On the principle that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, this column will consider the vexed question of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, a proposed 22-acre mixed-use community whose newest designs, by Frank Gehry, were recently made public. I broach the subject knowing I am likely to irritate everyone involved; it would require the judgment of Solomon to adjudicate a matter where there is some justice on both sides, as well as inexcusable obfuscation and exaggeration.

The controversy surrounding the Atlantic Yards brings into clamorous opposition two constituencies that, in other circumstances, would fit together quite cozily. On the one hand, you have the semi-celebrity locals who are desperately opposed to the plan, among them Steve Buscemi, movie star; Peter Galassi, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and Jonathan Lethem, the literary novelist of the moment. They hew to Jane Jacobs’s worldview, the less-is-more idea that it takes a village and that the massive intervention of the project would destroy the delicate fabric of the community.

But the project has many equally trendy defenders. Herbert Muschamp, the former New York Times architecture critic, declared that “Brooklyn Atlantic Yards is the most important piece of urban design New York has seen since the Battery Park City master plan was produced in 1979.” Behind him are some of the most powerful voices in city and state government, from Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki to the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, who are all positively tipsy with visions of development and job creation.

Peripheral to both camps are extremists of one sort or another. On one side are the type of people – Andrea Peyser of the New York Post comes to mind – who are in favor of the development mainly because they dislike Steve Buscemi and the indie film scene; on the other are those who decry the development because they hate their parents and because Governor Pataki wears a tie. I exaggerate, of course, but you get my point.

My sympathies incline slightly toward the builders, or at least, slightly away from their opponents, since I find it difficult to imagine that the already scarified fabric of Brooklyn will be further aggrieved by replacing the massive rail yards that now occupy the site to be developed. Furthermore, it is hard to buy the argument that this is or could ever be a small-town setting when it abuts the Atlantic Avenue Station; with the Long Island Rail Road and 10 subway lines running through it, this is the third busiest hub in New York City’s mass transit system.

In place of what is now there, the developer, Forest City Ratner envisages a sports and entertainment center for the Nets basketball team that will seat 21,000 spectators, six acres of open space landscaped by Laurie Olin (who landscaped much of Battery Park City), a boutique hotel, ground-floor retail spaces, office towers, and over 6,800 units of middle-income and marketrate housing. In all, 17 new buildings are set to rise over the Atlantic Yards, creating a far more dramatic skyline than Brooklyn has ever had before.

It is the height of the buildings that is the sorest point for their opponents. True, these structures would fundamentally alter the scale of this part of the city. But the place is ripe for such upward expansion, and one has the feeling that its present configuration stunts its real potential.

The main problem I have with the project, however, is the designs themselves.To put it mildly, Mr. Gehry is one of the most overrated mediocrities on the planet. This fact was confirmed – unintentionally – by Sidney Pollack’s adulatory and inept documentary, “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” which opened this past Friday. In it, the architect appears as a self-effacing schlub who doesn’t know what all the commotion is about. But a far different image emerged at the Atlantic Yards press conference on Thursday, when he dismissed his critics by saying that, “They should have been picketing Henry Ford.”

The implication is that it is the manifest destiny of Brooklyn to be built up and that Luddite reactionaries should not stand in its way. That may indeed be the case, but surely we can come up with something better than what Mr. Gehry has conceived.

Having retreated – and not a moment too soon – from the non-Euclidian and wholly abstract titanium swooshes of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Mr. Gehry’s latest project signals a return to the angularity and clashing structural composites of an earlier phase in his career. Quite aside from the misplaced and unacknowledged contextualism of these buildings – the way they allude to hulking skyscrapers of the 1930s, though not nearly as skillfully as Cesar Pelli did at the World Financial Center – they exhibit all the higgledy-piggledy confusion of Red Grooms’s Ruckus Rodeo.

Rising some 20 to 30 stories, these particolored buildings rear up over the Brooklyn skyline in wobbly set-backs that are simply too adorable to join at right angles. The conflict between the typology of the 1930s skyscraper, with its drably regular windows, and the ohso-contemporary betrayal of that regularity is to be taken, apparently, as a hallmark of Mr. Gehry’s rebellious integrity.

Worst of all is the projected centerpiece of the development, which bears the overly cute name of Miss Brooklyn. To say that this ill-kempt, misshapen and misbegotten vulgarity is poorly composed is to do nothing more than to acknowledge the stated aim of Mr. Gehry himself.There is supposed to be something bawdy and daring and rough-and-tumble about it – qualities that, we may suppose, Mr. Gehry associates with his mythologized view of Brooklyn. But the jazz and jauntiness fail to materialize in this out-sized and inert structure, which itself recalls the populist postmodernism of the early 1980s, a style that has long since ceased to amuse.

jgardner@nysun.com