with Donald Judd (FIG. 36-16) and Claes Oldenburg (FIG. 36-26),
Gehry works up his designs by constructing models and then cutting
them up and arranging them until he has a satisfying composition.
Among Gehry’s most notable projects is the Guggenheim Museum
(FIG. 36-69) in Bilbao, Spain. The immensely dramatic building
appears as a mass of asymmetrical and imbalanced forms, and the
irregularity of the main masses—whose profiles change dramatically
with every shift of a visitor’s position—suggests a collapsed or col-
lapsing aggregate of units. The scaled limestone- and titanium-clad
exterior lends a space-age character to the building and highlights
further the unique cluster effect of the many forms (see “Frank
Gehry on Architectural Design and Materials,” above). A group of
organic forms that Gehry refers to as a “metallic flower” tops the
museum. In the center of the museum, an enormous glass-walled1012 Chapter 36 EUROPE AND AMERICA AFTER 1945F
rank Gehry has been de-
signing buildings since the
1950s, but it was only in the
1970s that he began to break
away from the rectilinearity of
modernist architecture and de-
velop the dramatic sculptural
style seen in buildings like the
Guggenheim Museum (FIGS.
36-69and 36-70) in Bilbao. In
1999 the Deconstructivist ar-
chitect reflected on his career
and his many projects in a
book titled Gehry Talks.
My early work was rectilin-
ear because you take baby
steps. I guess the work has
become a kind of sculpture
as architecture....I’m
a strict modernist in the
sense of believing in purity,
that you shouldn’t decorate.
And yet buildings need dec-
oration, because they need
scaling elements. They need
to be human scale, in my
opinion. They can’t just be
faceless things. That’s how
some modernism failed.*
They teach materials and methods in architecture school, as a sepa-
rate course. I’m a craftsman....It seems to me that when you’re
doing architecture, you’re building something out of something.
There are social issues, there’s context, and then there’s how do you
make the enclosure and what do you make it with? ...I explored
metal: how it dealt with the light ....It does beautiful things with
light....Flat was a fetish, and everybody was doing that. I found out
that I could use metal if I didn’t worry about it being flat; I could do
it cheaper. It was intuitive. I just went with it. I liked it. Then when Isaw it on the building, I loved it....Bilbao... [is] titanium....
[I] prefer titanium because it’s stronger; it’s an element, a pure ele-
ment, and it doesn’t oxidize. It stays the same forever. They give a
hundred-year guarantee!†* Milton Friedman, ed.,Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process,rev. ed. (New York:
Universe, 2002), 47–48.
† Ibid., 44, 47.Frank Gehry on Architectural
Design and MaterialsARTISTS ON ART
designed it as part of a joint German–Saudi Arabian research project
on the technology of solar energy. The architect intended to deny
here the possibility of spatial enclosure altogether, and his appar-
ently chaotic arrangement of the units defies easy analysis. The
shapes of the Hysolar Institute’s roof, walls, and windows seem to
explode, avoiding any suggestion of clear, stable masses. Behnisch
aggressively played with the whole concept of architecture and the
viewer’s relationship to it. The disordered architectural elements
seem precarious and visually threaten to collapse, frustrating the ob-
server’s expectations of what a building should look like.
FRANK GEHRY The architect most closely identified with
Deconstructivist architecture is the Canadian-born Frank Gehry
(b. 1929). Trained in sculpture, and at different times a collaborator
36-69Frank Gehry,Guggenheim Bilbao Museo, Bilbao, Spain, 1997.
Gehry’s limestone-and-titanium Bilbao museum is an immensely dramatic building. Its disorder and seeming
randomness of design epitomize Deconstructivist architectural principles.