|
| Interestingly, a high-risk, high investment route
| for the US developers never considered the indian
| approach where builders own architecture colleges
| and often end up owning architecture at source
| (or at least ossifying it into comfortable issues)
| we can show why Sustainable, Humane Habitats; and other
| soft concerns prevail in developer-owned colleges, and
| why proponents of ideas that were already obsoleted
| in the 'eighties are tolerated by charitable trusts.
|
And even Mr. Ratner admits that, as a Brooklyn-based commercial builder,
he once ranked at the bottom of the city's architectural food chain.
But in recent years he has sought vigorously to polish that image. His
conversion began six years ago, when he joined The New York Times
Company in selecting Renzo Piano — an architect known for the refinement
of his buildings — to design a new Times headquarters in Midtown
Manhattan. And it gained traction when Mr. Ratner handed Frank Gehry —
whose celebrity has reached the point where he now has a signature
jewelry line at Tiffany — the commissions for Atlantic Yards, a 22-acre
project involving a basketball arena, hotel, and housing and retail
spaces in Brooklyn, and Beekman Street Tower, a 75-story apartment
building in Lower Manhattan. Their partnership may soon be one of the
most visible on the New York skyline.
But if the Gehry-Ratner lovefest has raised an expectation of innovative
design, it has also stirred unease. Few would question Mr. Gehry's
talent. The question is whether he has allowed his experimental ethos to
be harnessed for the sake of maximizing a developer's profits. It's also
fair to ask whether Mr. Gehry and other gifted architects have made a
pact with the Devil, compromising their values for the sake of ever
bigger commissions. Beyond that, their collaboration points up a major
change in the way cities are being built. There was a time when
government took an interest in big urban planning projects. Mr. Ratner
and Mr. Gehry are operating under a model by which the government plays
only a marginal role. Bigger social concerns, like housing for mixed
incomes, equal access to parks and transit, and vibrant communal spaces,
which were once the public's purview, now increasingly fall to
developers to address or not, as they see fit.
The collaboration, along with Mr. Ratner's other high-profile projects,
also shows how limited the architect's role remains in such
arrangements. Not so long ago American architects complained that they
were shut out of the public dialogue. Today they work in a climate in
which building is booming, and architecture is revered, but as an
aesthetic, not a social, force.
cont'd...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/arts/design/04ouro.html?_r=1&oref=slogin