The first look at Two Trees' plans for the new New Domino were released last night, and the archicritics are already weighing in. Justin Davidson of New York Magazine calls SHoP Architects' designs "daring," especially in comparison to the "stockade of slabs" that came before it. "In their new plan," he writes, "pairs of towers linked by bridges coalesce into a kind of skyline writing?maybe it spells OOOH, an appreciative response to the Domino Sugar sign." (Or maybe it spells SHoP?) Davidson also applauds Two Trees for asking SHoP to rethink the enter 11-acre site in the first place, an act he calls "a gesture of masochistic genius."
For [Jed] Walentas, electing to go through the approval process again is like having a root canal just for the hell of it. It's hard to argue that his motivator is greed, since the new proposal whittles away some market-rate apartments, keeps all the affordable units, adds less-profitable offices, shuts out megaretailers in favor of small stores, and increases the open public space by almost 60 percent. Maybe Walentas really wants what he says he wants: a round-the-clock New Dumbo. Davidson says that if this new plan fails, Walentas will "grudgingly" build the old one, but that would be "disastrous." "The city rarely gets this good a chance to extricate itself from a planning mistake. Yes, the new Domino would mean more creeping Manhattanization, but that sure is better than the alternative: the New Jersification of Brooklyn."
· Oooh, Williamsburg [NYM]
· Two Trees' SHoP-Designed Domino Development, REVEALED! [Curbed]
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