Everybody’s talking about Paul Goldberger’s piece in the New Yorker about Frank Gehry. According to Goldberger:
GOOD GEHRY: Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp bldg in Chelsea
BAD GEHRY: Atlantic Yards Proposed Design
ON DILLER’S PLACE: 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.ON ATLANTIC YARDS: It’s a shame that this quality hasn’t been more in
evidence in Gehry’s other New York venture, the Atlantic Yards
development, in Brooklyn. This cluster of skyscrapers extending
twenty-two acres around a new basketball arena for the Nets is the
biggest project he has ever undertaken, and it has been the subject of
bitter controversy for months. (Last month, following recommendations
from the City Planning Commission, the plans were scaled back by eight
per cent, but the project remains enormous.) Opponents complain that
the sixteen residential towers will create a wall between the
neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. So far, they have
cast the developer, Bruce Ratner, as the villain, suggesting that he is
cynically using Gehry’s name to add prestige to an ill-conceived
scheme. In an open letter to Gehry published in Slate,
the novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote, “I’ve been struggling to understand
how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an
unfortunate alliance, with such potentially disastrous results.”Yet
Gehry’s design is a large part of the problem. He told me that he
accepted the job in part because he has never taken on this kind of
urban challenge, but his talents hardly seem suited to it. Gehry’s
great success has come from architectural jewels that sparkle against
the background of the rest of a city—the Bilbao Guggenheim; the Walt
Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles. In Brooklyn, the task is to create
a coherent cityscape that relates comfortably to its surroundings.
Gehry tried to do this by grouping some understated towers around a few
very elaborate ones. (The six-hundred-and-twenty-foot-high main tower,
foolishly named Miss Brooklyn, is full of self-conscious Gehryisms.)
Rather than giving a sense of foreground and background, the
juxtaposition of plain and fancy just looks like a few Gehrys bought
for full price next to several bought at discount.