Gehry's role has receded, and that an arena would be designed with cost-cutting in mind from its previous $950 million price tag, raises several questions, most of which can be answered only with circumstantial or incomplete evidence. But that evidence, so far, hints at even more trouble for the project, at least if developer Forest City Ratner can't use Gehry to sell suites and sponsorships. So, what happened with Gehry? According to two news reports , though without named sources, Gehry laid off his staffers working on Atlantic Yards. (One commenter asserted the staffers were merely shifted.) One report said it was because he hadn't been paid. Is Gehry off the project? According to Forest City Ratner, no . Is he on the project? It depends on what we mean by "on." Gehry may still be providing guidance on his designs, but the arena may be out of his hands by now. Forest City Ratner won't specify what his rol...

In an essay headlined It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out , scheduled for Sunday's paper but already online, New York Times architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff makes a backhanded reference to Atlantic Yards in a lament that, maybe, architecture during the boom years was focused on the wrong things. Ouroussoff writes: WHO knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What’s more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief? Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once sco...

So, what character from pop culture does Atlantic Yards architect Frank Gehry most resemble? Remember, in the 2006 documentary, "Sketches of Frank Gehry," Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, observed, “Somebody asked me once about Frank’s ego. I said: You shouldn’t be put off by the kind of Columbo-like exterior. Y’know, the crumpled raincoat and the sort of shuffling, self-effacing manner. Frank’s got the biggest ego in the business.” OK, so he's not really like Columbo , the bumbling detective played by Peter Falk. Gehry as Dirty Harry Consider, then, Mike Davis's wide-ranging and dystopian 1990 book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles , which likens Gehry to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character : Gehry's baroquely fortified Frances Howard Goldwyn Regional Branch Library in Hollywood (1984) positively taunts potential trespassers 'to make my day.' This is undoubtedly the most menacing library ever built, a bizarr...