Architect Seminar - FRANK OWEN GEHRY

1. Architect Seminar - FRANK OWEN GEHRY Born – Toronto, Canada, February 28, 1929 By- Vaibhav Sethia B.Arch IV 061025

2. Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism. • Its application tends to depart from Modernism, in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. • DeCon structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. • Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but 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. • Is well educated in the field of European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.

4. EASY EDGES - Indicates his “fundamental concern with manipulating basic materials in unconventional ways to produce objects that are functional yet also visually striking.”

5. Gehry is very much inspired by fish. Not only does it appear in his buildings, he created a line of jewelry, household items, and sculptures based on this motif.  He said, "Three hundred million years before man was fish....if you gotta go back, and you're insecure about going forward...go back three hundred million years ago. Why are you stopping at the Greeks? So I started drawing fish in my sketchbook, and then I started to realize that there was something in it. The Standing Glass Fish, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

6. Fish dance Restaurant in Kobe, Japan.

7. CRITICISM • Gehry's work has its detractors. Some have said: • The buildings waste structural resources by creating functionless forms. • The buildings are apparently designed without accounting for the local climate. • The spectacle of a building often overwhelms its intended use, especially in the case of museums and arenas. • The buildings do not seem to belong in their surroundings "organically." • The buildings are often unfriendly towards disabled people. The Art Gallery of Ontario, for example, had most ramps removed at Gehry's behest. • Complex and innovative designs like Gehry's typically go over budget. • Some have even described Gehry as a “one-trick pony" and an "auto-plagiarist”, referring to the similarity in style some of his buildings share. • MIT sued Frank Gehry’s architecture firm claiming design and construction failures in its Stata Center which has developed cracks, leaks and other problems

9. WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL, Los Angeles , California.

10. Reflection problems – -Most of the building's exterior was designed with stainless steel given a matte finish, the Founders Room and Children's Amphitheater were designed with highly polished mirror-like panels. -The resulting heat made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm, caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 60 ºC (140 ºF). -In 2005 these were dulled by lightly sanding the panels to eliminate unwanted glare.

11. Acoustics – The walls and ceiling of the hall are finished with Douglas-fir  while the floor is finished with oak. The Hall's reverberation time is approximately 2.2 seconds unoccupied and 2.0 seconds occupied. Gehry wanted a distinctive, unique design for the organ. He would submit design concepts to Rosales, who would then provide feedback. Many of Gehry's early designs were fanciful, but impractical: Rosales said "His [Gehry's] earliest input would have created very bizarre musical results in the organ. Just as a taste, some of them would have had the console at the top and pipes upside down. There was another in which the pipes were in layers of arrays like fans. Very fascinating. Couldn't be built. The pipes would have had to be made out of materials that wouldn't work for pipes. We had our moments where we realized we were not going anywhere. As the design became more practical for me, it also became more boring for him." Then, Gehry came up with the curved wooden pipe concept, "like a logjam kind of thing," says Rosales, "turned sideways." This design turned out to be musically viable.