- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 June 2009 18.35 BST
Frank Gehry has been removed from the Atlantic Yard project in Brooklyn. Photograph: Robert Gallagher/Guardian
New York's hard-headed commercial approach to urban development has delivered a blow to the celebrity architect Frank Gehry by stripping him of his lead role in a multi-billion dollar project in Brooklyn.
Gehry, who is known for his tumbling titanium designs showcased at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and the Los Angeles Walt Disney concert hall, has spent six years working on the $4bn (£2.4bn) Brooklyn development known as Atlantic Yards. It would have turned a run-down 9 hectare (22 acre) site and injected it with 17 new buildings including up to 6,400 apartments.
But this week the developers, Forest City Ratner, announced that Gehry had been removed from designing any of the individual buildings. Though the Canadian-born architect remains nominally the master planner for the site, this constitutes a heavy setback for his LA-headquartered practice that has already lost half of its staff over the past year.
At the centre of his plan would have been a $1bn arena with seating for 20,000 fans of the Nets basketball team which is currently squatting in New Jersey. The arena bore many of the hallmarks of Gehry's unique style, it would have been surrounded by tumbling towers, though in this case built in glass.
In its place, Ratner has placed a new design by a conventional mid-western firm of architects, Ellerbe Becket. Their design would cost $200m less than Gehry's but would have none of the star quality or inventiveness of its predecessor.
The switch in designs has invoked a furious response. The influential architecture critic of the New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff, savaged the move as a "shameful betrayal of the public trust that gave New Yorkers the message that good architecture was an expendable luxury".
He described the Ellerbe Becket design as a monstrosity, "a colossal, spiritless box" that would fit more comfortably in a cornfield than in a vibrant city. "The arena is as glamorous as a storage warehouse," was his conclusion.
Others have likened the proposed arena to an airplane hangar from the 1950s.
Atlantic Yards was one of several mega-developments across New York, that were spawned at the height of the boom when the city was awash with money and optimism but have since stalled. In the past two years the Brooklyn project has become bogged down in legal challenges from local protests groups that argue it is too high-rise and monolithic for the area.
The economic downturn has also struck, forcing Ratner to delay or scale back much of the scheme.
The company made reference to the economic chill in a statement about the change in designers. It said: "Obviously the world has changed significantly since the project was proposed and we are making every effort to adapt to these changes while meeting the high standards we set for the project."
Gehry has expressed regret that his design is not going forward but said: "We remain extremely proud of our work on the Atlantic Yards master plan and on the original arena."