June 10, 2009… Cleveland’s Forest City developers get walloped by New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff for the design of a new basketball arena in Brooklyn N. Y. “A colossal, spiritless box,” he writes.

Ouroussoff writes that the arena design for the Nets team would make it “fit more comfortably in a cornfield than at one of the busiest intersections of a vibrant metropolis.”

Ouch!

Forest City’s Bruce Ratner and company dumped Frank Gehry’s exotic design for the more pedestrian work of Ellerbe Becket, the firm that designed Gund (Quicken) Arena here.

Writes Ouroussoff, “But what’s most offensive about the design is the message it sends to New Yorkers. Architecture, we are being told, is something decorative and expendable, a luxury we can afford only in good times, or if we happen to be very rich.”

Here’s a link to the Times column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/arts/design/09arena.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Forest City Enterprises and its Brooklyn offshoot – Forest City Ratner – have been under extreme community pressure as the firm tries to develop a massive project. It includes the arena, office, housing and retail and was planned originally as a multi-billion dollar project with 18 skyscrapers. It has had to be cut back with the poor economy.

Known as Atlantic Yards, it has had strong opposition from a community group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. (http://dddb.net/php/aboutratner.php).