Even Shrunken, Gehry’s Atlantic Yards Could Transform Brooklyn

For Bloomberg, November 16, 2006

In Frank O. Gehry’s gigantic $3.5 billion Atlantic Yards proposal, 16 towers line-dance for more than half a mile down the Atlantic Avenue spine of Brooklyn. Some wave in rippling shiny metal and glass. Others twist in crazily stacked cubes of brick and stone. From a distance, you could think the borough’s spangled West Indian Day parade had become its skyline.

This vision – anchored by an 18,000-seat arena for the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets and including 7.9 million square feet of offices, hotels and apartments – was first unveiled three years ago by the local Forest City Ratner Companies. Smacked around by brutal and well-organized resistance, it emerged from the first stage of environmental review process November 15 looking considerably less exuberant and with eight percent fewer square feet.

No one’s better than Gehry at making hunks of metal flutter like confetti. But critics did not think even he could create a living mini-downtown over the derelict rail yards that slash through a jigsaw puzzle of largely residential neighborhoods.

Gehry and his team in Los Angeles have offered a convincing retort to these critics by treating the site’s 22 acres as a single work of architecture informed by orthodox planning principles. That’s why the ensemble of buildings has the potential to transform downtown Brooklyn brilliantly – but also why its flaws, in both planning and design, remain considerable.

The project is tallest and most dense at the intersection of Brooklyn’s chief thoroughfares, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. Four zigging, rippling, tilting towers, surround the arena, which will peek out between them in sleek glassy curves. Putting the most density here is conventional good planning, because the spot surmounts a busy transportation hub – 10 subway lines and the Long Island Rail Road – that will provide quick and easy access.

Because opponents have decried the scale of the towers, the City Planning Commission has negotiated lower heights. Scale isn’t just about height, though. Taller buildings, carefully shaped and slimmed, would look more appealing and less intrusive than the lower, thicker towers that will replace them. Now one of the lopped towers has been reduced to a brick-clad stump.

Still, the criticisms of the project’s enormity aren’t baseless. Gehry has failed to rework the streets and sidewalks to orchestrate the movement of people and vehicles into something gorgeously efficient (nor did officials insist). Laurie Olin’s sterile landscape design, piling on the palliative greenery instead of reaching out to meld with adjacent blocks, helps not at all.

A so-called “urban room” could have been a thrilling three-dimensional experience – a contemporary Grand Central – as it moves tens of thousands of people between the development and the transit complex. Instead it’s just an architectural doodad. Hordes will be forced to scuttle through an excessively cramped subway entry beneath the room. There’s no direct link to the Long Island Rail Road, even though the platforms run right next to the arena. Without a greater commitment to mobility, the traffic nightmare opponents predict will certainly come true.

Considering the degree to which the scheme depends on sensitive architecture, Gehry’s lyricism is still struggling to emerge. The tallest tower, coyly named Miss Brooklyn, anchors the Flatbush-and-Atlantic prow of the site with 58 stories of Gehry tics in nervously rippling metal and glass.

Gehry seems to have gone missing from the arena’s interior design, which looks generic as well as claustrophobic, wrapped in gathering spaces that are both undersized and underappealing. To get an idea of how bad it could be, visit the disgrace that is Madison Square Garden.

The architect lavished more attention on the line of towers, one as high as 40 stories, along the two long blocks of Atlantic Avenue east of the arena. These buildings could have formed a grim, clifflike perimeter facing the gentrifying Fort Greene neighborhood. Syncopated into a delightful boogie-woogie of faceted and tilting shafts, they could harness the energy of the busy but now derelict Avenue.

It’s typical of such large undertakings that the architecture remains vague until after the plans have jumped through all the regulatory hoops. But architecture is too essential to Atlantic Yards’ success to be left to the whim of the developer.

The design is supposed to be controlled by reams of guidelines, but these constraints are all too readily subverted when neighborhood-friendly proposals come up against a developer’s reflex to go cheap – which is what happened in the dumbed-down execution of the Times Square redevelopment and at the bowdlerized World Trade Center site.

Forest City Ratner is trying to overcome the mistrust it has sown in earlier Brooklyn projects by throwing in eight acres of public space and 2,250 units of discount-priced housing. But this is the group that birthed the Atlantic Terminal, a mall-and-office development veneered in low-budget ye-olde style. Crammed inside is the gloomy, scandalously small new railroad station that was the public justification for Forest City’s development. Since it’s next door to Atlantic Yards, this is not a good omen.