An ambitious, sprawling, and chaotic design plan was announced yesterday for developing the area around a proposed basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets in a Brooklyn neighborhood. It calls for building seventeen buildings including six skyscrapers, some reaching as high as sixty stories—all built above the arena court, all skewed at wild angles, and all covered in a kind of tres-haute graffiti. Oy veh! If that sounds almost too cartoonish to believe, even by the oh-so-hip-and-happening New York art world standards, just take a look at it!
The preliminary design for the project submitted by the avant-garde developer Bruce Ratner and the dystopic architect Frank Gehry, would add 6,000 residential units (housing roughly 15,000 people) and will cost around $3.5 billion while adding just under two million square feet of office space. It’s scandalously garish—even for one of Gehry’s typically horrendous designs (witness his bizarre Guggenheim Museum in Spain and his silly Disney Theater in LA).
Anyone who doubts that worldviews are evident in architecture simply needs to spend fifteen minutes thinking about where to put the couch and chairs in one of Gehry’s designs.
4 comments:
"Hey, Frank, someone sat on your model."
The consequence of ideas in architecture is always interesting, unlike art and literature, buildings still have to stand up and hold together, they have to actually be ordered, even if the architect tries desperately to make it look like chaos. And so we have stuff like this, where the engineers actually have to work harder to make it stay together while looking like it won’t. Try as they might, they can never get away from the way God made the world.
Someone from Credenda/Agenda once pointed out that the mirrored skyscrapers of today show our fixation on the now. That leads to all sorts of wondering about other architectural fads. Mr. Gehry is another good example of worldview consequences.
It is horrid. I hope this helps stop it:
http://banananutrament.blogspot.com/2005/07/how-to-defeat-ratner-and-nets-we-need.html
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