New York | Atlantic Yards | Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin

[ARA]

Atlantic Yards from Frank Gehry and Laurie Olin
May 11, 2006




GEHRY-RIGGED
Two New York projects show how to use Frank Gehry and how not to.
by PAUL GOLDBERGER
Issue of 2006-10-16 Posted 2006-10-09

Frank Gehry may be the most famous architect at work today, but, like so many of his peers, he has found it nearly impossible to build in New York. Twenty years ago, he designed a tower for the site of Madison Square Garden which never got built, and in recent years a number of projects—a redesign of One Times Square, a downtown branch of the Guggenheim, a hotel for Ian Schrager—have all foundered. Now, at the age of seventy-seven, Gehry has completed his first freestanding New York building, a headquarters for Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, in Chelsea. It is only ten stories tall, but you can’t drive down the West Side Highway without seeing it—a white glass palazzo that looks less like a building than like a computer-generated image of one. On a cloudy day, it appears to fade into the mist. Gehry has likened the billowing forms of the façade to sails, and from a distance it seems to be made of some kind of plastic or fibreglass. All-glass buildings often feel stiff, but in Gehry’s hands even glass is relaxed.
(...)

(artigo TheNewYorker)
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/skyline/articles/061016crsk_skyline



culturebox: Arts, entertainment, and more.
Brooklyn's Trojan HorseWhat's wrong with the buildings Frank Gehry wants to put in my neighborhood?
By Jonathan Lethem
Posted Monday, June 19, 2006, at 12:14 PM ET

Dear Frank Gehry,

We've never met, but last month I sent you a letter. You didn't answer, so I'm trying again. I'm a novelist who grew up in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, and who lives there now (I've also lived in Oakland, Toronto, and in rural Maine, in case you find my perspective suspiciously parochial). The subject of my letter is the ill-conceived and out-of-scale flotilla of skyscrapers you propose to build on a series of sites between Atlantic Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn, in your partnership with a developer named Bruce Ratner and his firm, Forest City Ratner Companies.
Most people, if they've heard of this proposal at all, believe you've been hired to design a sports arena, to house the New Jersey Nets, a team owned by Mr. Ratner. Anyone who's glimpsed the drawings and models, however, knows that other, larger plans have overtaken the notion of a mere arena. The proposal currently on the table is a gang of 16 towers that would be the biggest project ever built by a single developer in the history of New York City. In fact, the proposed arena, like the surrounding neighborhoods, stands to be utterly dwarfed by these ponderous skyscrapers and superblocks. It's a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I'd think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but aesthetically—and socially—disastrous new development to Brooklyn. Your presence is intended to appease cultural tastemakers who might otherwise, correctly, recognize this atrocious plan for what it is, just as the notion of a basketball arena itself is a Trojan horse for the real plan: building a skyline suitable to some Sunbelt boomtown. I've been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an unfortunate alliance, with such potentially disastrous results. And so, I'd like to address you as one artist to another. Really, as one citizen to another. Here are some things I'd hope you'll consider before this project advances any further.

(artigo Slate.com)
http://www.slate.com/id/2143634/


Fotografias
http://www.atlanticyards.com/html/footer/images.html

[JVS]

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Architect Frank Gehry stripped of lead role in New York projectGehry's firm dealt another blow as he is removed from designing the $4bn Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn

Ed Pilkington in New York

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 June 2009 18.35 BST

Article history

Frank Gehry has been removed from the Atlantic Yard project in Brooklyn. Photograph: Robert Gallagher/Guardian

New York's hard-headed commercial approach to urban development has delivered a blow to the celebrity architect Frank Gehry by stripping him of his lead role in a multi-billion dollar project in Brooklyn.

Gehry, who is known for his tumbling titanium designs showcased at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and the Los Angeles Walt Disney concert hall, has spent six years working on the $4bn (£2.4bn) Brooklyn development known as Atlantic Yards. It would have turned a run-down 9 hectare (22 acre) site and injected it with 17 new buildings including up to 6,400 apartments.

But this week the developers, Forest City Ratner, announced that Gehry had been removed from designing any of the individual buildings. Though the Canadian-born architect remains nominally the master planner for the site, this constitutes a heavy setback for his LA-headquartered practice that has already lost half of its staff over the past year.

At the centre of his plan would have been a $1bn arena with seating for 20,000 fans of the Nets basketball team which is currently squatting in New Jersey. The arena bore many of the hallmarks of Gehry's unique style, it would have been surrounded by tumbling towers, though in this case built in glass.

In its place, Ratner has placed a new design by a conventional mid-western firm of architects, Ellerbe Becket. Their design would cost $200m less than Gehry's but would have none of the star quality or inventiveness of its predecessor.

The switch in designs has invoked a furious response. The influential architecture critic of the New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff, savaged the move as a "shameful betrayal of the public trust that gave New Yorkers the message that good architecture was an expendable luxury".

He described the Ellerbe Becket design as a monstrosity, "a colossal, spiritless box" that would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than in a vibrant city. "The arena is as glamorous as a storage warehouse," was his conclusion.

Others have likened the proposed arena to an airplane hangar from the 1950s.

Atlantic Yards was one of several mega-developments across New York, that were spawned at the height of the boom when the city was awash with money and optimism but have since stalled. In the past two years the Brooklyn project has become bogged down in legal challenges from local protests groups that argue it is too high-rise and monolithic for the area.

The economic downturn has also struck, forcing Ratner to delay or scale back much of the scheme.

The company made reference to the economic chill in a statement about the change in designers. It said: "Obviously the world has changed significantly since the project was proposed and we are making every effort to adapt to these changes while meeting the high standards we set for the project."

Gehry has expressed regret that his design is not going forward but said: "We remain extremely proud of our work on the Atlantic Yards master plan and on the original arena."

in http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jun/11/frank-gehry-atlantic-yards-brooklyn

[Pinus]

O "jovem promissor" Frank Gehry, uma vez mais (já não bastava o parque mayer) foi rejeitado, será que o mundo não está preparado para os seus projectos, ou os seus projectos é que não estão preparados para o mundo?!