Developer Defends Atlantic Yards, Saying Towers Won’t Corrupt the Feel of Brooklyn

Via the New York Times

From across the room, the new plastic-and-wood model of Brooklyn’s proposed Atlantic Yards project — revealed by the developer Forest City Ratner at a news conference yesterday — looked a lot like the old one sitting a few feet away: a 22-acre swath of glass, brick and metal towers that would loom over the surrounding neighborhoods and alter the borough’s otherwise sparse skyline.

But in an hourlong presentation of the project’s latest design, Frank Gehry, the project’s architect, and Laurie Olin, its landscape designer, emphasized details that they said would harmonize the planned arena and commercial and residential buildings with the neighborhoods they would border.

They described shorter and thinner buildings on Dean Street, where the project abuts a mostly low-rise neighborhood; extensive use of glass walls at street level; and what Mr. Olin described as “the biggest stoop in Brooklyn,” a sort of public porch planned for the southeast corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

“It still feels like Brooklyn,” said Mr. Olin.

But their presentation also made clear that the developer and its opponents still have vastly different visions of what, exactly, Brooklyn should feel like, at least in this corner of the borough, where the downtown commercial district shades into a quiet neighborhood of brownstones to the southeast.

“They should’ve been picketing Henry Ford,” Mr. Gehry said yesterday, dismissing critics who have questioned the pace and scale of development in the borough. “There is progress everywhere. There is constant change. The issue is how to manage it.”