Delirious Gehryopolis

Another take on the Atlantic Yards question: The latest New York magazine features an article by Kurt Anderson, arguing that Brooklyn should embrace the Gehry-designed architectural gift that Forest City Ratner wants to give us.

What do the DHers think? Personally, as a member of the "the city’s BAM-loving chattering class" mentioned below, I think Gehry's brand is a little overextended. But more than that, doesn't Anderson overlook the fact that the Gehry building just one small part of a cluster of 17 crap highrises?

I've pasted excerpts below, or you can read "Delirious New York" on the magazine's website.

From "Delirious New York":

How can we be a city of glamorous cutting-edge architecture without finally getting our own Frank Gehry building or two or—hell, sure, why not—nineteen? The first, under construction on the West Side Highway in Chelsea, is a nine-story headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp. It’s a new Gehry iteration; instead of an exploded giant tin can, it will be boxier, more traditionally building-esque, with townhouse-size modules and wedding-cake setbacks wrapped in translucent textured glass. “We’re gonna do more things behind there, too,” Gehry says, suggesting a future Gehryfication of Tenth Avenue. “Housing and stuff.”

And next spring, construction should begin on the first Gehry skyscraper on the planet, a 74-story apartment tower (plus hospital and school) just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Given the string of abortive New York projects he’s been through (like the doomed ground-zero theater center), he doesn’t want to publish his design for Beekman Tower “until they’re sure they’re going to build.” But he showed me the renderings. For a Gehry building, it’s conservative, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—a classic Manhattan skyscraper with several setbacks. But for a Manhattan high-rise it’s radical, since it will likely be clad in titanium—creased and wrinkled as if it’s a few yards of draped fabric rather than a dozen acres of metal.

Bruce Ratner of Forest City is the developer, as he is of Piano’s Times building and of what will be a whole new Brooklyn downtown between Atlantic and Flatbush—a Nets arena plus a residential quarter as large as Rockefeller Center with sixteen buildings, all by Gehry. Freddy Ferrer called it “the twin brother of Bloomberg’s West Side stadium boondoggle,” but that’s wrong. The arena is the anchor of a thoroughly imagined project by an actual developer; basketball seasons have 41 home games instead of 8, thus generating more street life; and the architecture will be the work of a single-minded genius, not a big corporate firm. Simply because enormous redevelopment projects are often or even usually misguided (Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, the Jets’ stadium, Freedom Tower) doesn’t mean we ought to oppose them by default. Westway, for instance, should have been built, and so, probably, should Gehry’s Atlantic Yards.

The skewed, cartoony angles of the buildings, which range from 20 to 60 stories, would in one fell swoop create a second, sui generis Brooklyn skyline encompassing the familiar, phallic old Williamsburgh Bank Building. Gehry’s goal is for it to “look like it developed over time. Usually I would bring in other architects to make it look like a city, not like a development.” But many hands at the drawing table (or the CAD screen) is no guarantee of urban quality either: At Battery Park City the result has been, as Ratner says, “a mishmash of architecture.”

Thirty years ago, as the city entered a grotty, seemingly permanent twilight, Red Grooms and Rem Koolhaas produced their retorts to the gloom, the jolly walk-through installation Ruckus Manhattan and the alternative-urban-history book Delirious New York, respectively. Gehry’s scheme seeks to be a latter-day consummation of those visions. It could be magnificent. Of course, executed poorly—say, Battery Park City populated by Arquitectonica’s cheesy, strenuously fun Westin Hotel in Times Square—it could also be dreadful. Until now, most of Ratner’s buildings have ranged from the uninspired to the bad, like his shopping center across from the Atlantic Yards. Even he admits the Atlantic Center mall is “not up to snuff. Philip Johnson did a first design, but I made a decision not to use him. I have to blame myself. I’ve been talking for ten years about trying to use ‘design architects’ instead of ‘developer architects.’ ”

[....]
Given Ratner’s track record, I asked Gehry if at first he mistrusted Ratner’s professed new dedication to quality and innovation. “Yeah. Yes, I did.” And how did he get over his skepticism? “I’m still getting over it,” he says, although so far, “the budget busts have not been architectural ones. He’s always voted with me on the side of the architectural. He runs into roadblocks sometimes in his company, but it has not been cataclysmic.”

Ratner isn’t spending 15 percent extra on these new buildings simply because he wants to underwrite cool design. He understands that in Brooklyn, just as his quotas of apartments for poor people and construction jobs for women and minorities were ways of winning over key constituencies, hiring Gehry was politics by other means, sure to please the city’s BAM-loving chattering class. “The spirit of what you say,” Ratner agrees when I posit this theory, “is accurate.”

There will be many more political hoops to jump through, and what Gehry calls his “lefty do-gooder” side is under challenge. “Citizens’ groups all over the world are backfiring on good architecture. They should back off when somebody knows what they’re doing.” One of his daughters lives in Carroll Gardens, a mile from the site, and she, he says with a chuckle, “is probably one of those out protesting.”

[....]
Gehry is 76, Frank Lloyd Wright’s age when he got the Guggenheim job. Like Wright (like most architects), Gehry is not exactly fulsome with praise for his peers. When I asked which new New York buildings he liked, he laughed. “I guess I like the Meier buildings. I like the simplicity of [Cesar] Pelli’s towers”—such as the handsome and, yes, very glassy new Bloomberg L.P. headquarters at 59th and Lex. “I used him as a model for Beekman, his way of handling tall buildings; he doesn’t get it fussy.” Like Wright, Gehry is an out-of-towner, a brilliant eccentric, but also, improbably, the great brand-name architect of his time. If Atlantic Yards is completed on schedule, in 2016, he will still be four years younger than Wright was when Wright watched the Guggenheim—his first New York City commission and final masterpiece—being finished.