The Imperial City

Delirious New York

Given Ratner’s track record, I asked Gehry if at first he mistrusted Ratner’s professed new dedication to quality and innovation. “Yeah. Yes, I did.” And how did he get over his skepticism? “I’m still getting over it,” he says, although so far, “the budget busts have not been architectural ones. He’s always voted with me on the side of the architectural. He runs into roadblocks sometimes in his company, but it has not been cataclysmic.”

Ratner isn’t spending 15 percent extra on these new buildings simply because he wants to underwrite cool design. He understands that in Brooklyn, just as his quotas of apartments for poor people and construction jobs for women and minorities were ways of winning over key constituencies, hiring Gehry was politics by other means, sure to please the city’s BAM-loving chattering class. “The spirit of what you say,” Ratner agrees when I posit this theory, “is accurate.”

There will be many more political hoops to jump through, and what Gehry calls his “lefty do-gooder” side is under challenge. “Citizens’ groups all over the world are backfiring on good architecture. They should back off when somebody knows what they’re doing.” One of his daughters lives in Carroll Gardens, a mile from the site, and she, he says with a chuckle, “is probably one of those out protesting.”

It’s a state-supervised project, so the City Planning Commission has the power only to recommend changes, not command them. Yet when Gehry spoke with me one recent Saturday, he’d just hung up with Amanda Burden, the planning chair, and was a little exasperated by her bluestocking micromanagement: “She wants retail on every inch, and she’s talking about how the doors open . . . ” While I appreciated his irritation, it also made me think Burden is doing her job. Such is the to and fro of the process.

Meanwhile, he’s had a hand in another Brooklyn project, the clear-glass-fronted Elizabethan theater to be built across from bam. It’s due to open in 2008, as is its neighbor, a library designed as a flying V (in transparent glass) by neomodernist Enrique Norten, who is talented and hot and, at 51, young in celebrity-architect years.

Gehry is 76, Frank Lloyd Wright’s age when he got the Guggenheim job. Like Wright (like most architects), Gehry is not exactly fulsome with praise for his peers. When I asked which new New York buildings he liked, he laughed. “I guess I like the Meier buildings. I like the simplicity of [Cesar] Pelli’s towers”—such as the handsome and, yes, very glassy new Bloomberg L.P. headquarters at 59th and Lex. “I used him as a model for Beekman, his way of handling tall buildings; he doesn’t get it fussy.” Like Wright, Gehry is an out-of-towner, a brilliant eccentric, but also, improbably, the great brand-name architect of his time. If Atlantic Yards is completed on schedule, in 2016, he will still be four years younger than Wright was when Wright watched the Guggenheim—his first New York City commission and final masterpiece—being finished.

Online E-mail: emailandersen@aol.com.