A Pox on All your Stadiums

This was from a few weeks back, but I've been backlogged like whoa and am trying to keep up in fits and spurts. Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times had this wonderful article on the Nets' Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn and how Ratner and the other developer/owners had screwed over the city by promising a Frank Gehry-designed building which actually looked wicked cool and then using a bait-and-switch to pick up some generic design from corporate architecture firm Ellerbe Becket (Which sounds like a love-child between Jacoby Ellsbury and Josh Beckett, both of whom I hate). Ouroussoff had this to say about the new building:

A colossal, spiritless box, it would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis. Its low-budget, no-frills design embodies the crass, bottom-line mentality that puts personal profit above the public good. If it is ever built, it will create a black hole in the heart of a vital neighborhood.

Well, let us know how you REALLY feel about this, Nicolai. Ironically, Ellerbe Becket also designed Conseco Fieldhouse in Indiana, so that jab about the cornfield is quite apropos.

A massive vaulted shed that rests on a masonry base, the arena is as glamorous as a storage warehouse. A rectangular window overlooks Atlantic, but without the other buildings it lacks the sense of mystery and surprise that was such an essential part of the Gehry design. A trapezoidal brick and glass box at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush is obviously intended as an echo of Gehry’s public space. But Gehry’s room, several stories tall, soared over the intersection. Ellerbe Becket’s, lower to the ground, just sits there, adding nothing.

At any rate, having spent a summer in Brooklyn and looking at the area in question wondering what the Nets' new home was going to look like, this article has severely depressed me. Hopefully the Nets' front office will do something on Thursday that the Nets' ownership clearly is incapable of doing - keeping the community happy.