Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards Project Stalls, Frank Gehry Forced to Lay Off Entire Design Staff

Back in April, you might remember that a bevy of Brooklynites took to the streets to protest Bruce Ratner‘s plans to redevelop big swaths of Brooklyn with the help of Frank Gehry at the design wheel. While those efforts didn’t really have much effect on the construction plans, who could have guessed that the economy would have swung the way of the protesters and done their bidding for them? So it has happened, as it’s been revealed that Ratner put the breaks on the massive Atlantic Yards project, forcing Gehry to lay off all of his design staff who were working on it. Here’s a bit:

“Almost all the people working on the Brooklyn project got laid off,” said a source familiar with the cuts who claimed the developer had refused to pay Gehry additional costs for design revisions. “Basically, he’s not willing to pay.”

Gehry’s Los Angeles-based firm laid off two dozen employees working on the Atlantic Yards projects the day before Thanksgiving, according to sources.

For more reading, we recommend the Brooklyn Paper‘s whole take on this. Also, love him or hate him, Nicolai Ouroussoff‘s “It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out” is a great read about finding you’re at the end of an architectural era and stepping into a new one.

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