Bruce Ratner has made it official: Frank Gehry is out as designer of the benighted Atlantic Yards Project. Turns out the celebrated enabler of titanium dreams is just too darned expensive so Forest City Ratner has turned the cornerstone of the project, a basketball arena for Ratner’s Nets, over to the firm of Ellerbe Becket, whose unofficial motto is, “If you need a really big box, we will build it!”
Of course those of us opposed to the project, in which the arena has always been a stalking horse for the skyscrapers the Ohio-based developer really wants to build, have said all along that Ratner would drop Gehry. It’s what he does, as architecture writer Nicoloi Ouroussoff recognized in a scathing critique yesterday in which he labeled the bait a “bit of window dressing intended to give the project an aura of enlightenment” and the switch “a betrayal of the public trust.”
“A cold, characterless intersection might thereby be transformed into Brooklyn’s vibrant answer to Times Square, minus the saccharine Disney décor,” Ourossoff continued — and that was him being nice! (In fairness, the Times today said the Ellerbe Becket design was more like an airplane hangar than a box.) Gehry was always just the shiny bauble, or maker of shiny baubles, that lured otherwise sober citizens such as Kurt Andersen into thinking that the Atlantic Yards project might be a good thing for Brooklyn.
“Have you been to Bilbao?” they would ask, referring to the magnificent Guggenheim museum he designed and planted, like a spacecraft, by the river in an ancient Spanish city. Which is how most of the Gehry-lovers thought of Brooklyn in the first place: a distinctly foreign province that could use a good dose of world-class culture, like it or not. I was at a benefit for the the Brooklyn Museum not long ago, seated between a couple of well-heeled benefactors — both, notably, from the Upper East Side — when the subject came up.
One of them mentioned how much she loved Jhumpa Lahiri‘s last book. I mentioned that Lahiri (or “Jhumpa” as I like to call her) had done a reading at my house to benefit Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a neighborhood association that opposes the AY project. The silence that followed was deafening, or would have been if you could hear silence in the museum’s cavernous ballroom. “We’re all for not destroying Brooklyn,” one of them finally said, “but we also care about The Future.”
She pronounced it with caps like that, and I don’t think she was talking about the Leonard Cohen song either. She meant a big behemoth, representing progress, that cultural missionaries have always brought to simple primitives like us. The fact that the wheels are coming off Gehry’s glimmering gift gives me qualified pleasure (though it ain’t dead yet, kids! Get involved!). I guess we’ll just have to make do with the blossoming food and music scenes here, the non-stop party that is Fulton Street, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the countless artists, musicians and writers who have chosen to make this area their home. Somehow we’ll make do.