As we mentioned last week on NAS, filmmaker Michael Galinsky is working on a documentary about the Atlantic Yards development. For your viewing pleasure today is the trailer for that film. More information about the project can be found here.
At a press conference in May 2006, architect Frank Gehry, who had gained fame for his designs around the world including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, unveiled his latest architectural vision for the Atlantic Yards development.
The point of interest for Nets fans was still the new arena, now known as the prospective Barclays Center after the London bank that signed on for the naming rights for the facility about a year later. But during the press conference, Gehry also talked about other aspects of the development, the complex’s tallest building, “Miss Brooklyn,” named after Gehry saw a bride walking the streets of Brooklyn in a flowing bridal veil. While coming up with his plan, Gehry said he studied Brooklyn, trying to understand “what is Brooklyn.” To those who opposed the project, it’s scale and scope and use of eminent domain to acquire the property needed, Gehry spoke of Henry Ford: “There is progress everywhere.”
Whether you supported the project or not, what could not be challenged was the cache and glamour an architect like Gehry brought to it. All of this talk of bridal veils and progress added intrigue the project. It’s a kind of poetry and attitude that seems distinctively New York in flavor.
Three years later, the current Nets Brooklyn situation brings me to a theme that was recently explored by Kevin Arnovitz in a must-read piece on TrueHoop. When the vision for the current iteration of Madison Square Garden came forward in the 1960s, it came at the expense of Pennsylvania Station, a Beaux-Art architectural masterpiece in New York City. The tearing down of the train terminal was considered outrageous, and born from it were new preservation laws that would prevent similar deconstruction in the future.
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