“Starchitects.” Just to mutter the word is to enunciate a paradox, because starchitects are increasingly becoming known for everything they do except design buildings. And in becoming stars, they become objects of derision. For that is another paradox of stardom: we love to hate stars. Whether the star be a foolish teenager who can’t drive sober or an architect whose work is otherwise redoubtable, being in the public eye is to be in the public’s sights. And the guns they are a-blazin. Contradiction, of course, is key to the society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord theorized in 1967.

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Both No Land Grab and Atlantic Yards Report commented on Nicolai Ouroussoff’s article, “Modernist Master’s Deceptively Simple World,” about the Portuguese architect Àlvaro Siza in Sunday’s NY Times. Siza, according to Ouroussoff, is a Modernist architect quite unlike starchitect Frank Gehry. Other than in the first sentence, Gehry goes unmentioned in the article, but I believe his spectral presence in the article can be concretized by a closer reading of this allusive text. (I don’t want Picketing Henry Ford to be considered simply a source for anti-Gehry jeremiads, but because Lumi Rolley mentioned this blog on NLG in reference to Ourossoff’s article, and because of my modest experience reading architecture criticism, I felt I should post this decoding of the text. Also, my own writing is often overly allusive, so it’s helpful for me to work through similar writing by someone else. By way of explanation for this blog’s silence of late, I should say that I’ve been working on a more thorough-going criticism of the way neoliberalism intersects with the built urban world, which you’ll be reading soon enough.)
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The lawsuit filed recently by opponents of the Atlantic Yards (AY) project seeks to “to annul the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) and the approval of Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project”; defendants are the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Given their less-than-stellar record on transparency, accountability, and ethics, it may be surprising that these agencies did not jump at the chance to give the AY project a thorough “terrorism” review, assessing its vulnerabilities, because there is nothing more purely unanswerable to public, citizen oversight than claims of national security. But the ESDC, PACB, and MTA (no word yet on the NYPD) punted on the terrorism review.

 

 

In this post, I discuss the relationship of political Islamist terrorism to neoliberalism through the lens of this large development project, which is using highly leveraged finances and the high-tech architecture of Frank Gehry. I also discuss “securitization,” a term I am using differently from its traditional meaning, to describe the sublimation of urban security features into a totalizing ideology of security and how this process may negatively affect both the architectural character of the project and the actual people, particularly local minorities, who support the project.

 

 

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At the NYC Grassroots Media Conference on Saturday February 24th, I will moderate a panel discussion with bloggers Lumi Rolley of No Land Grab and Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report and a spokesperson from Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

The panel discussion is at 3:45pm, ’til 5:15pm, at The New School University Graduate Faculty Building, which is 65 5th Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets.

If you are interested in attending, you can save money by pre-registering for the conference on the NYC GMC website.

Here is an overview of the planned discussion:

This panel will address the grassroots-media response to the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Though the response was not coordinated and arose organically, it can serve as a model for other communities and struggles facing a well-funded, sophisticated media machine. Whereas the project’s developer had access to many mainstream media, the opposition’s responses to it coalesced around websites, blogs, and message boards. Two primary watchdog blogs, whose writers will speak on this panel, Atlantic Yards Report and No Land Grab, exemplify how committed citizens can use available technology to inform communities, journalists, and lawmakers. The former began as an independent journalist’s response to inaccurate coverage of the Atlantic Yards project in the The NY Times and grew to become a fact-checking site that offers fact-checking and a counter-narrative enabled by the myriad information about the project available online from the government and the developer, as well as in mainstream publications. No Land Grab is a clearinghouse for any and all information relating to the project, with links to stories from both the grassroots and the mainstream, allowing interested citizens to follow the project as it has unfolded in real time. A spokesperson from the umbrella opposition group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn will speak about the effects of independent and grassroots media on the struggle over the Atlantic Yards. This panel reveals the paradox of corporate message hypermanagement: although corporations and governments attempt to control every aspect of their public presentation in all media forms, the proliferation of media allow concerned citizens access to heretofore unavailable information, shedding light on the inconsistencies, distortions, and failures, as well as the strategy, of the message control. In the case of the Atlantic Yards project, an overarching message encouraged by the developer was race- and class-based divisiveness, and this panel will show how grassroots media can expose divisiveness, and its connection to top-down planning, through rigorous analysis of such tactics.

I hope to see you there!

At times this blog nearly writes itself. The announcement that Barclays, a British investment bank with nary a US commercial branch, will pay for naming rights of the Gehry-designed basketball arena to be built at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues is one such time. I have argued that undergirding the Atlantic Yards (AY) development is the immense movement of global capital associated with speculative real estate, even as this evolution in capitalism is responsible for the precarious economic position of so many minority communities in Brooklyn, whom Forest City Ratner (FCR) has enlisted for support of the project even though they are the least likely to reap any benefit from it. Additionally, I have argued that this project is especially characterized by a disconnect between superficial images and reality, a disconnect endemic to our hypervisual society, but increased by the use of a sham democratic review process, paid-off supporters, and an architect who, perhaps more than any of his peers, privileges the surface of his structures in order that they might enter into the image-based branding lexicon of their hometowns. So here we are with a project sold to Brooklyn on the supposed merits of Brooklyn-specific criteria, from the deep wound we are all supposed to have suffered by the Dodgers’ departure to the architecture’s wince-inducing echo of a likely apocryphal Brooklyn bride. Enter Barclays for the sole purpose of capitalizing on imagery. Deputy Mayor for Unreasonable Development Daniel Doctoroff tells it like it is: “To have an international investment bank without a major local presence to invest the way they are in the image of Brooklyn and the image of New York just is a remarkable vote of confidence. The idea of using Brooklyn and New York to build a global brand is one that we think is a very wise investment.� The terms “image� and “brand� are ubiquitous in any discussion of the AY project.

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This is the second part of a 2-part post in response to a piece written by Jonathan Liu for N+1, which, in my estimation, gave a sophisticated defense for the Atlantic Yards (AY) project that is representative of the position held by many proponents of the plan, even those supposedly on the Left. I begin with a quote.

Capitalism: On the other hand, if it is truly capital’s “brain-dead imperatives” that they object to, then “Atlantic Yards” is only a tiny symptom; now’s as good a time as any for revolution, and, given the word, I’d happily join the Brooklyn vanguard at the barricades. Liu writes that the Atlantic Yards is only a tiny symptom of, as Lethem phrases it, “capital’s brain-dead imperatives.” He is wrong. AY, both in the process by which it has been conceived, and in the way Gehry imagines it, encompasses exactly the most brain-dead, soul-slaughtering of capitalism’s endemic qualities. So let’s look more closely at, first, Gehry’s architecture, as it embraces the nefarious qualities of the spectacle-commodity, and, second, the process, as it is defined by spectacle.

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The votes are in, and the loser is…Frank Gehry. Everywhere I look lately, Gehry is on the receiving end of a critical hurtin’. Reliable and even-keeled critics, previous fans of his work, like Paul Goldberger and Martin Filler, have voiced skepticism about the Atlantic Yards (AY) project. Filler’s criticism impressed me because his past enthusiasm for Gehry struck me as unwarranted and unpersuasive. But his recent critique—nay, excoriation—of the AY project should have Gehry crying “Uncle!” Also, I am grateful to Filler for informing us of the quid pro quo between Gehry and Ratner after The New York Times Company and Ratner hired Renzo Piano to design the new Times tower. With the completion of the ICA building, Gehry’s first work in Manhattan, we may be seeing more negative reception, such as James Gardner’s in that progressive rag The New York Sun. At this point, other than Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times (whose tune, I expect, will change), Jonathan Liu, writing for N+1, seems to be the only serious critic left in the ignominious position of defending Gehry. This two-part post will take a closer look at Liu’s argument with the intent of elucidating the larger theme of the way the Atlantic Yards project and Gehry’s architecture fits into our present neoliberal, hypercapitalist society of the spectacle. I single out Liu not because I have some beef with him—I’ve never actually read him before—but because his criticism articulates quite well the beliefs of other supporters of the AY project.

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Anyone who reads urbanism/architecture criticism or theory today has certainly seen references to Guy Debord, the Lettrist International (I prefer the anglicization Letterist myself), or the Situationist International (SI). To architects and urbanists, Debord and the Letterists are best known for psychogeography, the dérive, and their unremitting attacks on Le Corbusier’s style of modernist urbanism. Psychogeography, the study of the effects of the built environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals, and the dérive, a quasi-scientific, often half-drunken psychogeographical peregrination throughout the city, constituted a direct response to the modernist project begun in Paris by Baron Haussmann, which was fueled by the notion that clean, wide-open, insurrection-proof boulevards are an invariable public good. Psychogeography assumed that in this process of modernization, something of value was lost, and the dérive sought an objective calculation of the spatial and temporal layers of the city. Serious stuff, though one more humorous antecedent to the dérive was to use a map of London, for example, to find one’s way around a region of Germany. One imagines a future when someone with an outdated map of Brooklyn will wander interminably in search of the corner of Pacific and Sixth Avenue. Indeed, in its current state of suspension, cocked toward a complete erasure of the past even as the detritus of the past accumulates on it in order to construct the appearance of ruination (and thus, blight), the site of the Atlantic Yards project seems ripe for some present-day psychogeographical study. Before long, it is possible that Debord’s 1955 assessment of Haussmann’s Paris will be equally applicable to Gehry’s new Brooklyn: “From any standpoint other than that of facilitating police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.â€?