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Southern California Triumphant: The Architecture of Frank Gehry
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14825 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1988 |
2,504 Words |
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Shira Rosan
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The architecture of Frank Gehry is the architecture of possibility. Created and nurtured in Southern California, America's Golden West where the sun never sets and everyone gets a second chance, Gehry's is an architecture that believes in the present and the future. The recent retrospective of The Architecture of Frank Gehry, on display at the Whitney Museum through October 2, provides a through, complete, and well-documented view of the work to date of this important and influential American architect.
This retrospective comes at an interesting time in Gehry's career. The concerns that have informed his architecture over the past quarter century are giving way now to others, some still to be defined. The opportunity to pause and look back at this point, bringing the past into sharper focus before moving on, is a rare one.
Unlike Early Modernists
The work of Frank Gehry is in many ways outside the Modernism/Post-Modernism debate of recent times. Unlike the early modernists, Gehry claims that his architecture is not intended to change the world and that the work he does is crucial to no one except himself and his client. Unlike the Post-Modernists, he does not reach into the past for iconography, and his kind of contextualism, although subtle, is much broader than the historicizing applique work of which we have seen so much in the last decade. Gehry finds certain issues consistently compelling and faces them head-on, with changing emphasis but continuing intensity.
One of these recurring issues is the idea of process, which in Gehry's work carries two meanings. The first is the architectural process itself. Gehry is interested in revealing the building process in the finished product--a modernist notion. But while modern architecture has been content to give clues to the location and nature of building elements, Gehry exposes them wholesale. Thus in the Gehry, Famillian, and Norton houses, for example, wood-stud framing is left exposed and sometimes even placed under glass, the better to call attention to it simultaneously as structure and sculpture. Plywood, a material usually covered over in the final building, is often used as a cladding material in Gehry's work. Typical of his office's approach to materials, he has researched different types of plywood and chosen to use a Finnish product whose beauty changes our perception of the material.
The other process that captures Gehry's attention is the social process, the process of inhabiting his work. This concern reveals in Gehry the existence of a social conscience based less, one suspects, on the noblesse oblige of the early modernists than on a genuine interest in and fondness for his fellow humans. The relationship of the restrained fa?de of the classroom building at Loyola Law School to the exuberantly angled staircases bursting from it is a precise analogy to the behavior of students during and between classes. This is form following function in a new way. Similarly, at the Rouse Company headquarters--an early work, from the days before his reputation or direction were so firmly established--Gehry designed partition systems but did not design or choose furniture. Rather, he encouraged the company to reuse its existing furniture; he wanted the users to personalize; he wanted the users to personalize their spaces. Many architects shudder at what happens to their buildings once messy and unpredictable clients acutally begin to use them.
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