The World’s Worst Architect!

Thank goodness: I am not alone in thinking that Frank Gehry is the world’s worst starchitect.  Geoff Manaugh in Gizmodo just shreds the guy, and quite deservedly.

“Gehry long ago stopped pursuing any interesting material or tectonic experimentation—and he used to be an interesting architect!—to become the multi-billion dollar equivalent of a Salvador Dalì poster tacked to the wall in a stoned lacrosse player’s dorm room, an isn’t-it-trippy pile of pseudo-psychedelic bullshit that everyone but billionaire urban developers can see through right away. What’s particularly frustrating about Gehry’s career is that he’s somehow meant to be cool, a kind of sci-fi architect for the Millennial generation, a Timothy Leary of CAD; but he’s Guy Fieri, his buildings hair-gelled monsters of advanced spatial douchebaggery …

[Gehry’s buildings] are just crumpled Reynold’s Wrap on an otherwise white-bread interior, a boring, room-by-room grid surrounded by hair spray, like some lunatic version of Phyllis Diller blown up to the size of a city block and frozen mid-stroke.”

Wow!  That’s telling it like it is.

Planning For People

On my other blog, I have written about, and displayed the video for, a short speech given by urbanist Jan Gehl that is well worth the 18 minutes it takes to watch.  He uses Copenhagen as his example of a city that plans for people.

In fact, Copenhagen’s policy is to become The Best City In The World For People. We can compare that with Vision’s mantra of making Vancouver the most expensive (oops, I meant “Greenest”) city in the world.

Stairway #1