Top 10: 10. Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry. Getty Images.

Top, Guggenheim Bilbao

.

.
Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.
.

Frank Gehry is a fascinating success story.
.

The "swoops and curves" imagery that marks his well-known projects didn't exist before he was sixty years old. The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rein, Germany, was built in 1989. Even this structure lacks the shimmering metal surfaces of his more familiar later work. The Vitra Museum was a forerunner of the buildings that show the exploration of curved surfaces, nurbs, in his work.

Vitra Museum. Image via Wikipedia.

.

Gehry taught design for years, in addition to conducting his practice. By all accounts, his engagement and effectiveness as a professor has always been excellent. The ideas that propel his more recent, best-known work must have been forming for years, and the synthesis of his formal vocabulary with sophisticated technical application of computers in design and fabrication of building components probably owes to his academic background. He was keenly aware of just how computers can be used, without personal expertise in computers of any kind. .
.

One thing is clear. The buildings Gehry has designed and built since the early 1990's couldn't have been built sooner. The dimensioning and fabrication of the structural framing and some of the sheet metal simply would not be feasible without computer-aided design and fabrication. Interestingly, the software Gehry's firm selected was Dassault Systèmes S.A. which is a French company that originally produced software for aeronautic design, and that's the software Gehry purchased. ("Flighty" thereby reached a newly literal translation for architecture.)

.

As evident in Sydney Pollack's documentary, Gehry is a warm, interesting person, with broad interests, ready insight and a high emotional intelligence in addition to holding rare skill as a designer. He's seriously studied art, architectural history, city planning and he ran a business, practicing architecture for years before his now-famous buildings were even ideas in his own mind.

.

The images of cubism have unmistakable parallels in Gehry's design. The underlying motivations seem to be quite different, although Gehry would have never been unaware of the visual similarities.

.

.

Cubist painters, as illustrated by the Picasso above, sought to show all the planes of an object, at least more than would be visible from a single point of view, in one plane, that of the painting. This "exploded view" depiction of an object at once abstracted and elaborated on its visual character.
.

Personally (and without objection) I think Gehry's forms spring largely from the basic motive of "doing it because I can." He could, because he recognized the potential of computers for both documenting and fabricating complex nurb surfaces. The plethora of shiny metal clouds making up the exterior image of the Disney or Guggenheim projects don't lend themselves to easy detailing of things like keeping water out, or of fabricating or erecting. They do expand the boundaries of what is possible, and they do so in style. They're stunning.

.

As forms, they're also composed with skill and audacity that Aalto would applaud. The exact proportion and placement of each element of these buildings is carefully and exhaustively thought out, but each decision is also heavily controlled by the designer's intuition. There isn't a formula for these compositions.

Update, May 31, 2010, LA Times article on Ruvo Center in Las Vegas.

Website, Frank Gehry's firm.

An incredibly valuable photo archive on Frank Gehry's work, Thomas Mayer.

An Architectural Record interview , 2000.

If you haven't seen the Sydney Pollack documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, it's highly recommended.

This post on Frank Gehry is updated February 22, 2011, here.