May 5, 2008
Goodbye Miss Brooklyn: Ratner Goes to Plan B1
Developer Bruce Ratner and architect Frank Gehry have announced that ‘Miss Brooklyn,’ the 620-foot residential and commercial tower planned for the 22-acre Atlantic Yards project, has been scrapped. In its place they’re proposing a building called ‘B1’: a 511 foot tall structure that will now house commercial tenants only. If they can be found – Forest City Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for what will now be 650,000 of commercial space.
B1’s design is markedly different from the sleek Miss Brooklyn, which was to have risen higher than downtown Brooklyn’s tallest building, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Gehry’s redo is an amalgamation of asymmetrical stacked boxes – call it Miss Jenga – that he deems “more festive” than Miss Brooklyn.
A second building, dubbed ‘B2,’ would (theoretically) be built first. It’s a 340-foot building with 350 market-rate and affordable apartments, colored red and pink in order to “speak to the residential fabric of the neighborhood,” according to Gehry.
Atlantic Yards Report notes that the downsizing of Miss Brooklyn is old news, and a rally over the weekend drew hundreds of protesters who oppose the $4.2 billion project. In a Daily News Op-Ed yesterday, Ratner pledged to forge ahead.
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when I first looked at the picture, I thought it was satire; it literally looks like garbage.
Outter Burrougher - truth!
And as to the supposed "affordable" housing - be careful how you guys throw that term around. While it is true that a small proportion of the housing would be set aside for low income families, much of the 30% of the housing that's "affordable" is marketed for "moderate income families". This ain't helping the poorer residents, and is only "affordable" to those in certain income brackets...
frank gehry's butter has slid off his pancake.
HIDEOUS.
oh god. are there architects out there other then gerhy? that motherfucker is tapped for everything and IT ALL LOOKS THE SAME.
The Miss Bklyn design looked better, but only relatively.
Why do they still insist on trying this? They have been able to secure not one single tenant, and this plan works better?
really? that's an actual design? what a piece of shit. i know 4-year olds with a better sense of spatial relation.
i also agree with kingstonlounge's assesment. the idea that low-income families will gain a meaningful amount of affordable housing from this whole deal is ludicrous.
basically ratner just got to steal a whole bunch of prime real estate and he won't be doing anything to benefit the people who live here in return. he's a bigger piece of shit than that design.
Wow. What a horrible looking building!
Ugh!
I said before that Ratner baited the low-income housing activists and turned them against the Park Slope liberals who opposed the project. Now that he pushed this through with their complicity he can build what he always wanted, another Metro-Tech.
If you saw the movie "Idiocracy" with Luke Wilson, this design looks just like the futuristic run down city.
Dilapidated buildings rope-tied to one another to avoid collapse.
Cars driving right off of broken highways.
The sign of the hospital runs out of space, and the words spill over:
GENERAL HOSP
...............................IT
.................................A
....................................L
Finally The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been built full scale.
It almost makes your wonder if Gehry, who has shown little respect or regard for Kings County residents before, is just taking Ratner's money and giving the finger to the whole borough that's going to have to look at this pile of crap for a long time.
The one major comfort is that I doubt any of this will ever get built.
Also, rumor has it that Ratner is sniffing around for a buyer for the Nets.
I think Frank Gehry has reached the point in his career where he just says:
"F__k it. Just stack some blocks and let them throw money at me!"
There is no way this is happening anymore
Unless Ratner drives a truck full of money up to the home of every Brooklyn Politican
The Newark Nets will premiere in 2010 (at the latest)
It needs more terrace space.
The red building is gross.
This project is dead.
They won't find tenants for their towers, plus the arena will sit empty. If I'm the Nets why wait on this crap with there is a brand new arena waiting for you in downtown Newark?
So long Atlantic Yards...
Every single thing in that picture is ugly as sin. My two-year-old makes stuff like that out of wood blocks.
This architectural design is AWESOME!
By creating each floor out of 4 separate "boxes" that are all stacked askew to each other, the architect has effectively DOUBLED THE NUMBER OF CORNER OFFICES in the building! BRILLIANT!
See, he's created a structure with about 8 corners instead of 4.
Rock on!
Nice call on the allusion to Idiocracy. This does look a lot like a building designed by a 4-year-old.
I seem to be alone on this, but I think the design is friggin sweet. I'll take this over the craptastic sadness that is the Atlantic Center/Terminal. It certainly isn't what comes to mind when you think of Brookyln buildings, but the architectural landscape of a city is always changing and evolving. This particular design or direction might not be your cup of tea, and fair enough. But I find the design striking; challenging and interesting.
Why does anyone hire this hack, Gehry? Are they so taken with the hype surrounding the guy? Hey, Ratner, maybe you might just be able to afford to build something there if you didn't commission one of the most structurally and environmentally inefficient designs in the world. You can always find somebody who likes something hideous, just like some people like snakes, spiders or Sex in the City. But the rest of us have something called "taste."
Guh, it looks like a precariously balanced assemblage of trailer homes teetering over a quonset hut badly made out of salvaged materials. What is Gehry trying to communicate here? Is it an inside joke on the shaky and unstable nature of NYC real estate? It will only look more ridiculous due to its proximity to the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. Maybe this is Ratner's way of giving the architectural finger to neighborhood residents who opposed his grand scheme for the AY.
Dystopia
www.forgotten-ny.com
I hope buildings will always be built to look the same. Then nothing will ever look out of place.
@lombardicus
are you frank gehry? if you are, you have to tell us
I, for one, blame the midwest.
@petebfd
Unfortunately not, but I do wish he would use his position of influence in the world to bring words like "craptastic" into the modern architectural lexicon.
I understand that people don't like it, and I understand why people don't like it, and neither of those things bother me. I just happen to like it. I'd love to go to work there. I'd love to walk past it on the weekends. I'd love to show it to my folks or friends when they come to town. It is, as Spiritof76 points out in his/her own charming way, a matter of taste. I guess in this case, mine differs from most of the commenters here. I can live with that, and I hope they all can, too.
By the way, for what it's worth, I also happen to love unconditionally brownstone Brooklyn. In all my limited travels, nothing I've seen has ever seemed so perfect for urban neighborhood design as the brownstone. I just think there is room for competing styles in a big borough like Brooklyn, especially when the space being developed is a dilapidated industrial corridor along a high-traffic commuter artery.
Why does the big block building need a giant Epson printer next to it?
Post-modernism has jumped the shark. Thank. God.
I'm not a John Silber fan, but he was so right on about Gehry et al in his book Architecture of the Absurd.
lomardicus - I think there there are some very striking, interesting lines in the design. Unfortunately, this particular design looks poorly executed, as though it were a project a student forgot to do and then stayed up all night completing in the hopes that turning in any piece of garbage would be better than getting a late grade.
I think it's uglier because there is wholly unrealized potential in the main building (that and there's that disgusting abstract "giant Epson printer next to it").
Gehry can't do skyscrapers. All his tall building designs look like shit. There should be an ordinance forbidding Frank Gehry designing anything higher than eight stories.