Box Boom

The Summer Edition of Linea (not available online) has an article on the faceless big boxes being crammed onto New York City streets. The author, Gregg Kreutz , observes how the 'style' of 'starchitects' is driven by developers, not aesthetics and how the wish to get rid of bland ugly boxes has resulted in something far worse:

"So you wish modern buildings weren't so stark and hard edged", an evil genie might say. "Okay, well how do you like this twisted, contorted, explosion-in-a-tile-factory eyesore"

he goes on:

"as far as I can tell, its found a way to look even worse. I'm thinking of the new Gehry building in Chelsea and the soon to be build Gehry building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.[I think he meant Atlantic Yards] Both are put together out of glass and steel and instead of being rigidly vertical, they, each of them, are multi storied pile of strange random looking curves. And random is the operative word here. The buildings don't add up to a coherent visual idea. A cruve here, a curve there, but nothing you can actually call real design.

No real design, the perfect architect for a project with no real business plan other than grabbing as many subsidies as it can.

I know of no real artist who finds Gehry's crap in the least attractive - trite, flippant novelty seekers do, and the 'chattering classes' who are passing off a bigger massive fraud then abstract art.

- as mentioned, not online, but free copies are available at the Art Student's League.