Gee, I didn’t see this coming.

As expected, Ratner has dropped the Frank Gehry design for a new Nets Arena in favor of a new design by Ellerbe Becket. The new design is charitably described as bearing a “likeness to an ‘airplane hanger’”. Hardly the lofty civic gesture Brooklyn was promised. (Williamsburg has seen its own bait and switch, on a lesser scale – as soon as the 2005 rezoning was approved, Enrique Norten was dumped as the architect for the Edge; the result has not been pretty.)

In related news, Nicolai Ourousoff has a review of Thom Mayne’s new building for Cooper Union, praising the “civic value of a bold statement”. Perhaps civic value and bold statements are just for Manhattan.