The Guardian Unlimited ran on story on Jonathan Lethem’s letter to Frank Gehry. I didn’t know Gehry was "embroiled in a long-running battle" on the Hove seafront in the south of England.

Frank Gehry is fighting a war on both sides of the Atlantic. The Pritzker prize-winning septuagenarian architect is already embroiled in a long-running battle to build a pair of tower blocks on Hove seafront, described by Gehry as "Victorian women in wind-blown dresses". Now it seems that he has some even more formidable opponents than the genteel residents of Brighton and Hove: angry Brooklynites.

The latest images of Gehry’s Brooklyn project, a $3.5bn forest of skyscrapers, were unveiled to the press last month. The New York-based novelist Jonathan Lethem, in an open letter to Gehry published in online magazine Slate, described the development as "a nightmare for Brooklyn" that would cause "irreparable damage" to the quality of life in the district. "To my unschooled eye," wrote the man whose 2005 novel The Fortress of Solitude was in many ways a paean to Brooklyn, "these buildings have emerged pre-botched by compromise, swollen with expediency and profit-seeking".