Sketches of Frank Gehry

Gehry Residence
From the architect: a symbol of deconstructivism. Gehry, however, knew something had to
be done to the house before he moved in. His solution was a bold one in the 1970's that
involved the "balance of fragment and whole, raw and refined, new and old" and would strike
up controversy.
Gehry actually did keep the existing house almost completely in tact, but not in a
conventional manner. The Dutch colonnial home was left in tact and the new house was built
around it. Holes were made, walls were stripped, torn down and put up, and the old quiet
house became a loud shriek of contemporary style among the neighboring mansions--
literally.
Gehry's design wrapped around three sides of the old house on the ground floor, extending
the house towards the street and leaving the exterior of the existing home almost untouched.
The interior went through a considerable amount of changes on both if its two levels. In
some places it was stripped to reveal the framing, exposing the joists and wood studs. It was
repaired according to the addition, showing both old and new elements. This is especially
evident when walking through the rooms of the house and passing by both new doors placed
by Gehry and older ones originally in the house. The apex of the old house peeks out from
within this mix of materials, giving the impression that the house is consistently under
construction.

Architectural style[edit]

Much of Gehry's work reflects a spirit of experimentation coupled with a respect for the demands
of professional practice. Gehry's work has remained largely unaligned with broader stylistic
tendencies or movements.[citation needed] With his earliest educational influences rooted in modernism,
Gehry's work has sought to escape modernist stylistic tropes while still remaining interested in
some of its underlying transformative agendas. Continually working between given
circumstances and unanticipated materializations, Gehry's style works to disrupt expectations.
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.[49] Gehry
has been called "the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding".[50] However, a
retrospective exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a
sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and
painting.

VitraFurniture Museum

Easily recognizable as the architectural style of Frank Gehry, the deconstructive sculptural
building differs only slightly than his usual designs in that he limits his materials to white
plaster and a titanium-zinc alloy. As said by the architect, "I love the shaping I can do when
I'm sketching. And it never occurred to me that I would do it in a building. The first thing I
built of anything like that is Vitra in Germany.
Paul Heyer, an architecture critic, described the visitor's experience as "a continuous
changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship
to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of
the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display..."
Surrounded by a meadow of cherry trees, the museum is also nearby to Claes Oldenburg's
sculpture Balancing Tools, as well as a conference pavilion by Tadao Ando.

Disney conference hall

Gehry worked with Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustical consultant, to hone the hall’s sound
through spatial and material means. To test the acoustics, they used a 1:10 scale model of
the auditorium, complete with a model occupant in each seat. This required all elements to
be scaled accordingly, including increasing the frequency of sound in the space to reduce
the wavelength by a factor of ten. The concert hall's partitions and curved, billowing ceiling
act as part of the acoustical system while subtly referencing the sculptural language of the
exterior.
Guggenheim
Set on the edge of the Nervión River in Bilbao, Spain, the Guggenheim Museum is a fusion
of complex, swirling forms and captivating materiality that responds to an intricate program
and an industrial urban context. In fact, the phenomenon of a city’s transformation following
the construction of a significant piece of architecture is now referred to as the “Bilbao
Effect.” Twenty years on, the Museum continues to challenge assumptions about the
connections between art and architecture today. Although the metallic form of the exterior
looks almost floral from above, from the ground the building more closely resembles a boat,
evoking the past industrial life of the port of Bilbao. Constructed of titanium, limestone, and
glass, the seemingly random curves of the exterior are designed to catch the light and react
to the sun and the weather.