Charles Taylor’s review in the journal Dissent of From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture’s Encounter with the American City, by Nathan Glazer, is worth a read. Glazer looks at how the ideals of modernism have been usurped by the making of starchitects, whose personal vision for a building outweighs the consideration of the building’s context or a social agenda. “When architects are regarded chiefly as artists, discussion of their work is reduced to a question of their personal vision,” Taylor writes. “Questions of whether a building serves those who use it or the larger community, of whether it honors or ignores the style and scale of its surroundings, of whether it adds to or damages the life of its neighborhood, are treated as quaintly prosaic and utilitarian, akin to reducing any consideration of a work of art to its social relevance.”

That’s his zoomed out theorizing, which translates this way when talking about Atlantic Yards. “Introducing his design for Atlantic Yards, Gehry spoke about trying to understand ‘the body language of Brooklyn.’ But the only language Gehry has ever been interested in is the language of Frank Gehry. To say he is defiantly noncontextual is to imply that context enters into his thought at all.”

Gehry may have been ousted from the Theater for a New Audience building, but his vision for Atlantic Yards, which, no matter your opinion of it, seems pretty noncontextual considering the neighborhoods around it, remains.
A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn [Dissent]
Photo from the Atlantic Yards Web site.