Gehry Plans Unveiled For Mixed Use Development In Utah

With his permission, I am posting a comment about this article that Brandon Chase Bell sent to the NextGen architecture list:

I am a student from Utah State, in Landscape Architecture about two hours north of this proposed project. My wife's parents live about fifteen minutes from where this is proposed. Lest there be a question, let it be clear this Gehry “project” can in no way be construed to fit into the community, it’s history, the values or attitudes of the present population. Sometimes, as with other states, cities and counties, particularly smaller communities, in the West often accept any form of growth as a means to & hope for economic development.

I was sickened to hear of this proposal; my stomach is still churning. Utah has been a lead in the interior, lower pop. Western states in recent years for quality forms of growth, with organization such as Envision Utah, newly expanded funds for commuter and light rail (for a state with only 2 million residents, and a western mindset- it seems like everyone owns a pickup truck or SUV- that is an extraordinary accomplishment) as well as the new urbanist Daybreak community, which most of you have probably heard of, which when fully built out will use a whopping 90,000 acres, the largest single piece of land owned by a single, private owner next to a metropolitan region.

This Gehry-designed development, is only about 20 minutes away (by car of course) and in the suburban landscape of Utah that’s pretty close. It will, rest assured stick out like a sore thumb. It will be going in near a conventional suburban development called Traverse Mountain, nicknamed by some planners “Travesty Mountain”

It will in now way, shape or form, fit into the fabric of the area, as mostly there isn’t any, directly adjacent, but mostly fields, except the above named Traverse Mountain suburb. The twisted thing to me is that Gehry’s reasonings and logic are always such a blatant farse and straightup contrived baloney. Saying that this is patterned after the “slot canyons of Utah” is laughable. They are about 5 hours( 350+ miles) away, and in a totally different bioregion and context, not something that residents here, will or in my opinion, “should” identify with. These are totally different “Utahs” We’re talking about: alpine mountainous regions here in the north, versus the areas in the south, where the slot canyons are, that are the redrock areas, similar in character to the Grand Canyon.

Even if it was modeled after, the slot canyons, that is an inappropriate, out of context, model, that doesn’t fit this area, and even if it did, as a reference or analogy,that doesn’t have anything to do with whether it makes for good urban form- which it seems most certainly to not. This is just ex post facto justification for Gehry doing whatever he wants to do, in characteristic fashion.

This “inspiration” stuff is a flat-out farce: an idea doesn’t equal “inspiration.” It’s just an idea, and in this case, as often is with Gehry a bad one, with as usual no respect for the context or surrounding area. The problem with this is that it is not simply a building but an entire development/ “neighborhood” that is very “distinct” (read: out-of-context) and as an entire neighborhood, its impact (being negative) will be dramatically larger.

I’ve forwarded some of this on to professors in my department, to see if we what we can do something about this. They aren’t all died-in wool New Urbanists, but they're pretty good about being active and making projects about stuff like this. I will try to get some other contacts, stirred up, about this too. This really sickens me.