[QUOTE=ablarcChances are pretty good he doesn't know yet what the billowy white amorphous clouds are that so offended you, BKM. Give it time; those will come into focus too. You don't have to be finished while you're in mid-process.[/QUOTE]
But this is Gehry we're dealing with, and for all we know, maybe those billowy white amorphous clouds are an actual part of the building.
Oh, they are indeed, but their exact nature and construction are probably still forming in his mind.Originally posted by asohn
Guano applied over saran wrap.
No, you are incorrect, SIR. TEH GREAT MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS would only use a special organic sludge purified through a proprietary process (which costs $300/square foot to apply by specially trained technicans from Austria) that attracts clouds of flies to the neighborhood.
APPLIED OVER
a special multipolymer film that traps all heat in the buidling and will requre repeated retrofitting over time to stop endemic leaks that cost the developer thousands in mold claims..
You got a pic anywhere we can link to? Always ready to change my mind if sufficient evidence is provided (I know, I know, scientific positivism is sooo 19th century..)
Admittedly subjective statement (and I think there is very little that is subjective in urban design/architecture): Koolhaas and Hadid buildings remind me of asylums, secret police headquarters, death, loss. Calatrava and Gehry buildings suggest life, exhuberance, glamor, fun. I know which I'd choose. I think Koolhaas, if half of what I read in the New Yorker some in Rotterdam..) is beyond repeal; truly an abjectly awful, human-hating, city-vandalizing monster. Sorry, but I feel strongly about this. Every time I see a truly hideous building I feel as if someone were allowed to make me wear ugly, uncomfortable clothes for as long as they wished.
Rant over.
Last edited by Tranplanner; 07 Jul 2005 at 9:09 AM.
Life and death of great pattern languages
This is a bit off topic but I just looked up Frank Gehry on Wikipedia and his birth name is Eprhaim Goldberg - where'd he get Frank Gehry from?
If the center in question is the Stata Center, then behold the second half of this post (broadband recommended): MIT and Gehry's Stata Center, 22 Apr 2004
Actually, though, that only shows the Vassar Street (loading dock) side, which isn't nearly as cool as the side actually facing campus. Here's a more comprehensive gallery.
Seen the pics. No. Sorry. Don't see it. Just about any beaux arts / art-deco public building I've ever seen beats it hands down . The only thing goign for it is that it 'looks different'. That is a rather debased measure of architectural value.
Life and death of great pattern languages
I think John Massengale asks some important questions (as usual)
" We know Gehry can design individual civic monuments / object buildings, but can he design several blocks of urban fabric? Do we want one architect designing all those towers? Do we want all those towers in a low-rise Brooklyn neighborhood, no matter how good they are?
Even the much smaller Rockefeller Center had mulitple hands designing the different towers. And Rockefeller Center was built by the richest man in the world, during the depression, as an eponymous legacy for his family. While Forest City Ratner is better known for quantity than quality. They've never hired a Starchitect before, and it's easy to think they did this solely in order to wring more concessions from the city. (Like the $200 million the city and the state are supposed to kick in.)
Will the tilted towers look like Toontown? Does anyone in Brooklyn want a streetscape like that, particularly when it's only on one side of the street? Most of the answers are unknown at this point. I'd be happy to see Gehry design a great ensemble, but some of the questions would still remain"
He's more kind than he should be.
That is an excellent question. Excellent, excellent. I hope you realize the intent of my post from earlier. I don't know if it was apparent to everyone else, but folks here are reacting to Gehry's conceptual design, when in fact I found the intent behind Ablarc's post to be more compelling. His anti-planner stance is becoming more and more obvious to me, and I am not sure whether we should ignore him or engage him. For example, when I posted, "The planner in me wants to analyze, to be neutral until I can assess the impacts of the proposal," my intent was to indicate how a planner should think about the Gerhy proposal, which is obviously different from any possible inherent personal curiosity I might have about it. In fact, my comment was sort of a subtle and specific critique of certain types of architectural professionals that I have dealt with, in the context of the site plans that I have reviewed that are oftentimes missing critical information and are blatantly misleading. It's one thing for archtiects to suggest that planners are close-minded, weak-thinkers, and constrained regulators, but another for the architect to understand how we think and the duty and responsiblity we have to uphold the public trust. Perhaps Tranplanner's comment from earlier is somewhat on the mark, but maybe the basis for one's pomposity and arrogance is borne out of ignorance.
But having said all that, I am in no way critiquing Ablarc specifically. I like the way he challenges planners and contemporary zoning codes and I welcome his posts and comments. There is more I can say about this, but I'll save those comments for other threads.
OK, my mind has come to a bit of a consensus.
This project is sh!t.
The ONLY redeeming idea is of placing the stadium in the centre of the block, with buildings surrounding it within the bordering streets. This is a good use of space.
Why, planners of course. This is what they should be doing, since they mostly can’t design. You don’t have to be able to do something to be a good critic or impresario.
I just wish planners had better judgment about these things. Then you could trust them to make such important decisions. In a better world, they would.
The key of course is better and more relevant education for a changing world in which suburban nonsense will count less as time goes by. Planning school, as abrowne’s curriculum demonstrates, is so focused on trivia that you can’t blame people for not getting the tools for a broad view.
Just look at the comments about Gehry’s project on this forum; they focus on the most superficial aspects of its appearance.
If you just go by the comments and criticisms that have been posted, everybody here seems obsessed with the look, the styling, relatively trivial traits: literally skin-deep, frivolous talk about fluff. Could that be because Gehry and Ratner have already got the underlying planning principles aced? After all, they aren’t very complicated to those who know cities. The fundamentals all seem sound to me; the styling issues are interesting but belong at cocktail parties and gallery openings.
Wanigas?, the planning aspects of this project are copiously covered in hundreds of pages of posts (see the link to Wired New York); I like your attitude and would like to hear your considered comments from a city planning perspective, but take your own advice and ignore the styling. As for my putative agenda, the impulse behind the post was to share news, but it has indeed become what you thought was the initial motive.
Maybe there’s meaning to the silence on fundamentals; maybe there isn’t much to criticize there. In the end, the technical issues of city design are nowhere near as abstruse as many make out, though people who aren’t really familiar with them can be pardoned for thinking they’re complex and baffling.
The political and interpersonal processes of city building, however, are so complicated that they should be left to those who can operate in those arenas; this is where planners have plenty of useful experience. Presently however, the theories and often the goals are fatally flawed, and no use at all to anybody who wants walkable cities to revive.
* * *
abrowne, there are plenty of redeeming aspects besides the arena placement; see if you can find them.
Last edited by ablarc; 07 Jul 2005 at 10:33 PM.
Oh come on, ablarc. You are ignoring the main point; Gehry has been annointed by the architectural press and academy and writers for media organs like the NYT, hardly "planners." That's why "everyone" considers him a genius. It's a giant intellectual circle jerk little different than the modernist gurus you dismiss. What happened to the "horrors" of buildings as sculpture you werer ranting about repeatedly in various posts?
And, you may dismiss as minor details issues of scale, precedent, proportions, materials, forms, neighborhood desires, and hypercommercialism-all are unimportant compared to some arcane "urbanism" that the Great Master somehow gets right. This is not criticism, this is mumbo jumbo mysticism.
I am far less convinced. I give up. Perhaps you can post the next Diller Scofield cloud of fog as the next "urban solution" for, say Baltimore?
As Donald Trump said about the first Freedom Tower design....this is JUNK ARCHITECHTURE!! I love the concept of building up downtown Brooklyn, as it wholly deserves a thriving downtown, but come on now. Please make buildings that stand up STRAIGHT!
Don't turn Brooklyn into a test lab for trendy (and trashy) architecture.
I didn't say planners had annointed Gehry; I said in a better world, they should be defining the real talent. You asked the question, I answered it.
Please read with more precision; I try to write clear sentences.
It isn't the category a building fits into that determines its excellence (that's the dismal trap Modernists and other style mavens fall into all the time); it's how well something's done. Koolhas and Gehry are both starchitects who deal in sculptural form, but one's all thumbs and the other's an artist.
I don't know for an absolute fact that when this project's finished it'll be a grand slam, and you don't know for a fact that it'll be a ludicrous failure; but Gehry's recent track record's pretty good, despite hot-spot reflections (which are both trivial and fixable), and he deserves a wait-and-see attitude. You might want to read up a little on the auteur theory; it was cooked up for the movies, but it applies to all the arts.
I don't dismiss them; those are exactly the issues he did get right (not perfect; we can all find some fault, and there's a little room for opinion), and he's created a visual extravaganza on top of it. Not many can do the second part, and most people shouldn't even try (they'll end up like Koolhas), but lots of folks can do an ok job on the issues you list.
Check out the project (link to Wired New York, above) in depth and verify this for yourself. If after you do that, you still feel he hasn't, write a thoughtful analysis of how and why he fails, not just assertions and bile.
It seems to me that the progress of planning has been away from the belief that planners know what's best for the city to a perspective that holds that we might not be doing the right thing, so that everything must be done with restraint. The old bulldozer bureaucrats like Moses saw themselves as engineers, creating a good place to live out of the chaos of the city. But the freeway revolt, the failure of housing projects, expressways, etc. and Jane Jacobs really caused a reevaluation of that.
So planning as a profession underwent a radical shift. It's not really "planning" anymore, not like it was. Now the job of the planner is more one of administration. His job isn't to come up with big, grand visions, but rather deal with things often one house at a time. Even when he develops master plans, they're quite vague and often aren't followed anyway. A lot of this I think is that planners were forced into this position by a public that was tired of what was happening, but I think much more of it has been a new humility on the part of planners. Planners don't pretend that they know anything. Look at how cynical this board is towards DPZ. It's not that most here don't agree with what DPZ is saying, but we have enough respect for urbanity that we don't think it can be "done up" in the middle of a corn field -- no matter how "smart" the planners designing it are.
It seems to me that architecture never had such a revelation. They're still stuck in "lone genius" mode, and Ablarc characterizes that belief. He's put his faith in Gehry for God knows what reason. Planners are so cynical of the model of lone genius that they look past whatever it is that Ablarc sees and understands that the Gehry "shiny ****" fad is no different than the brutalist fad that Ablarc despises. If architecture is to break out of the rut of going from one mistake to the next, it's going to have to learn the humility that planning developed a long time ago.
Well put, jordan; I think you're right on all counts.
Planners went directly from one extreme to the other, and both ends of the spectrum are wrong. What's needed is a little centrism on this matter, and that's why I talk up the opposite extreme; the hope is that on the way to the spectrum's other end, folks will linger a while in the middle this time.
I agree with you about architects. Yet what hope there is for improvement comes largely from them, if only be default; Duany's an architect.
And though he's a bit high-handed in person, he knows how to go through the paces of community involvement; in other words he has the know-how to be a politician. Lots of folks have that, but for a variety of reasons far fewer have his firm grasp of the (not-so-complex) knowledge needed to design a city.
That's where planners can improve: they can discard their suburban know-how, and once they have more prowess they can move back towards the middle in exercising judgment and advocacy.
* * *
P.S. I don't despise all Brutalism, fwiw.
jordanb Very well thought out points. I'm inclined to agree.
ablarc I would also agree that centrism relating to "lone stars" and "absolute cynical outlook" is a good idea. But the problem this thread has is just simply one of taste. I don't really like Gehry. Lot's of people don't like Gehry. Lot's of people do. I recognize that his projects are not disasters, and some are certainly quite good and I find them to my liking - but his style in general is distasteful to me. Perhaps it is because I am from Vancouver, where we have so little old architecture and old urban fabric, that I find his alien structures to be offensive.
I recognize that the foundations of this project seem (I have not had time to scour through the WiredNewYork thread as you have) to be in place - large number of residents, decent retail, presumably strong transit, central location, and even an anchor tenant - the stadium - that should keep the micro area fairly prosperous and lively even in times of economic downturn.
There are plenty of people who can figure out these foundations, though. Not all is garbage today - many of your posts here reflect these gems that appear from time to time. Once the foundation is more or less established, you can be justified in critiquing the aesthetic. I feel that while this project does not look bad (if one wanted to simplify it to this), it is very distinctive and jarring - and like other distinctive and jarring things it will probably not age well, and become rather ugly in common opinion.
The tilting tower image I recall seeing elsewhere. I believe it is used, albeit on a far smaller scale, on a Vancouver "tinseltown" development - a low rise retail structure beside our arena district. Being only 4 stories high it can only be used as an example to a certain point, but it is still enough to make me weary of the entire motif.
Futher, I am very suspicious of celebrity worship, and I see elements of it here that upset me. Surely someone could have been found - *gasp* a local, I dare say? - to lead the design or at least have local design input as to what THEY want to see?
Thank you, jordan, for writing so well and clearly-you summarize why I have had such a visceral reaction to this Brooklyn project.
ablarc: I will be more fair. I will read the Wired New York posts in more detail. Maybe I am being unfair. It's just that jordan is right: we are immeidately suspicious of the genius model because it has been so damaging in the past. I am not a fan of his amorphous computer sketches as published in the past. They are amusing at best, but I still don't see them as great urbanism. There are too many blank walls, too many hostile facades. We will see.
As I see it there are two sides to Gehry. There is the fun, cartoony side that we see in Disney Hall. Then there is the dark side, the tortured building in mid-collapse seen in the Stata center. This plan combines parts of both. I can stomach the cartoon Gehry, but the tortured Gehry gives me an ulcer. It's the anthropomorphic nature of buildings that creates this. Seeing a tortured building makes me feel like I'm watching a man being tortured. Maybe that's popular in America these days but it doesn't make for a great place to live, which is the ultimate purpose of the city.
That's a perceptive analysis, jaws. One source for Gehry's "tortured city" style is Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a movie about an "idealist" tyrant who tortured and regimented an entire society, as exemplified in the city, Metropolis. Clearly and amazingly, this silent movie foreshadowed Hitler, an "idealist" tyrant who...; it certainly unleashed German Expressionist set design as a potential architectural style--a style that's now been realized by Gehry.
Both Lang and Gehry drew inspiration from the mystic philosopher and architect, Rudolf Steiner.
Not very familair with Steiner...
Metropolis' buildings remind me a lto of the drawings by A. Sant''Elia
Life and death of great pattern languages
OK, I'm open to the idea of planners defining the talent, but how can you keep such a system from becoming rife with corruption? You'd have architects paying off planners for a positive review. Would the in-place checks and balances suffice? How would it appear to you if you went to the building inspector's office for an electrical permit and they told you which electrician to use? Maybe my cynicism is born of being in a state known for corrupt, pay-to-play politics and planners elsewhere find that they are not led into temptation. Then again, design competitions for urban schemes are a form of planners (aming others) defining the talent and occasionally that route produces successful results.
Adrift in a sea of beige
Luca:
Rudolf Steiner, 1861-1925:
Joh, the tyrant of Metropolis.
http://skepdic.com/steiner.html
http://www.nasites.com/cmprojects/pr...olis_Notes.pdf
Scenes from the films of Fritz Lang and C.W. Murnau:
* * *
boilerplater:
But only those who can recognize it; this’ll take a little uptick in education.
Sounds so…Third World. Since leaving Boston and New York for my Sunbelt Valhalla, I’ve heard neither hide nor hair of corruption, though there’s a good deal of good-ol’-boyism (that used to be called human relations).
boilerplater, you’d have to get people from the highest strata of achievement, perceptiveness, open-mindedness and detachment. Older achievers who are near the ends of illustrious careers fit this bill; they’re less likely to be on the take; they have big, painstakingly-assembled reputations to preserve; and they can sit back and let themselves be motivated by eleemosynary urges.
These are the same august and philanthropic folks you find on panels like the Nobel Prize Committee, and boards of foundations and museums; and you don’t have to worry about their age making them hidebound in outlook. A youthful outlook’s a state of mind, not a function of age; you don’t give up thinking on the cutting edge if you’re used to it (Gehry’s 76), and youth is no guarantee of progressive thought; just look at some of the posts on this board that come from youngish folks.
Can you imagine Jackie Onassis taking a bribe? Or George Soros? Or Sean Connery? Or Bono?
And it’s disingenuous to pretend you can’t tell for the most part who the good-performers will be (why do they give prizes for achievement?), and that everybody’s judgment is equally valid (why don’t we have the Nobel Prize awarded by department store clerks?), and that everybody’s equally subject to the blandishments of lucre (why don’t we have convicted felons drive Brink’s trucks?). No; the system won’t be perfect (what human endeavor is?), and there will be occasional abuse (and more frequent accusations), and plenty of controversy. And wrong decisions will be made.
But wrong decisions are made now, and the system that’s presently in place holds out no hope whatever of improvement, just more and more idiotically specific regulations piling up and getting in the way.
New York has the Municipal Arts Society (plenty of clout) that’s composed of such folks, Washington has the slightly less illustriously-performing Fine Arts and Pennsylvania Avenue Commissions. In provincial places you’ll get provincial commissions that make provincial decisions; but hey, some would say that’s as it should be.
Maybe. And maybe my optimism comes of having been privileged to observe people acting principled and high-minded.
I’ve flown in the face of so many currently-held articles of faith already in this post; I might as well add one more for the jaded to deride: Given the right context, the best people will take the opportunity to rise to the occasion.
After that, it’s just a question of finding them. That’s not nearly as hard as the relativistic obfuscators and cynics would have us believe.
Very occasionally. Can you name specific examples? I can name design competitions aplenty that have produced horse-manure; WTC Master Plan’s an example.
Last edited by ablarc; 11 Jul 2005 at 3:08 PM.
Would we build like this because we should, because it satisfies some deep-rooted human need, or because our mastery of technology allows us to do so?
As Theophilus White wrote when Penn considered trearing down (what is now) the architecture library: I'd wish to experience the new building before the university tears down the old one.
I have seen
old ships sailing
like swans asleep
Quote
