Gehry
Frank
“You can’t redo old ideas. The only way to gain is to go forward and not look back. You can learn from the past but you can’t continue to be in the past.” Frank Gehry
Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Frank Owen Goldberg; February 28, 1929) is a Canadian American Pritzker Prizewinning architect based in Los Angeles, California. Gehry’s best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Experience Music Project in Seattle; Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and MARTa Museum in Germany; and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. But it was his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of “paper architecture”— a phenomenon that many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years. The de Young museum exhibit will expose the man behind the “star-chatecht.” His process sketches, models and other creations will be on display in addition to bold images of his radical architecture. Frank Gehry’s impact on modern society has changed the landscape of conventional thought.
Frank Gehry: Bending Reality April 2, 2011 – October 2, 2011 de Young Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Golden Gate Park 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, CA 94118 415.750.3600 ©2010 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Scribble
to Reality Evenniy Lopez and Nicole Wong
Gehry was not satisfied with clean geometric simplicity
Gehry recalled his earliest inspiration coming from his grandmother. When they would play, they would build imaginary cities with wood shavings scavenged from his grandfather’s hardware store and wood block cuttings for their home’s stove. His grandmother also kept live fish swimming around in the family bathtub; the shape and fluent movement of the fish inspired him. His mother took him to concerts and museums where he as introduced to art. Gehry loved the exhibits and the music. His upbringing became his inspiration for his architectural designs Gehry first professional inspiration in the architectural world was modernist architect Raphael Sorian, whom he encountered before confirming his career path of becoming an architect. While living in the southern California area, he was surrounded by the architecture of modernist Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. His early works followed either the Modernist Style or the International Style, introduced by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. Gehry was not satisfied with the clean geometric simplicity of the two styles because he was eager to use his artistic ideas in his designs. He was eventually caught up in the west coast avant-garde art scene and befriended painters and sculptors, including Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz and Bob Irwin. He took the idea of using overlooked by-products of industrial civilization to express more of his personal design philosophies. He began to redirect his architecture by fusing Japanese and vernacular elements with the influence from painters and sculptors. This lead to his unique furniture design made from layers of corrugated cardboard and lamp designs
Sketch and model of Dancing House of Prague
in the shape of fish. With no desire of becoming a furniture designer, he stopped
Gehry created his own unique style
his furniture line to focus more on architecture. His experimentation with common manmade materials ultimately led him to redesign his house. The concept behind the construction of the house was to combine the original look with his own idea of the exterior that consisted of using materials such as chain linked fencing, corrugated aluminum, and unfinished plywood. The finished outcome of his house caused both positive and negative criticism toward his unconventional architectural design style. With his newfound freedom in architectural designs, Gehry decided to start his career over from the ground up. Instead of getting ideas from the art pieces he studied before, Gehry began to get inspiration for projects by studying the community, the location, the client, the desired outcome, and the budget. Besides meeting the client’s desired idea and budget, he merged his creativity into the architectural design. By focusing on fusing creative
movements into the architecture he designed,
Gehry created his own unique style. Movement eventually became a key element in all of his works. His distinctive sketches that resemble a bunch of scribbles on a page are his own personal inspiration. Though no one understands his doodles, Gehry distinguishes the idea coming from them to create an actual structure that will be built and seen. Personally, Gehry has no clue as to where and how he gets all of his inspiration. He only knows that once he places his pen to paper, an idea is born that will ultimately become a reality.
Dancing House (Nationale-Nederlanden building) of Prague completed 1996
Fluid
Movement Ultan Guilfoyle and Mildred Friedman
Frank Gehry loves to sketch. It is the beginning of his architectural process. From Gehry’s sketches flow the models, one after another, each a refinement that will eventually become finished buildings unlike any others in the architectural world. It is this sketch quality, what he calls the “tentativeness, the messiness,” that Gehry clings to as a way of guarding against formula or repetition. His pen doesn’t glide across the page, as it dances effortlessly through a continuum of space. One need only observe Gehry’s manner of drawing to gain an immediate impression of his way of thinking: the pen does not so much. Gehry’s process of turning these evanescent, abstract drawings into tangible, three-dimensional form: finished buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone. It is a common misconception that Gehry’s buildings are constructed as mere containers, built for the sake of their form. In truth, the buildings are built from the inside out. Working closely with his colleagues, Gehry takes his sketch ideas and, as quickly as possible, makes them three-dimensional, the better to see how his buildings work, how they fit with their neighbors, and how they function in the most essential way. Wooden block massing studies are constructed and reconstructed in step with Gehry’s own evolving sketches, gestural models of cardboard, wood, torn paper, metal mesh, cloth and any other material that has the property to capture the “latent energies” of drawing, act as intermediaries, keeping Gehry conscious of the three-dimensional implications. Full-size mock-ups are built to test out materials, construction techniques, performance, and so on. The final design model is at a larger scale for a more precise structural development, as well as development
Model of InterActiveCorp Building 2007
of details relating to cladding, fenestration, and material selection. Gehry says,
“We constantly go back and forth between the models and the drawings, because (pointing to the drawings) if this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work!” The process, as Gehry admits, forces him to “work in two or three scales at once.” This forces him to forget about the model as an “object of desire” and instead to concentrate on how the building works. Thus, the total count of physical models at different scales created for a single project is quite extensive and can easily run into a hundred or more. Gehry works with models because it permits impossibly cantilevered parts and vertiginous piles of fluid transformation. Block program models come first then the design process models are used. The models start off small and get bigger and bigger. The models are formal, spatial and material tests of gestural implications of Gehry’s drawings. Model after model is scanned into a sophisticated computer and rendered into working drawings. Gehry and his research and technology team changed the way his practice approached design. Traditional paper based ways of documenting and delivering architectural projects could not capture Gehry’s innovative designs. Gehry built a team of technologists and practitioners, which initiated new ways of thinking about architecture and building, using advanced 3D technologies to design, document and go directly from design to construction without intermediate paper documentation. This new technology is CATIA, a highly sophisticated 3D computer modeling program originally created for use by the aerospace industry, to model accurately in
Section view of west elevation of UTS’s Dr Chau Chak Wing building
complete detail the building shell as well as those parts of the building that are unusually shaped. In parallel, Gehry’s practice pursed innovations to project delivery to establish more collaborative project teams, conducting practice through integrated 3D project data. Gehry Partners and Gehry Technologies were recognized for pushing the boundaries of construction and engineering technology and creating some of the world’s most recognizable architecture by leveraging software and computer animated design.
The age-old split between the hands that design and the instruments that execute has been overcome: the separate phases and techniques of conceiving and executing a building were woven into an unbroken loop. Gehry’s designs dramatically blur the line between art and architecture, yet the strong appeal of his sculptural designs does not obscure the role of function. He follows a painstaking process of subtle vision and revision both in his sketches and in his model shop.
Walt Disney Concert Hall Los Angeles, CA completed 1996
Architectural
Choreography Gehry’s buildings strike some as alien intruders into the landscape
Kurt W. Forster
The architecture of Frank Gehry looms on the horizon like a huge boulder in an otherwise carefully cultivated landscape. One can simply disregard it and turn instead to more familiar buildings, or one might react passionately to its startling and unruly appearance, but one is not likely to overlook it. Gehry’s buildings strike some as alien intruders into the landscape, and others as homegrown hybrids springing from the very seedbed of our culture. Either reaction touches on significant aspects of Gehry’s work, for it is precisely the way in which he transforms the familiar that estranges it for the viewer.
Common Strangers Gehry’s capacity for endless transformation of the commonplace leaves unaltered almost nothing that falls into his hands. His architecture does not bear the dubious imprint of the modern form-giver but seems instead to have been released from its imprisonment in convention. At his best, Gehry manages to free his projects from typological constraints, enabling his buildings to assume shapes of unprecedented kind and configuration. They are neither formally fixed and repetitive, like those of Michael Graves, nor hypothetical and largely self-generated, like those of Peter Eisenman. These comparisons are fair, and they work both ways: if the New York Five have pursued formal autonomy in their work across all personal differences and along a wide arc of time, Gehry has chosen an architecture he can make with his own hands. His buildings are able to stand on their own because they result from an inventive transformation of their circumstances rather than from an expostulation of their problems.
Detail of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Gehry does not “sign” his projects with a personal touch but instead transforms whatever he takes up. These transformations eventuate in objects that have as definite a history (of their own) as they have a characteristic shape (of his making). Not only have his buildings changed over time-so also has the architect. Today Gehry is less a lonely hero battling the status quo than he is an explorer of unanticipated possibilities. He has shifted ground only gradually and still starts mostly from what he finds, lifting some of the most ordinary things from their familiar places and urging new purposes on them. Where there is little to be found that would lend itself to his treatment, or where there are only obstacles to overcome, he likes to play hide-and-seek with contingencies, causing happenstance in the midst of hindrance.
Choreographer of Chance Gehry’s delight in massing volumes or suspending them (permanently) in a (fleeting) moment endows his buildings with a sense of vitality that seems beyond the realm of architecture. Among American artists working prominently in the decade of Gehry’s professional formation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ray and Maria Stata Center Cambridge, Massachusetts completed 2004
Gehry engages volumes in intimate relationships with one another
the sculptor David Smith anticipated the architect’s desires with his series Cubi, 42 rising and falling stacks of volumes that tumble and turn through implied motion. A similar sense of arrested movement informs Gehry’s later projects, which seek to fix en passant what cannot stay in place. Over the years, Gehry has cultivated a highly personal studio practice of working with models, because it permits impossibly cantilevered parts and vertiginous piles of volumes in fluid transformation. As he began to shape buildings from mobile parts, his sense of space transcended Cartesian notions. This
special sense defies verbal definition, but it might be compared with the sensation of moving bodies in a medium akin to water. To the extent that his buildings arrest volumes in continuous motion (and transformation), time becomes their formative dimension. Correspondingly, they de-form the neutral concept of Euclidean space and enter into a conterminous function with the fields within which they occur. Gehry does not envision the volumes of his buildings within the confines of abstract space (which is also the space of economics); rather, he engages these volumes in intimate relationships with one another. In short, he sets the bodies of his buildings in motion as a choreographer does his or her dancers. One need only observe Gehry’s manner of drawing to gain an immediate impression of his way of thinking: the pen does not so much glide across the page as it dances effortlessly through a continuum of space. Gehry’s studio practice recalls nothing so much as performance rehearsals: days and weeks of choreographic invention and refinement, at which all dancers must be present all the time. The architect’s affinity for the transitory and his conjurer’s grasp of minute
Walt Disney Concert Hall Los Angeles, CA completed 1996
The museum in Bilbao reawakens an architecture that has lain dormant for centuries
displacements are fueled by his knowledge of performance art and enriched by his collaborations with artists. At Bilbao he planned with and for artists, providing spaces for specially commissioned installations as well as flexible galleries for a great variety of displays. The building complex includes generously proportioned areas for public events and unforeseen opportunities, vastly expanding the breadth of the contemporary museum. It is entirely purposeful that the museum has been anchored in the cityscape of Bilbao like a
vast circus tent surrounded by a congerie of caravans, for the variety of anticipated events requires large and ever-varying venues. Subsidiary spaces are clustered together, squeezed through the bottleneck between river and embankment, made to duck under bridges, and finally allowed to soar over the building’s core in a spectacular canopy. All this implies motion, induced by internal tension and external compression, which gives rise to the towering, and seemingly revolving, space of the central hall. If it is possible to speak of a spatial realm without figural contours yet possessing powerful bodily qualities, if ambulation can unlock the complexities of a building’s order beyond the outlines of the plan, then the museum in Bilbao reawakens an architecture that has lain dormant for centuries. The suggestion may sound extravagant, but the reality of this building, which has been fashioned from segmented shells, will surely bear it out. If one were to seek an index for the historical standing of this building, one need only consider the novel applications of computer technology in its making. For the Bilbao museum, Gehry tapped the full capacity of computer-assisted design. Leaving its auxiliary role far behind, he and his collaborators made use of programs
The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao completed 1997
Every volume has been shaped in three dimensions
originally developed for the design of airplane fuselages but that in this case provided the matrix for the shaping of every part and the refinement of every element in the museum’s design and construction. The age-old split between the hands that design and the instruments that execute has been overcome: the separate phases and techniques of conceiving and executing a building were woven into an unbroken loop. Every volume has been shaped in three dimensions, tested and modified by computer plotting, just as every part of its physical assembly-steel frame, cladding, and all-was fabricated on the basis of computer-generated construction documents. Only in this way can the inaccurate fit among the conventionally separate phases of invention, transcription, and execution be perfected, and the exponential degree of geometric complexity of such a structure be realized without costly trial and error. The Bilbao museum will not only go down as one
of the most complex formal inventions of our time but it will also stand
as a monument to the productive capacities that are now at our disposal if an architect such as Gehry puts them to imaginative use. Hackneyed applications of computing do no more for architecture than pencil sharpeners used to do. When complexities of an order that is commensurate with our understanding of the world can be restored to architecture, we shall no longer have to be content with the subsistence diet dictated by the economics of our own time and the impoverished aesthetics of an earlier era.
The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao completed 1997