I grew up a few blocks from his funky Santa Monica house [1], passed by it all the time. When you’re a kid you typically see wild new things like that as just normal because you have no context for how unusual they are. His house defied that perspective; even as a kid you understand that being wrapped in oddly angled chain link fences and corrugated metal is just... different. It's an unanswered question, a loose thread, a thing you can't unknow.
I don't particularly like the house - it's meant to be challenging not beautiful - but with perspective I see now there aren't many creations out there that achieve existence in eternal confusion like it does for me. I see his other works like Bilbao [2] and Disney Hall as refinements on the concept with the added dimension of beauty. They're not quite as memorable, but I think do a great job exploring the frontier of beauty and befuddlement.
The Santa Monica spot was, personally, a bit of an eye-sore after about 8 years. I kept wishing someone else would rise to the flamboyance, but nobody ever really did. Well, I'm wrong of course, but I never did see such a striking spot until I got to Europe, or whatever ..
Notably this Onion piece was added to the home page of MIT’s architecture department the year my cohort of grad students moved from LCS into the newly opened Stata center.
The building was was fun to explore, but had a number of defects that suggested its designer was a big-picture not a details guy.
He designed the Stata center at MIT. I know it's had lots of problems (leaks and other issues) because of its wonky design. But I always liked walking by, and thought of it as a Dr Seuss building.
Anecdotally, the professors I talked to in the building hated it. Non-rectilinear walls and oddly-shaped offices made it difficult to put up bookcases and desks. The windows were all custom, meaning if one broke, it was difficult to replace. And, of course, the aforementioned leaks.
I was in the Radio Society and had access to the Green Building (50) roof. The Stata Center actually looks coherent from that angle, and you can tell that was the angle the designers and approvers had been seeing it from (in model form) the whole time.
I saw the (a?) architectural model for Stata before it was built. I was with an artist, and we just walked into somewhere it had been set up for an event. (Yay for MIT culture of letting students go most places on campus.) It looked pretty crazy at the time. IIRC, there was a clear sphere embedded in the top of one of the lower roofs. My joke was that the model looked like someone had taken a paperweight, and smashed up a previously ordinary-looking building. It was crazy when construction started, and you could start to see elements of the building emerge, like, they are actually building that. (Though they left out the paperweight sphere.)
Before it was built, a designer friend, who'd worked worked in a Stata building before, mentioned the frequent complaints of Gehry buildings, such as people in triangular offices, or with slanting walls, that couldn't fit a desk.
Years later, I was surprised and deligted to end up working in Stata. My office was pretty generic rectangular and functional, with big windows that opened. No complaints about the office, except the HVAC couldn't win against the early GPU compute my officemate was doing. Space in the building was in demand by everyone, yet there were large areas of dead space. I wondered whether some of the conspicuously unused space was because they could've figured out how to adapt it, but was being banked consciously, so that space could be made for PIs who arrived later.
Stewart Brand criticized IM Pei's building for the original Media Lab (E15), as not being malleable like the "temporary" Building 20, and maybe some of the same criticism applied. Though Stata, coincidentally built partly on the site of Building 20 that was razed for it, did incorporate plywood elements in the interior, I think as a nod to Building 20. This included large plywood tables that were moved around as needed for different purposes in the open ares outside the elevator on my floor (G10?), multiple times a day.
The strange bathroom placement, and the ones that used visibly dirty ("green") water to flush, weren't a practical problem, but multiple times were awkward to explain to visitors. I liked the big single-person bathrooms on the office floors, and they were luxurious for students and professors doing all-nighters to get in a discreet paper towel bath, compared to the indignity of trying to do it in a toilet stall.
One thing I liked about the larger building design was the main street ground floor, adding cafe and various random seating, which was a big improvement over the Infinite Corridor.
At one point, I had a fair number of visits to a client's (IBM) IM Pei-designed facility in Somers (NY). There were so many oddly-shaped conference rooms in the pyramidal buildings.
I toured at MIT when I was applying to colleges, and the student narrating the walking tour trash-talked the Stata Center pretty brutally as we went by it, mentioning the leaks, the lawsuit, how nobody liked it, etc.
I never knew if those were her actual feelings or if this was part of a script approved by the admissions office, or even which of those possibilities would be crazier.
I worked in the Stata Center for the first five years and it was just a very poor office building to work in. Even setting aside the leaks and other construction defects, individual working spaces, traffic paths, and communal spaces were not well-separated leading to a lot of distraction. There was also various useless corners due to sharp angles.
I much preferred working in the previous building, CS and AI lab building, NE43. It looked like a punch card from the outside, but had a very nice design with small offices (with closing doors) ringing a common space. The primary downside is the square footage per worker was decadent by today's standard.
Oh wait, we were talking about Frank Gehry, right? His museums looks cool but he should never have been allowed to design an office building.
The exterior design grew on me, for all the issues it had (and at least one major redo), over time. The few times I was in there I liked the ground design well enough as a space. But I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone rave about the interior layout as a working space in general.
I know someone who worked for an HVAC sub for the building and they said it was really hard because there weren't plans as they were used to working on at the time.
This is the starchitect shtick - build sculptural forms that can, incidentally, be used as buildings. It's literally the most superficial kind of architecture.
It's much harder and less self-indulgent to start from a human-scale brief for a working and/or living environment and build a functional triumph that is also visually striking and original.
You can get away with being transgressive and challenging™ for art galleries and museums, but offices and homes need a whole other level of integration.
He also designed a Facebook’s office in Menlo Park. The roof was literally a park, seemingly blending with the bay and you could go for a nice nature stroll mid-day by just going up a flight of stairs.
https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/facebook-campus-in-menlo-...
I worked in this building. It was terrible. Low light, completely open office, people walking around you all the time, extremely noisy, pretty ugly (the roof-top garden was the exception). My team expensed noise cancelling headphones because it was so loud.
Not surprising to hear. I mean Gehry has always been more flair than quality. His studio has probably weakest execution from all of the star architects. But it's a great brand i guess thats why you hire Gehry.
I mean, having been in that building a few times, and working on the other side of the street, it's pretty clear the reason that building is such a disaster is that the architects did what the clients asked for. I like to give Gehry the benefit of the doubt, maybe that's cause he guest starred on Arthur. But you can only tell the client they're dumb and their building will suck to be in so many times before you just go ahead and let them have their hellscape.
Same. Echo chamber hell. I appreciated the modernness of the interior as a design nerd, though it was uncomfortable as a primary desk for all the reasons you’ve said. Never mind the never ending flood of visitors up and down the walkways.
The roof was the main reprieve about the entire environment, wonderfully maintained and honestly a blessing to escape the main campus.
Nonetheless. Frank is a legend, very fortunate to have been able to been able to experience his work on a daily basis.
It’s really fun to explore, no two spaces are alike, and lots of nooks and crannies. Definitely in my top 5 favorite buildings on campus and in Cambridge.
during an internship in Vicenza years ago, right before a guy in a makeshift Mickey Mouse costume punched me in the back of the head and sprinted down an alley nearhy, I ended up sharing a courtyard bench with Frank Gehry without realizing who he was. he looked over the draft I was struggling with and said, in this almost offhand way, that sometimes a building needs a little room to misbehave if you want it to feel lived in. we talked for a few minutes about light, angles, and the stubbornness of materials before he drifted off to another studio. I only pieced it together later when someone mentioned he’d been visiting the site that week.
the news today brings that memory back with a kind of sideways clarity.
I was big into Gehry as an architectural student. His work was so different and exciting compared to other architects. He was the "father" of what was called the Santa Monica school. There was a good few architects in LA doing interesting stuff. I travelled from Europe to LA to try and work for him but never got past the reception. I prefer his earlier work in the 70s and 80s and less of a fan of his later work after Bilbao when he got more mainstream fame. I attended a talk of his at USC in the 90s and he was really funny, he was like a stand-up comedian.
I got to meet Frank in the mid 90s while studying architecture in New Mexico. He was incredibly generous with his time and ideas to us students that stayed extra late to catch him touring the studios with the dean around midnight. His midnight critique of my design that was due the next morning made me throw it out and start over to include some of his ideas.
I worked in the IAC NYC HQ for a while (as Dir Engineering for The Daily Beast).
It was really nice walking into that space. Always been influenced by architecture in my engineering career and it was really nice to have that pedigree infused into my workspace just a little bit. It's just a little dose of delight every day.
I've walked past the 'folding into itself' building in Prague quite a few times, and never once realised it was a Gehry. I have also walked a fair bit in downtown LA, during summer, and seen some hot spots without understanding the nature of Gehry's ability, to reflect.
He lived a long time to have built a lot of interesting places for his fellow humans to reflect, and live in.
His team built great models, can't say the same for structures get built IRL, especially California buildings in Winter climates. TBH starchitects whose buildings performance fail as much as Gehry's should have their Pritzker revoked if X% of seminal projects fail as buildings. Or there should at least be some sort of architecture naughty list, but I surmise that list would be very long.
Notably one of the first people who whipped out a credit card to buy the 3D CAD/modeling program Rhinoceros 3D at v1.0 on the first day it was available for purchase:
Agreed, such a great structure in NYC's skyline. Lived on 73 for a few years. The contoured windows and benches inside were just as fun as the exterior.
Still don't understand why they stuck a red brick school in the middle and didn't contour it with the stainless steel panels like the rest of the building.
I toured that building when I was looking for a place, and just so happened to be there when there was recess or something. The loud noise of kids was definitely a significant factor in me not signing a lease.
The only thing they have in common is that if you look at one of their buildings you instantly know who designed it. But nobody ever confuses an FLW building with an FG building.
I don't particularly like the house - it's meant to be challenging not beautiful - but with perspective I see now there aren't many creations out there that achieve existence in eternal confusion like it does for me. I see his other works like Bilbao [2] and Disney Hall as refinements on the concept with the added dimension of beauty. They're not quite as memorable, but I think do a great job exploring the frontier of beauty and befuddlement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehry_Residence
[2] especially the aerial perspective https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao#/medi...
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