Neighborhood Watch

Friday, August 15, 2008

Are We Living In Karl Fischer City?

Curbed has a map pinpointing all of the projects of controversial and prolific architect Karl Fischer. Unsurprisingly, they are clustered in North Brooklyn. From the site of the former Greenpoint Terminal Market, to the condos lining McCarren Park, all the way south to Wallabout, this guy is designing a lot of what we are going to be looking at and walking past in the coming years. You may recall he is the man behind the hulking Schaefer Landing and the impetus for the contextual zoning on Grand Street.

The architecture blogs are uniformly disdainful of his work. His relatively-wide buildings lack any pedestrian oriented street-level presence-- something that we will be coming to strongly regret as more of these projects go up. Most of the buildings lack any affordable housing, because they are built in the upland area of the neighborhood and were grandfathered into the 421-a residential tax break (which now requires affordable housing). If analogous neighborhoods in Chicago and LA, like Wicker Park and Venice Beach, are building much better and more engaging architecture, what's wrong with North Brooklyn?

What do you think? Should we rename the area Fischerburg and Karlpoint?

-Mikki and Michael

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Chris said...

Karl Fischer is a POS hack designing ugly junk

6:18 PM, August 18, 2008  
Blogger b said...

"lack any pedestrian oriented street-level presence"

What do you mean by this? Lack of retail? I don't think it's fair to critique all his work as such. Some are pretty atrocious, but a couple are really quite nice. Generalizing about/bashing Fischer's work has been a lazy/trendy phenomenon for quite some time now, but if we're serious about analyzing change in a neighborhood, we have to be more discerning than that.

5:18 PM, August 19, 2008  
Blogger mike said...

Fair enough. I'm thinking about the 400 ft stretch of 20-50 bayard where there are only three entrances, a whole bunch of glass walls and crazy staircases. The giant parking lot behind 50 bayard on lorimer street. The numerous designs where there are no elements that create contrast between the first and second stories. The terribly bleak entrance to the Schaefer Landing esplanade, not to mention the guardhouse.

5:31 PM, August 19, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Take a look at reality folks.
These buildings are an improvement
to what was......what is..........
get your brain on

4:48 PM, August 21, 2008  

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