Frank Gehry Sketches
History
Frank Owen Gehry was born in 1929 in Canada. As a creative child, he enjoyed building little cities out of scraps of wood. His use of corrugated steel, chain link fencing, unpainted plywood and other "everyday" materials were partly inspired by his grandfather's hardware store. It was his mother and father who introduced him to the world of art. "So the creative genes were there," Gehry says. "But my father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't going to amount to anything. It was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would push me.” Recalls Gehry. He is now working and living in Los Angeles as a world-renowned architect.
He is currently the Design Principal for the firm of Frank O. Gehry and Associates, Inc., which he established in 1962 and is a distinguished Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and teaches advanced design studios at the Yale School of Architecture.
After moving to California with his supportive family, Gehry attended the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture and received his Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1954, After graduation, he spent time away from the field of architecture in numerous other jobs, including service in the United States Army. He studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of design for a year, but leaving before completing the program. Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned for more than four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia.
Frank Gehry’s buildings, which include his private home in Santa Monica, are seen as worldwide tourist attractions. These buildings are referred to as the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey. In 2004 the fashion empire, Vanity Fair, labelled Frank Gehry as "the most important architect of our age".
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger published an article in The New York Times in November 1989. He wrote; “Mr. Gehry's buildings are powerful essays in primal geometric form and materials, and from an aesthetic standpoint they are among the most profound and brilliant works of architecture of our time."
There have been as few American architects who have expressed the chaos that can be seen in the creative process that goes into one of Frank Gehry’s designs. His design style, as well as the appearance of his buildings, have been said to be fragmented, and the use of sometimes violent forms that have found place in his designs over the last 50 years have seemingly been able to capture the whole range of human experience.
Some of Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Spain the MIT Stata Center in Massachusetts and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.
It is a thanks to Gehry’s self-designed home in California, which gave him the needed jump-start to his career as an architect. His idea of a one of a kind home came from lifting and manufacturing the idea of “paper architecture”. “Paper architecture” is an idea that many architects experience in their shaping years through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years.
Architectural style
Frank Gehry has often said over the many years as an architect, that he likes to build deep emotional bonds with his projects and, as his first building commission was in his native city in Canada, he explained that he felt a bizarre kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through his own subconscious, while discovering the ideal façade of the building.
The Guggenheim Museum Spain is a rather disorderly creation, though; the museum was perhaps one of his most gentle and self-possessed designs. Its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure.
Guggenheim Museum
Providing a safe structure is the most important long-term value of architecture, a worth that becomes extremely complex in the context of codes and standards. It is impossible to know all of the codes, as many of them switch from region to region. For nearly every building that Gehry designs, a different set of rules is applied to the design process.
Many of the buildings that Gehry has designed in his career fall within the style of Deconstructivesm. This seemingly unheard style of was referred to as being post-structuralist in nature as the style had the ability to go beyond what was current in the form of ideas of structural definition.
Example of Deconstructivism
Within the art of architecture, Deconstructivism tends to shift away from the set ideas of Modernism such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this shift in ideas and design theories of the time, Deconstruct buildings are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas such as the universality the a form should have, and designers of this time did not reflect on the belief that form should follow function.
A clear example of this new design theory can be seen in Gehry’s own home. The style of building was so drastically different from its original context, and done in such a manner as to challenge its original spatial intention. He enmeshed the pink-shingled exterior in chain-link fencing and corrugated steel, impaled it with an angular wire-glass skylight and exposed the interior's wooden floorboard like a sculpture. This residential bombshell nailed Mr. Gehry's avant-garde credentials but left establishment patrons baffled or disgusted.
Gehry’s style is sometimes seen as unfinished or even crude, but critics cant disregard the fact that his work is consistent with the California ‘funk’ art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay to make serious art.
Future Projects
Sceptics will soon be silenced when Gehry embarks on his new project, an underground gallery space commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The idea of this space is that it will be virtually invisible from the outside. Gehry wishes to break into new design ground and prove critics wrong as many of them claim that all Gehry’s buildings look alike, and are all compared to one of his first buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in Spain.
There is truth in the fact that many of Frank Gehry’s buildings are of similar style and that is simply because he has crafted his style and held true to what he believes is architecture.
Gehry has stated in easy terms the reason for the similarity in his work, he says; "The easiest way for me to relate this is by way of music. When you hear a Beatles or a Rolling Stones tune you are aware immediately who the artist is, in the same respect, when you see one of my buildings, the same is generally true. Is that such a bad thing?”
Criticism
Over the years, while Gehry's work has been commended and his design style idealized, he, as a designer, has also received much disapproval. Some have said that his buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms, as well as the buildings are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate. Critics have also written that Gehry’s buildings do not seem to belong in their surroundings and that the spectacle of a building often overwhelms its intended use, especially in the case of museums and arenas
It is understandable to see how an amateur eye could look at the collection of Gehry’s buildings and say that they all look the same, as they are all whimsically organic in nature. But it is fair to say that a critic should realize the amount of work that goes into the designing of a building. From site analysis to construction, the process generally takes at the absolute least two years.
Other notable aspects
Awards
From 1977 onwards Gehry has won numerous awards for his amazing work as an architect. In 1989, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker Prize serves to honour a living architect whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.
In 1999, he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal "in recognition of a significant body of work of lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture."
Budgets
In an industry where complex and innovative designs like Gehry's typically go over budget, Gehry’s reputation as a designer has come from his integrity to take clients budgets seriously. The world-renown Sydney Opera House in Australia, which has on many occasions been compared to the Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in terms of architectural innovation, is reported to have overrun the building budget of 1,400 percent. Gehry’s name was then appropriately mentioned when the Guggenheim Museum was constructed on time and budget.
In an interview with Harvard Design Magazine, Gehry explained how he was able to stick to the given budget of a building. Firstly, he made sure that what he calls the "organization of the artist" prevailed during the construction process, in order to prevent political and business interests from interfering with the design. Secondly, he ensured that he had a detailed and realistic cost estimate before proceeding. Once that was in order, he worked in close collaboration with the individual building trades to control costs during construction.
Celebrity status
To many architects, Frank Gehry is also known as the most acclaimed American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, but to the media, Gehry is considered a modern architectural icon and celebrity, what the journalists like to call a "Starchitect”. He first caught the attention of the public when he designed the range of cardboard furniture, “Easy Edges” in 1972. Since then, he has appeared on TV numerous times, such as in Apple's black and white "Think Different" pictorial ad campaign that associates offbeat but revered figures with Apple's design philosophy. He even appeared as himself in the animation, The Simpsons, where he parodied himself by intimating that his ideas are derived by looking at a crumpled paper ball. Then, in 2009, Gehry designed a hat for pop star Lady Gaga, reportedly by using his iPhone.
Fish
Gehry has drawn much inspiration from fish. Not only do they appear in his buildings, but he has created a line of jewellery, household items, and sculptures based on this motif.
One of the many works designed by Gehry and inspired by the look and nature of fish is the Standing Glass Fish. This gigantic fish model is made of glass plates and silicone, while the internal supporting structure of wood and steel clearly visible. It soars above a reflecting pool in a glass building built especially for it, in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Another huge Gehry fish sculpture dominates a public garden in front of the Fishdance Restaurant in Kobe, Japan.
Other art practices
In addition to architecture, Gehry has made a name for himself by designing furniture, jewellery, various household items and sculptures, His first line of furniture, produced from 1969–1973, was called “Easy Edges”, constructed out of cardboard.
Another design field that he has embarked on is lamps. While working closely with the BELUX Company, Gehry has designed a collection of lamps which will be available for mass production. Together, they have given the lamps the name – Cloud , which evokes the poetic nature of these creations. According to Frank Gehry, each lamp should convey ‘the feeling of freedom and eccentricity’. Each lamp is available in a range of colours as well as various models such as hanging, standing, floor and table lamps. The lamp is made from a delicate paper-like shade, and in the middle is an invisible light source. The design is characterised by its irregular sculptural shape, marked by countless folds, crimps, bulges and dents. Gehry had the idea that each lamp has an individual shape, while the idea is that the fold structure of the shade, which is shaped more or less by accident during production, can be changed by bulging it out or pressing it in, forcing the users to become co-designers who can repeatedly change the shape of the lamp if they wish to do so.
The practice of architecture is defined as rendering services which require the application of the art, science, and aesthetics of design and construction of buildings, groups of buildings, including their components and accessories and the spaces around them wherein the safeguarding of life, health, property, and public welfare is concerned.
I feel that taking this into consideration, Frank Gehry has, throughout his career as an architect, successfully applied these ideas and services and has taught the world a new way of not only looking at buildings but the design process as a whole.
So do I wish to apply the blend of art, science, and the aesthetics of design into my chosen art practise and hopefully produce a successful result such as Frank Gehry has done in his lifetime.
just watching a documentary on Frank and had to explore him more
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