The plans for the proposed buildings around the Brooklyn Nets arena have been revealed by architect Frank Gehry, and they show a dazzling group of skyscrapers at various angles. The NY Times calls it an "instant skyline" and notes that the plan is far from a sure thing, given that developer Bruce Ratner still faces a bit of community antipathy for his plans. But the excitement is best summarized by the first paragraph of Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's glowing appraisal:
Frank Gehry's new design for a 21-acre corridor of high-rise towers anchored by the 19,000-seat Nets arena in Brooklyn may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades. If it is approved, it will radically alter the Brooklyn skyline, reaffirming the borough's emergence as a legitimate cultural rival to Manhattan.Quick, someone check on Marty Markowitz - he may have died and gone to heaven upon reading this. And check out this closing graf:
This is no small miracle. Even in this early stage of development, the design proves that Mr. Gehry can handle the challenge better than most. His approach is a blow against the formulaic ways of thinking that are evidence of the city's sagging level of cultural ambition. It suggests another development model: locate real talent, encourage it to break the rules, get out of the way.If that isn't an FU to the planning at Ground Zero, Gothamist doesn't know what is.
What do you think of these plans? Do you think these buildings will be built? Will Brooklyn be hotter than ever? Or should Brooklyn stay the same? And here's a great feature on the stadium from New York magazine, plus the slideshow of Gehry's Brooklyn models.
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OK, maybe I'm being OCD here, but I find this stuff to be off-putting. If Frank Gehry wants to live in a home that's off-balance, that invokes a feeling of uneasiness, (not to mention nausea), that's fine.
It's a whole different thing to inflict that feeling on a neighborhood, not to mention an entire city.
That Image above reminds me of a Dr. Seuss City...
Thankfully I moved from Park Slope back into Manhattan 3 years ago. Enjoy!!!
So, all those people will have their homes taken away for... THAT? What we're forgetting here is that many Brooklyn residents (who lived there way before all the hipsters invaded) will lose their homes by force to build a stadium in the private interest. Thanks to the Supreme Court's ruling a few days ago in Kelo vs. New London, it's now perfectly legal for the city to take their homes away and give them to Ratner. Thanks, but no thanks.
Okay, so say I'm a kid and I was playing with my Lego set and I got up and dropped everything in my hands when Mom said "Lunch is ready"!
ewww,
It seems that Gehry has not lived, loved nor worked in actual city setting for some time. This is way too California (driven by a car design)and absolutely not pedestrian accessable. Too much eye candy - do we want 42nd street and Times Square blaring in our formerly quiet, livable neighborhood?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought "Dr. Suess" right off the bat. It looks like Brooklyn cum Whoville. I may be a philistine, but I think the relentless ass-kissing that Gehry receives from outlets like the NYTimes has inured the man to the fact that many of his designs are just so much jackassery. If form follows function, then farce follows flattery. Would gothamist consider adding any of those buildings to its skyline logo? Of course not; it would look like toppling book-ends.
Looks like something out of Beetlejuice.
Thank goodness this will never be built. Let world-class architecture go be world-class architecture somewhere else: we New Yorkers would rather see our city suspended in ether, thank you very much. Better, let's tear down the skyscrapers and restore the pastoral charm of the farms which once populated Manhattan and Brooklyn back when John Jay was still in short pants. Or better still, let's plow the entire city under and return it free of charge to its rightful Native American owners.
Leaning Towers is what you call "world-class architecture"??
S.D.: Yes.
I had the unique opportunity to see Gehry's designs from his Manhattan Bridge Proposal from the NY Art Commissions Archives recently. Can I tell that the design was butt-ass ugly, and absolutely out of touch! Thank god that design never went through. To be brief his design concept was to cover the bridge with 20' high screens emblazoned screens with words MANHATTAN BRIDGE with high rendered graphics. This intent to cover and molest Brooklyn with his oversized UGLY billboards is still prevalent with this most recent proposal for the 'Net's. Will some one put a human figure in there to show how huge and out of scale this actually is?
I don't see how this design - or ANY design by ANY architect that includes giant skyscrapers that house office-worker drones, and shopping malls with chain stores, and a sports staduim - "reaffirm[s] the borough's emergence as a legitimate cultural rival to Manhattan."
This is only 'cultural' if you mean suburban-American consumer culture, which I think should stay in the suburbs.
Yeah, there's lots of skyscrapers out there in the suburbs, Kim.
Wouldn't New York be awesome if we eliminated from it all people who earn a salary, all commerce, and all sports? That would be great. Workers of the world, go f*&% yourselves!
i actually like gehry's style but it's turned into a predicatable filter that he applies on every site.
much worse, he designs some of the most energy inefficient buildings around... as he openly admits, he doesn't care that large buildings such as these are some of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. they are designed oblivious to site and rely exclusively on energy-hogging mechanical systems to control climate. passive solutions are very simple but his ego can't be bothered with rational thought.
Well, IMO, it's more like the set of a movie like Judge Dredd...
Aesthetically, to me, the projected advertisements would be a bit much and The Leaning buildings in different directions are reminiscent of a Batman comic more than anything else.
It is possible to have Modern Architecture with a design that doesn't look like it was inspired by LSD. Being against this design isn't against Modernization, just against this Design. A knee jerk reaction as if it is, is over the top.
hijiki, would you care to share your data on emissions from Gehry buildings and other structures?
Somebody shoot me now. Quite Frank-ly, Gerhy has got to be the most overrated, least talented major architect in the world today.
To those of you who hate the plans (which seems to be everyone who has posted so far): which major architect would you rather see design this?
Wow, what a bunch of stick-in-the-muds, fuddy duds and Daughters of the American Revolution you all are. Gehry's design is exciting and dynamic. Sorry if something new compels you to question your ideas of what urban architecture should be. But cities are about change. Tradition is important but stagnation should not stand. A real and true argument against this project is the displacement of current residents, but that's not an aesthetic issue but a political one and one that needs to be carefully considered. But as far as what this project would do to the Brooklyn skyline, it's nothing but good. It would help to DEFINE Brooklyn as a forward thinking, 21st Century urban center. It would help attract talent. It would call attention to the Borough's other many virtures. None of that is bad.
bernard tshcumi - 'park de la villette' and 'west diaoyutai tower'. Plus his based in NYC and understands 'our' dynamics.
Franky boy have you ever stood next to the desolation of one Gehry's bill-boards? This is the "Great Wall of Gehry" and shows how much he 'hates' New York. He is literaly killing our neighborhood.
Well folks, I actually like this design. It's very much like what's going on in cities like Berlin right now. As long as it's not shiny and metallic(and blinding everyone driving down Atlantic Ave, myself included), I think it's great. And I hate every single thing I've seen proposed for the WTC site. Try again on that one, guys...
I doubt Tschumi could be bothered to take his tongue out of Jacques Derrida's ear for long enough to engage in a politicized building process in Brooklyn. He does much better with China's central planners.
Those are great looking buildings. The main building at ground zero should have looked something like that.
I'm not exactly sure what evamm is asking but I'll offer this.
I've attended concerts at LA's Disney Hall, It's a masterpiece of urban design and an exciting new addition to a downtown short on urban marvel. Gehry's Brooklyn design promises to add this kind of vitality to Brooklyn.
I'm not quite sure why so many respondents on this board, which I assume skews young, are so close-minded. Urban life is about change and experimentation (I once again offer the caveat about the needs of current residents who might be displaced. That needs to be considered seriouslY0
Gehry's MIT design is interesting to look at at first, then gets boring and will become dated the same way we view boring concrete buildings (ie. Boston's City Hall Plaza) today. Design should be timeless and this Blade Runner wannabe is far from that.
An interesting caption clip from the NY Times slideshow:
"...the project would forever transform Brooklyn and its often-intimate landscape"
It sounds like somehow intimate is a bad thing.
Oh my god, the Disney Concert Hall is NOT a masterpiece of urban design! I've also attended concerts there and the design couldn't relate any less to the urban context. It's pretty, but it is uncomfortable to approach, it turns its back on three of the streets it borders and barely relates to the pedestrian at all. Metal panels on the back had to be covered because of its visual/heat-inducing impact on surrounding buildings. Not to mention his schtick has become, well, a bit tiresome.
Now I'm not a classicist, and I welcome experimentation, and I don't think this development would be the end of the world (brooklyn is dense and vibrant enough to endure regardless) but we're missing a really good opportunity to do wonderful, memorable, and unique things with this site -
As long as we're putting in votes, I'd recommend Deborah Berke or Machado/Silvetti - granted they're probably too small but a boy can dream...
There are hundreds of architects, many local firms, who could propose a better design than this. That's not the issue. They want Gehry because, while his designs suck, his fame extends over the world.
But what I don't understand about the entire project is how you can cram 6000 additional residents and lord knows how many workers, tourists, and arena-goers into that area of Brooklyn -- which is already, at this moment, a traffic nightmare on top of a congested mess of a subway station. There are so many underused areas or Brooklyn that could handle the extra load - but Flatbush and Atlantic is hardly an underused area.
Frankly my dear, it is still california and a result of 'drive by shooting' LA style.
How is one going to cross the yards and go to Brooklyn's Childrens Museum from Pierpont Street or Cumberland?
tim, there have been several articles in architecture magazines lately that go into detail on sustainability and architects... norman foster being one of the few paying attention. in a press conference when asked how he felt about the sustainability of his buildings, gehry replied something to the effect of, 'i'm an architect, not an environmentalist'.
as far as co2 emmissions go, architecture accounts for about 800 million metric tonnes per year compared to 500mmt for transport and 300mmt for industry. it might be easier to lower our greehouse emmissions by using basic building design principles specific to each climate than it would be to make our cars more efficient.
read more here:
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1003/glo/index.html
and here:
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1001/grn/index.html
or you can get a pretty good idea of the efficiency of his buildings simply by visiting them and paying attention to orientation, window placement, light, airflow and looking at the excessive materials needed to hold up and repair his beautiful, forced gestures.
Thanks, hijiki. I've been to Bilbao and have a pretty good feel for the physical dynamics of the place; your characterization of Gehry's designs as inefficient is inconsistent with my own experience of his work (though I'm not an engineer by trade, just more an amateur engineering enthusiast). The Brooklyn design appeals to me because I see shades of both Bilbao Gehry and Westin Bonaventure/Caltrans Gehry. Anyway, thanks for the links. I shall dig away.
its just awful, he is an awful architect. new doesnt have to look like a bad duran duran video and the stupidity of creating "a shape that no one has ever seen before" is becoming boring after 100 years of rebeling against the "staid establishment" look around their is no establishment, put down your weapons and start over. our childrens children can tear it all down again. god forbid someone work in the new york language we see everywhere. every idiot architect inventing their own tounge......self centered mumbling at our expense.
Yuck! The only thing uglier than that model would be the real thing looming over the rest of Brooklyn. I hope Brooklyn can save itself from this greed driven monstrosity. Gehry has created some singular buildings but is by no means qualified to level a huge urban swath. Would you trust a dentist who gave you a top-notch filling to perform your brain surgery? Being a famous architect does not make you a good planner.
Findley seems like s/he's got an eye so I'll just agree to disagree. And I appreciate those comments.
But to say that Gehry is a lousy architect is just narrow-minded. He completely took apart and re=assembled the "language" of architecture in his incredible beach houses (among other examples), his giddy Prague buildings (which Bklyn design happily recalls) and of course there's Bilbao and its garrulous sister, Disney Hall.
If you can't feel the excitement and joy concertgoers experience as they enter Disney Hall, you're made of the same stone they used to construct Avery Fisher. It's an incredible place to hear music and it adds loads to the LA cityscape.
If the Gehry Bklyn designs contribute anywhere near as much delight in rethought urban spaces as Disney Hall does, it will more than accomplish its goal.
In the first few seconds I saw the pics, with it's loud colors and it's slanted towers, I honestly thought it was a large graffiti mural made 3-D. I was half expecting to see a cartoon subway train explode out of it while dribbling a basketball.
I'm disappointed at Gehry, I expected better. I really liked the original version with it's solid but active askewed towers. I'm not diggin' the slanty shanties at all. Natis is right, it will look dated instead of timeless.
For any and every rant against Modernism spoken or written thus far on this comments board or off...I say Amen. To me
For whatever it may be worth at this stage, Gehry is by no means a modernist architect. Mies is a modernist. Le Corbusier is a modernist. Frank Gehry is not even close to being a modernist. He is the postmodernist par excellence.
It looks like free jazz meets Kenny G.
Look, the point that Gehry misses is that you aren't going to sweep aside the problems inherent in a Battery Park style complex with publicly challenging architecture. He might have gotten Nick O. from The Times all wet about his project, but he doesn't address the environmental impact of creating superblocks by closing several blocks by the busiest intersection in Brooklyn.
The LA Philharmonic hall is simple compared to the scale of this project. The project in Boston, mentioned above, suffers from turning its back on its neighbors and an unwelcoming entrance (something like cascading razor blades) and public space.
If we are going to hand over $1.1 BILLION in subsidies (Ratner's numbers, not mine) then do we want to subject Brooklyn to the frenzied whims of a fashionable hack?
first, i was disappointed at the NYT article. i felt it was strongly stilted toward how awesome the buildings are allegedly going to be and barely mentioned how up in arms the actual neighborhood is to this project. it's not just like 3 anti-development people who are pissed... it's entire buildings, families, streets. ridiculous.
secondly, to suggest that in years this area will just look like it's always been there is to suggest that there will be a lot more development around it in the future... development begets development. psssh! so, if you're worried about this project, you should also be worried about alllll the projects to come in the future.
third, my favorite line in the nyt article was the one about "this isn't manhattan. if we wanted to live in the city, we'd live there. this is brooklyn." (something along those lines. it was the last paragraph in the article.) very well put.
ok...um, Frank Gehry REALLY needs to get a new schtick. I don't know if its him or all those asian interns that do all of his work for free. All of his buildings are EXACTLY the same...they just change scale. ok...wavy walls...tilting peices, titanium....we get it already!!
It seems like every city feels like they need one of his buildings to be cool. Get over yourself FRANK!
He must be stopped.
Tim,
He rejects the past and has issues with ornamentation. He's a Modernist.
xandervaliya, modernism has been pretty well defined at this point. gehry is not a modernist. skim any 101-level text for help.
i actually like it... but i'm a fan of dr.seuss. he's becoming a one-trick pony. it feels like elitist homgenization. is it really just another form of suburbanization/mcstripmalling for the urban crowd? it's the same idea that he sells to every city rich enough to bear his jewels. compare him to khan, le corbusier, saarinen, wright... they didn't plagiarize themselves like this. they designed unique buildings to solve individual problems for specific locations.
This is surprising to me, most of you guys must not live in the area immediately surrounding these proposed buildings, because all I hear is critique of the architect, and not much regarding Ratner.
I live in that area, and as at least one person said, it is already too congested with traffic (car and foot). Ratner is forcing this area to become metropolitan, when the very reason so many people have moved here and started paying high rents is "because" it is not metropolitan. Right now, it still looks like a neighborhood. Ratner wants to make it a mini-manhattan.
Ironically, to me the ONLY bright spot of this is Gehry. As someone who will have to live under the new 'skyscrapers', I would much rather live near some interesting looking buildings rather than more rectangle boxes slapped next to each other. If Ratner has his way (and I hope SOMETHING stops this plan), the only saving grace will be the Gehry designs.
This project will ruin fort greene. I never thought I'd see the day when I would have to actually leave fort greene and move to manhattan for cheaper rent. F--k!
Right on Sh-k - It's an unfortunate fact of life that when a large group of people see something as desirable, a small percentage with money will see even more money.
For the record, I live in the North Slope.
If I remember correctly, the Atlantic Center was fought vigorously by brooklyn citizens for a decade or so with the same arguments (scale, displacement, etc) before it was eventually built. I think the AC is annoying and ugly, but it hasn't destroyed the neighborhood. In fact, it's arguably made it safer/nicer.
Now, should we fight this? Probably. Mainly because I'm always frightened when so much development is proposed at once - neighborhoods are meant to evolve slowly. But I also think such development is inevitable and again, not the end of the world - I would just like to see something better done with it.
Right on Sh-k - It's an unfortunate fact of life that when a large group of people see something as desirable, a small percentage with money will see even more money.
For the record, I live in the North Slope.
If I remember correctly, the Atlantic Center was fought vigorously by brooklyn citizens for a decade or so with the same arguments (scale, displacement, etc) before it was eventually built. I think the AC is annoying and ugly, but it hasn't destroyed the neighborhood. In fact, it's arguably made it safer/nicer.
Now, should we fight this? Probably. Mainly because I'm always frightened when so much development is proposed at once - neighborhoods are meant to evolve slowly. But I also think such development is inevitable and again, not the end of the world - I would just like to see something better done with it.
I think the bottom line is that we're all a little uncomfortable with its insensitivity, regardless of our individual perspective.
oops, I only meant to say that once.
"gehry is not a modernist."
What is he then? And don't just say Post-Modernist. If I wanted irony and surrealism just for the sake of it, I could just as easily find it at the UN or Brasilia.
if you must pin a label on him, you could call him a deconstructivist... but i'm guessing that's probably too 'ironic' for you too. an essential part of modernism is the premise that 'form follows function'. that is obviously not the case with gehry's work.
you could argue that's still modernism in simplistic terms (dividing all of architecture into two categories), but if your goal is to insult his work, calling it modernist isn't very accurate and puts gehry in the company of some very succesful architects which doesn't cut very deep.
I'm not quite up to speed on architectural history, but I think one might be able to debate whether Gehry's a lower-case-m modernist. "He rejects the past" to some extent as xandervaliya notes, but then again that doesn't necessarily make him a capital-M Modernist.
On the new Atlantic Yards: I agree with the comments by Lumi and some of the others above. This wood and cardboard model just doesn't matter that much. The massive scale, questionable urban design, huge public subsidy, use of eminent domain, and displacement of existing residents and business -- all these are more cause for concern than the architectural style(s) of the buildings themselves.
As an aside, does anyone know what the story is behind that building on the south side of Atlantic between Sixth and Carlton (which would be destroyed under the Ratner plan)? How old about is it? I ask because the LIRR tracks curve around it, as can be seen on the NYT map (they had a good photo of it on their website, but I can't find it now).
While "Old" Modernism is guided mostly by rationality and Post-Modernism mostly by irationality. Both are just two generations of the same philosophy: "The past is for losers, the future is now". To me all these attempts to interpret the future however are purely formal exercises with little social significance.
post-modernism often embraces the past. it's not hard to see baroque and art nouveau (the past) in gehry. at their cores, the philosophies aren't very similar at all... as you pointed out with your rationality vs irrationality thought. the commonality is that they both reflect today's cultural values and technologies. which leads to your next point...
like it or not, the social significance of gehry's work couldn't be more obvious. bilbao has inspired many every day people in ways that haven't been seen since gothic cathedrals. obviously it's not for you but that does not make the work 'pure formal exercises'.
but to finish carrying your point to the next level of simplification, classicism and modernism are both guided by one philosophy: to shelter.
I wish Santiago Calavatra was chosen as the lead architect on this project. I think Gehry's design looks like a Las Vegas hotel. Brooklyn needs outstanding modern architecture to complement its turn of the century (Victorian/Queen Anne) architecture.
Baroque in Post-Modernism? Not without a vast oversimplification.
The use of curvilinear forms on Post-Modern architecture is coincidental. An end result of it's furious attempt to differentiate itself from the rectilinear forms of "Old" Modernism.
It's curvilinear forms are enormous, indelicate and distort the very structure of the building. Art-nouveau employed curvilinear forms as ornamentaion upon a tried and true template of building form. Gaudi's work at his most extreme still retained the look of a classic apartment house. To me gehry's work is brutal with none of the delicacy, sensuality, lavishness, and humanism of Art-Nouveau.
If Post-Modern architects are making any reference to the past, in my opinion, it's either lip service or a parody.
To be inspired by a visit to the Bilbao Guggenheim is one thing but to try to incorporate it into one's daily life for decades (whether one wants to or not) is another matter. Modernist and futurist painting, sculpture, and performance art was not designed to plop in the middle of a city and impose itself on the inhabitants the way architecture does.
For me, modern architecture works best when it's an extension of strutures of a Classic style, like Scarano & Associates' headquarters, or the Brooklyn Museum, or proposed Moynihan Station. The new Yankee Stadium is almost a reverse of this principal; an entirely new, state of the art, building that's anchored to the community around it, thanks to it's classic, timeless facade encasing it's modern interiors.
As pedestrian as it may sound nowadays, architecture should be more humanist because, as you said, it shelters. That is, of course, entirely up to the designer and most of all, the client.