Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

I wrote yesterday ( link ) about how a new project for 395 Flatbush Avenue extension just might signal, among other things, support for towers over the Atlantic Center mall someday. If so, then the view in the photo below, taken from Fort Greene Place and Hanson Place, would change, and the 18 Sixth Ave. (B4, aka Brooklyn Crossing) tower top left might not be visible. Photo May 8 by Norman Oder

Yesterday Common Edge published my essay Does Brooklyn’s New Brooding Monolith Deserve Kudos? It's surprising to me that two major critics, and an online poll, have treated the Brooklyn Tower, the borough's first supertall (over 1,000 feet) so generously, since the "person-on-the-street" perspective is so negative. Note that the architect behind the tower, SHoP, is also responsible for the Barclays Center's look. As I wrote: To Dezeen, SHoP principal John Cerone linked the Brooklyn Tower to the Barclays Center, the Brooklyn arena that the firm revamped—after a design by Ellerbe Becket—to acclaim when it opened in 2012. “People take selfies at Barclays and then they turn around and then take selfies down the street with the Brooklyn Tower,” said Cerone. “They don’t know they are by the same architects.” Well, if they take selfies from the arena plaza, those photos include the Brooklyn Tower, but it’s not the focus. As shown [below[, a photo from the plaza foregroun...

The architecture critics Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange, in their 12/28/20 round-up, Mask Up! It’s the 2020 Architecture and Design Awards , offered: Personal Growth Prize: To Barclays Center, long a symbol of everything that’s bad about the way things get built in New York City, serving as a central Brooklyn meeting spot for weeks of Black Lives Matter protests. PS: And now KD is balling. Well, that link, unsurprisingly, goes to the New York Times article that came after--but didn't mention--my more skeptical essay in Bklyner on Brooklyn's Accidental New Town Square . The Times wrote, for example: The operators of the arena have taken the protests as an opportunity to change the messaging on the screen above the plaza. Gone is the rotating menu of ads for Geico insurance and JetBlue airlines and Dumbo Moving and Storage. In its place is a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “The time is always right to do what is right.” I wrote, with more context: For days, th...

After 18+ months of stealth mode - building a platform, designing systems, doing architecture & engineering, hiring teammates, testing & prototyping, consulting advisors, assembling a supply chain - we're finally pulling the curtain back on Assembly OSM. https://t.co/YDAJlodVS5 — Assembly OSM (@AssemblyOSM) September 28, 2020 Note that the tweet, and the "exclusive" fed to the hungry-for-innovation Fast Company, feature the Barclays Center, though the building, in the main, is not primarily an example of manufacturing-based construction. Rather, the innovative facade is what qualifies. The article, headlines  Why one architecture firm is looking at planes to construct buildings of the future , states: It’s this manufacturing-based approach that [Chris] Sharples wants to bring to the world of architecture. That’s why he and his architect brother and twin, Bill, have launched Assembly , a new company that is streamlining the development of high-rise apartment buil...

This is the fifth of ten articles on the 11/19/19 Quality of Life meeting, which focused on the new B12 and B13 towers. The first concerned plans to finally move forward with Site 5. The second concerned the timing of the platform over the railyard. The third concerned the single parking garage entrance on the block. The fourth concerned the design of the new towers. The sixth concerned B4, Times Plaza, and the railyard. The seventh concerned art on the Dean Street construction fence. The eighth concerned recent traffic chaos around Disney on Ice. The ninth concerned the Pacific Park Conservancy. The tenth concerned the Pacific Park Owners Association. The initial coverage, in real estate publications, focused on the green images. Curbed:  TF Cornerstone reveals renderings for Pacific Park mixed-users, public park . 6sqft: New renderings show 72,600-square-foot public park coming to Brooklyn’s Pacific Park development . Just as with the images of the buildings, as I wr...

This is the fourth of ten articles on the 11/19/19 Quality of Life meeting, which focused on the new B12 and B13 towers. The first concerned plans to finally move forward with Site 5. The second concerned the timing of the platform over the railyard. The third concerned the single parking garage entrance on the block. The fifth concerned open space plans on that southeast block. The sixth concerned B4, Times Plaza, and the railyard. The seventh concerned art on the Dean Street construction fence. The eighth concerned recent traffic chaos around Disney on Ice. The ninth concerned the Pacific Park Conservancy. The tenth concerned the Pacific Park Owners Association. Hovercraft perspective also ignores railyard towers in rear They probably won't win architectural awards, the designs for the paired B12 (615 Dean) and B13 (595 Dean) unveiled this week, by Handel Architects and developer TF Cornerstone. But the towers, with 798 units, do take some cues from the surround...

Beyond the scoop spoon-fed to the New York Post about two developers buying three terra firma sites in the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project, there wasn't much new in the press release dutifully repackaged by Real Estate Weekly , Bklyner , 6sqft , Bisnow , and Curbed . But a few things are worthy of notice. First, though the Post didn't make it clear, TF Cornerstone is leasing buying the two adjacent sites on the southeast block, 615 Dean (B12) and 595 Dean (B13), while the Brodsky Organization is leasing buying 664 Pacific (B15). The two firms are not operating in partnership. Enter Perkins Eastman, exit SHoP Also, Greenland USA--which controls 95% of the project (except those three sites) going forward as part of Greenland Forest City Partners--disclosed that the architect for B4 (18 Sixth Avenue) will be Perkins Eastman, which produced the rendering above right. That means that SHoP, which designed the other two towers (461 Dean and 38 Sixth) on the arena blo...

An announcement from the New York Chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism , which is referring to "South Brooklyn" in its old sense, the portion of the original city of Brooklyn within Kings County: South Brooklyn - The Good, the Bad & the Beautiful CNU NYC is pleased to invite you to the first in a series of City Walks. We will look at some old and new development in Brooklyn, with a walk through Park Slope and Pacific Park (the former Atlantic Yards). The tour finishes in Fort Greene with drinks in the outdoor garden at Habana Outpost in Fort Greene - on the corner of South Portland Avenue, which the readers of Time Out . called "the most beautiful street in New York." Brooklyn architect and urbanist Gaither Pratt will lead the tour. Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council Chair and Brooklyn Speaks activist Gib Veconi will say a few words about Pacific Park. As always, the CNU NYC tours follow the New York Rules of Order.* Please spread the w...

What do architecture critics think of the state of architecture criticism today? , asked the Architects Newspaper 5/21/18, assessing a media environment with fewer paid critics, more online opportunities, and evolving challenges in assessment. Justin Davidson, architecture and classical music critic for New York magazine, offered a thoughtful quote, excerpted below, noting that critics must also be reporters and that criticism usually goes beyond esthetics (an indirect knock, some might say, against previous critics like the New York Times's Herbert Muschamp): In order to be effective, architecture critics have to look beyond architecture. I got into this business because I loved writing and I loved beautiful buildings. The deeper I dive, the more aware I am of the overlapping areas of expertise that get called into play every time the easy equipment shows up: finance, planning, zoning, activism, preservation, politics, performing arts, engineering, retail, gentrification, tran...

461 Dean in rear, blending in Ok, now we know. According to Architectural Digest, 11/17/16, The World's Tallest Modular Skyscraper Welcomes Its First Residents , "Designed by SHoP Architects and located next to the Barclays Center, 461 Dean Street was built to blend into its historic Brooklyn neighborhood." Oh really? Here's more explanation: It just so happens that the firm behind the record-setting tower is the New York–based SHoP Architects, the same that designed the Barclays Center. This fact is significant, since cohesive aesthetics are increasingly important to many Brooklynites. To that end, SHoP used multiple exterior colors to help the high-rise blend in with surrounding buildings (red for historic brownstones and blue for the modern skyscrapers). Well, given that 461 Dean (aka B2) has black and silver panels, as well, I'm not sure that's fully thought-out (or, maybe, fully explained). Let's put it this way: nobody thinks 461 Dean blends...

In  Will Brooklyn Finally Get a World-Class Skyline? , New York Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson surveys the landscape, and has some side praise for the B2 modular tower: Even the lawsuit-afflicted Pacific Park next door to Barclays Center will soon yield some decent and affordable places to live: SHoP Architects’ 461 Dean Street, which sports more attitude than grace. Stacking and bolting together factory-made modules was supposed to make affordable housing cheaper and quicker to put up. Instead, construction snafus and lawsuits among builders turned the process into a nasty slog. Now the tower has defiantly announced its arrival with a façade of fire-engine red. It's a wee bit conclusory to call it "decent and affordable" without acknowledging lingering clouds over the mold investigation , the limited affordability (and lack of family-sized units), and the cancellation of Forest City Ratner's ambitious plans to build the entire project via modular ...

The 550 Vanderbilt condo tower, aka B11, is definitely emerging, as anyone passing by the corner of Dean Street can see: the structure of the third floor is visible. That emerging structure, as shown in the GIF at right and the photos below, differs considerably from the self-serving, deceptively modest rendering produced by the firm CookFox and distributed by the developer, Greenland Forest City Partners. Last October, I contrasted the rendering with a photo of a similar slice of Vanderbilt Avenue at Dean Street, contending that the rendering was skewed to diminish the size of the tower. The evidence today seems even more clear. Indeed, note how the third floor of 550 Vanderbilt extends to nearly the top of the second floor of the brick building across the street, but the rendering packs in nearly four floors. The rendering, larger version The photo, larger version

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...

Last night's Atlantic Yards Quality of Life meeting, held at Brooklyn Hospital near Downtown Brooklyn, contained an update on several issues, including modular construction , but the biggest issues for the audience were the wholesale removal of parking in and around the southeast block of the site, which triggered dismay, as well as an architect's presentation regarding two new towers, which was well-received. Dismay over parking for residents In order to attenuate noise from construction, Empire State Development has required a 16-foot fence--twice the height as typical--around the southeast block, Block 1129, bounded by Dean Street, Carlton Avenue, and Vanderbilt Avenue. The fence and its support not only removes 85-100 parking spaces, it removes the on-site surface parking used by some arenagoers. In other words, the tight fit for the project--which requires the larger construction fence--means that parking gets sacrificed. "This is obviously going to elim...