[Rico Rommheim]

Karl Fischer seems to take the criticism in a quite humble way. Here's the link to that article that was mentioned.

NY’s most loathed architect
It’s Karl Fischer, designer of glass boxes

Every time one of his buildings goes up, it seems another New Yorker’s heart sinks.



Since 2003, Montreal-based architect Karl Fischer has designed more than 200 residential structures in Manhattan and Brooklyn, each one looking very much like the last: glass-curtained boxes flecked with grim brick or concrete, characterless high-rises in bohemian areas that, like uninvited party guests, seem to neither know nor care that they are profoundly out of place.

“Like doctors, there is a certain ethic of the architect: You’re not supposed to make anything worse,” says Aleksandr Mergold, architect and professor at Cornell University. “I’m not saying Karl Fischer is making things worse. But he’s not making things any better. That Cold War look seems to come from a lack of imagination. Great business model, though.”

Angel Chevrestt
Schaefer Landing in Williamsburg, one of nearly 200 residential buildings architect Karl Fischer has designed in New York City.
Indeed. Among the projects on Fischer’s desk are the conversion of two 100-year-old townhouses on East Third Street, the conversion of St. Vincent’s on 52nd Street, and a new hotel on 34th Street. This summer, when Fischer released a rendering of his six-story apartment building (glass, concrete, shoved between low-lying brick tenements) set to go up at 427 E. 12th St., preservationists reeled.

“The contempt for the historical and architectural character and context of the neighborhood is appalling,” Bowery Alliance of Neighbors member David Mulkins told the Local East Village at the time.

Still, Fischer’s designs -- lacking as they may be -- are constrained by a host of other factors, from zoning laws to the developers’ budgets to marketing directives. “I’m proud of almost all the buildings I do,” Fischer says.

At real-estate blog Curbed.com, Fischer, who works mainly in Williamsburg, Greenpoint and lower Manhattan, has become something of a bête noire. “We average eight posts a month on him,” says editor Sara Polsky. “With our readers, he’s among the worst offenders.”

Fischer maintains a low profile, but he tells The Post he’s aware of the anger he elicits; he reads those comments. “It’s hard to tell whether that’s people speaking from their heart or getting something off their chests,” he says. “You always start out with the best intentions.”

It wasn’t until his first year at Canada’s McGill University that Fischer discovered architecture: He enrolled as an engineering major but found it all too “cut-and-dried, not creative enough.” He never really felt a calling for architecture before, but says that, in high school, “I enjoyed geometric shapes.” He loves Paris for “the ornate and the modern architecture,” says his favorite New York building is the Flatiron and his least the buildings at the Cooperative Village near Grand Street. “There’s no design to them at all,” he says.

Aesthetically, Fischer fills the regrettable gap left by Robert Scarano, the New York City architect who specialized in outsized buildings done on the cheap, with facades that looked defiantly, lazily modern among more time-worn, pre-existing structures. (Scarano voluntarily surrendered his certification privileges in 2006, after the city charged him with violating building codes.)

“Since Scarano went out of business, Fischer is probably the most prolific architect in New York,” says one real-estate broker.

Fischer, 62, credits his long-standing relationship with the Hasidic communities in Brooklyn and Montreal, where they do the bulk of mid-priced residential development, with his success. “I started off working with the Hasidic community on Kent Avenue, doing their housing,” Fischer says.

His ability to work cheap and fast led to Fischer’s first big project in New York, the 2003 conversion of Williamsburg’s famed Gretsch Factory. It was fairly un-controversial: The interior was gutted, the exterior -- except for a dubious paint job -- left alone. His cornerstone project was 2005’s Schaefer Landing, a high-rise glass residential building on the Williamsburg waterfront, upsetting as much for its aesthetic mediocrity as for all it represented: rapid, irreversible gentrification, the death of romantic living in illegally converted lofts.

“Schaefer Landing just looks like everything else along that north Brooklyn waterfront,” says Julie Golia, public historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The response to Fischer reminds Golia of the war between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, the modern vs. the historical, practical economics vs. the human cost. “It speaks to the tension between architecture and the world around it,” she says. “It’s is connected to the mall-i-fication of certain areas. His work lacks a point of view.”

As for Fischer, he’s just surprised that anyone can recognize one of his buildings on sight. “Even though many people say they recognize my style of architecture,” he says, “personally, I don’t feel like I have one.”

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...6ldDVqmnO64DMN