Top 10: 10. Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry. Getty Images.

Top, Guggenheim Bilbao

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Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.
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Frank Gehry is a fascinating success story.
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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.

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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. .
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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

Top Ten

With the path laid out by the early creators of modern architecture, momentum built pretty quickly for the design and construction of new buildings possessing "modern" visual traits. This pretty much began in the 1920's, and accelerated greatly after the close of WWII. Many factors favored this, with economic benefits of simpler materials, more efficient structural systems (again, steel contributed greatly) and the human taste for newness all contributing.


A number of architects advanced the theory and practice of modern architecture, and there's no desire here to produce an exhaustive, or even representative, catalog of these individuals. What I'd like to do is catalog a few, those who advanced the state of architecture in a direction that in my own view was valid. In doing so, this vein of architectural design that I've concluded is most valid becomes the backbone of the content of these posts.


(In no way does the delineation of personal convictions try to negate the value of work done by other schools of thought. Architectural theory has always been held by many architects as something of a moral imperative. They then go on to argue their convictions in moralistic, often passionate terms. While this is understandable, it tends to be unproductive, I think, so I'd like to disclaim any presumption of divine right to the "true faith" of architecture. Such beliefs just have to stand on their own, and there's adequate room for disagreement about what constitutes valid design philosophy and what does not.)


So, here's a list of modern masters, architects whose work I've most admired and felt were able to find valid approaches to design, although they were quite dissimilar.

• Alvar Aalto

  Image via Wikipedia Aino and Alvar Aalto



• Le Corbusier


• Mies van der Rohe


• Louis Kahn


• Frank Lloyd Wright

Of possibly less world-wide stature, but immense ability and accomplishment:

• Jorn Utzon


• Ralph Erskine


• O'Neil Ford


• Harry Weese


• Frank Gehry
  

Of the ten listed, (yes, a top ten list) Aalto, Kahn, Utzon and Erskine produced the work I've probably most admired, and felt to be most philosphically valid.

This guy, Kenneth Frampton, says it well. "Critical Regionalism" is a nice phrase, loaded with meaning, and utterlly devastating to a lot of stuffed-shirt phoniness that finds its way into various media that deal with the subject of architecture. While he writes critically, he articulates values that, in my opinion at least, address important themes of architecture that resonate in people's lives.
Another theoretician, Christopher Alexander, delved deeply into the study of what it is that does

Cover via Amazon

resonate in peoples' lives, and he spelled out his conclusions in brilliant detail in 'The Timeless Way of Building' and 'A Pattern Language.'