ARCHITECT FRANK GEHRY DISCUSSES BUILDING AND BEAUTY
At left, architect Frank Gehry; at right, Pratt President Thomas F. Schutte
Legendary architect and Pritzker Prize winner Frank Gehry took center stage in Memorial Hall on November 10, to hold a conversation about the role of beauty in architecture.
The talk was moderated by Julie V. Iovine, executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper, with Yael Reisner, author of Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship (Wiley, 2010).
L-R: Julie Iovine, Frank Gehry, and Yael Reisner before an audience in Memorial Hall Asked by Reisner whether a new generation of architects might allow beauty to exist, Gehry responded, “What’s interesting to me is why we need it at all,” but allowed, “I think there’s a DNA requirement in us all to have art.”
Discrediting the notion that he crumples paper for inspiration, Gehry told students, “Things come to your mind when you don’t expect it…. Be yourself, and you’ll like what you do.”
Much of the conversation focused on how an architect serves the client’s agenda. Reisner chided Gehry for talking “more about budget than meaning or aesthetic goal,” to which Gehry responded, “The budget is the driving thing.”
When asked by a student where building materials come into the process of designing a structure, Gehry said the material is not his starting point, though he likes to explore materials’ possibilities. What’s important, he explained, is “how you use the material.”
Gehry said he had created his best-known work, the spectacular Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, to be covered largely in titanium; the material gave him the flexibility of form to achieve the remarkable structure, which opened in 1997 with its curvaceous, metal-clad forms resembling a ship.
Asked by another student how he felt about keeping to historic style, Gehry said, “I grew up as a modernist. I don’t quote historic forms…I’m not interested in repeating what someone else has done.”
Gehry also addressed his transformation of Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan into a primarily residential 76-story building, considered controversial because it will reshape the downtown skyline as the tallest residential building in New York City, with possibly the most expensive rentals in its neighborhood. Gehry declared that the bay windows were the only change he had made, saying that his “only innovation was to make it 10 stories higher, slimmer than those old chunky buildings.”
The conversation was sponsored by the Steel and the Ornamental Metal Institutes of New York and presented as part of the School of Architecture’s fall lecture series.
Photos: Diana Pau
Gateway Editors
Reader Comments (4)
I can't help but recall my years at Pratt getting ripped apart because I liked the look or form of one of my buildings. From 1962-67 at Pratt, If form didn't follow function, you failed, period. Having visited Mr. Gehry's Music Experience in Seattle, I can tell you from personal experience that the interior spaces have no composition whatsoever but rather result from the building's exterior form and nowhere is the structure of the building clearly articulated. An impressive piece of sculpture, yes, but honest Architecture? Of course it's always easy to criticize. Mr. Gehry is certainly an accomplished practitioner, and though I admire him intensely for 'selling' his designs and getting them built, I wonder if admiration for some of Mr. Gehry's work will stand the test of time.
Thank you RIchard for this very interesting comment.
I am an alum, 1985, MFA Fine Arts, when criticism was very high in painting, if it did not follow the "East Village" style.
My lack of interest in this style and content, placed me on the exterior of class critiques - which were of little interest to me anyway, since they were comprised of a majority of my classmates and not the faculty that I was paying for.
I am familiar with one of Gehry's recent buildings in NYC, where I have heard there are few interior walls.
That's the IAC buiilding.
Perhaps out of obsession it is, that decades after dismisal one still clings to the harsh words of the rejector. That the chiding father has long forgotten when the back of the hand did cross one's face, is surely that which stains the pallate most sourly. But miserable without measure, is the soul who has not forgotten such trivialities.