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Old Posted Mar 12, 2013, 7:44 PM
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http://www.vanityfair.com/online/dai...front-redesign

A Skyline for Williamsburg? The Brooklyn Waterfront Gets a Radical—and Terrific—Re-Design





ByPaul Goldberger
March 12 2013

Quote:
Vishaan Chakrabarti, the architect and planner who is a partner in the firm SHoP, was quoted not long ago as saying that “contextualism is an opiate for the masses.” It was not what you would call a politically correct statement in this age of hyper-sensitivity to neighborhoods, landmarks, historic districts, and small scale, when everybody wants each new building to “fit in,” whatever that means, and buildings that look different from what has been built before are an automatic no-no to many community groups.

But what Chakrabarti may have lacked in political correctness he made up in perceptiveness. Once, the notion that a new building might take its cues from its surroundings didn’t count for enough in New York. Now, it seems to count for too much. We are hesitant to accept the fact that great cities come from breaking rules as well as from following them, from architecture that surprises and excites as much as from architecture that behaves itself. The challenge is keeping a balance. Too much adherence to narrow rules and guidelines creates a dull city; too little yields chaos.

This is a roundabout way of saying that SHoP’s new plan for the section of the Brooklyn waterfront around the old Domino sugar refinery in Williamsburg is one of the most exciting developments New York has seen in a long time. No, this mix of residential and commercial space is not “contextual,” if you think the context is the few gentrified blocks of Williamsburg adjacent to this 11-acre site and the small-scale buildings a little farther to the east. The SHoP plan, a collaboration with the landscape-architecture firm Field Operations, envisions very big buildings—one tower is 598 feet tall; another, the project’s centerpiece, consists of two vertical slabs sitting on top of a horizontal slab and topped by another horizontal slab, so that the whole thing looks like a gargantuan open rectangle or, if you will, a 40-story doughnut. (The building, which also calls to mind a tamer, straightened-out version of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV tower in Beijing, would be positioned with the doughnut hole open to the east, so the rising sun would be visible through it.) Another building would consist of a slab resembling an upside down “L,” resting atop a medium-high slab that would contain an office building.

These are big buildings, unusually shaped. Along with the new Mercedes House apartment building by Enrique Norton and the planned apartment project by Bjarke Ingels, both near the riverfront in Manhattan’s West 50s, the Domino plan suggests that developers in New York just might, at long last, be starting to shake themselves free of the mediocre and confining design models they have been using forever, and to create housing that is genuinely exciting for everyone to look at, even if they have no intention of living there. That fact alone makes this proposal important.

It’s a given that there will be large-scale development on the city’s waterfronts—that is happening no matter who is the mayor, no matter who is in charge of city planning, and no matter who makes up community boards. The question is how good it will be, and how much it will contribute to the city as a whole. To come back around again to context, it’s clear that SHoP has considered the context here to be not just the surrounding blocks, but the city as a whole. This striking project, full of fresh thinking and creative imagination, is designed to be part and parcel of the sweep of the waterfront on both sides of the river, and the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines beyond. That may not please some of the neighbors, but it’s good for everyone else.
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