alt Hacker NewsFrank Gehry has died
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From 2002: "Frank Gehry No Longer Allowed To Make Sandwiches For Grandkids":
https://theonion.com/frank-gehry-no-longer-allowed-to-make-s...
(just a picture, no story).
He designed the Stata center at MIT. I know it's had lots of problems (leaks and other issues) because of its wonky design. But I always liked walking by, and thought of it as a Dr Seuss building.
He also designed a Facebook’s office in Menlo Park. The roof was literally a park, seemingly blending with the bay and you could go for a nice nature stroll mid-day by just going up a flight of stairs. https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/facebook-campus-in-menlo-...
during an internship in Vicenza years ago, right before a guy in a makeshift Mickey Mouse costume punched me in the back of the head and sprinted down an alley nearhy, I ended up sharing a courtyard bench with Frank Gehry without realizing who he was. he looked over the draft I was struggling with and said, in this almost offhand way, that sometimes a building needs a little room to misbehave if you want it to feel lived in. we talked for a few minutes about light, angles, and the stubbornness of materials before he drifted off to another studio. I only pieced it together later when someone mentioned he’d been visiting the site that week.
the news today brings that memory back with a kind of sideways clarity.
I got to meet Frank in the mid 90s while studying architecture in New Mexico. He was incredibly generous with his time and ideas to us students that stayed extra late to catch him touring the studios with the dean around midnight. His midnight critique of my design that was due the next morning made me throw it out and start over to include some of his ideas.
I was big into Gehry as an architectural student. His work was so different and exciting compared to other architects. He was the "father" of what was called the Santa Monica school. There was a good few architects in LA doing interesting stuff. I travelled from Europe to LA to try and work for him but never got past the reception. I prefer his earlier work in the 70s and 80s and less of a fan of his later work after Bilbao when he got more mainstream fame. I attended a talk of his at USC in the 90s and he was really funny, he was like a stand-up comedian.
I worked in the IAC NYC HQ for a while (as Dir Engineering for The Daily Beast).
It was really nice walking into that space. Always been influenced by architecture in my engineering career and it was really nice to have that pedigree infused into my workspace just a little bit. It's just a little dose of delight every day.
I first heard of him through The Simpsons and will forever think of "Hey Frank Gehry! like curvilinear forms, much?" when I hear his name.
There's the Seattle Museum of Popular Culture which has it's fans and non-fans
https://www.gscinparis.com/frank-gehrys-experience-music-pro...
Me, it doesn't do it for me personally. I like that it's "different" though. Many museums are "different"
I've walked past the 'folding into itself' building in Prague quite a few times, and never once realised it was a Gehry. I have also walked a fair bit in downtown LA, during summer, and seen some hot spots without understanding the nature of Gehry's ability, to reflect.
He lived a long time to have built a lot of interesting places for his fellow humans to reflect, and live in.
An architect of light, mostly.
His team built great models, can't say the same for structures get built IRL, especially California buildings in Winter climates. TBH starchitects whose buildings performance fail as much as Gehry's should have their Pritzker revoked if X% of seminal projects fail as buildings. Or there should at least be some sort of architecture naughty list, but I surmise that list would be very long.
Notably one of the first people who whipped out a credit card to buy the 3D CAD/modeling program Rhinoceros 3D at v1.0 on the first day it was available for purchase:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHp7C2Ccu94
which engendered the opensource node editor Grasshopper eventually expanding to a ménagerie of animal-named support applications.
My sis has some of his wood chairs. Very nice work.
As an artist I appreciate Frank Gehry.
As an engineer I detest Frank Gehry.
Nooooooo :’(
sad. I love his work.
Who else gets confused between Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright?
I grew up a few blocks from his funky Santa Monica house [1], passed by it all the time. When you’re a kid you typically see wild new things like that as just normal because you have no context for how unusual they are. His house defied that perspective; even as a kid you understand that being wrapped in oddly angled chain link fences and corrugated metal is just... different. It's an unanswered question, a loose thread, a thing you can't unknow.
I don't particularly like the house - it's meant to be challenging not beautiful - but with perspective I see now there aren't many creations out there that achieve existence in eternal confusion like it does for me. I see his other works like Bilbao [2] and Disney Hall as refinements on the concept with the added dimension of beauty. They're not quite as memorable, but I think do a great job exploring the frontier of beauty and befuddlement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehry_Residence
[2] especially the aerial perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao#/medi...