(NPR書介) Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry

"Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness."
-- Frank Gehry

Here, from Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger, is the first full-fledged critical biography of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time. Goldberger follows Gehry from his humble origins—the son of working-class Jewish immigrants in Toronto—to the heights of his extraordinary career. He explores Gehry’s relationship to Los Angeles, a city that welcomed outsider artists and profoundly shaped him in his formative years. He surveys the full range of his work, from the Bilbao Guggenheim to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. to the architect’s own home in Santa Monica, which galvanized his neighbors and astonished the world. He analyzes his carefully crafted persona, in which an amiable surface masks a driving ambition. And he discusses his use of technology, not just to change the way a building looks, but to revolutionize the very practice of the field. Comprehensive and incisive, Building Art is a sweeping view of a singular artist—and an essential story of architecture’s modern era.

Frank Gehry談藝術設計X建築人生
Conversations with Frank Gehry
作者： 芭芭拉．艾森伯格
原文作者：Barbara Isenberg
譯者：蘇楓雅
台北：天下文化 出版社：2011
北京：中信，2013 (建築家弗蘭克．蓋里，臺大圖書館版本，2014海峽兩岸圖書交易會贈)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Happy birthday to ‪#‎FrankGehry‬, architect of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Museo Guggenheim Bilbao) that opened in 1997. Gehry’s proposal for the site on the Nervion River ultimately included features that embrace both the identity of the Guggenheim Museum and its new home in the Basque Country. The building’s glass atrium refers to the famous rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim, and its largest gallery is traversed by Bilbao’s Puente de La Salve, a vehicular bridge serving as one of the main gateways to the city. Learn more: http://gu.gg/YBJKq


Photo: David Heald

MOT TIMES 明日誌
小編常覺得，能成為一位不凡的建築大師，除了要有獨特的風格、勇於挑戰的心態 、甚至是帶點自我或童心未泯都是挺「家常便飯」的──不信？那就拿慣用「曲線」扭轉世界的建築藝術家 Frank Gehry 來道給你知！

已屆 86 歲，在建築圈依然生龍活虎的 Frank Gehry，其設計過如畢爾包古根漢美術館、華特‧迪士尼音樂廳等不朽作品的背後，還有一項更令人激賞的設計領域，那便是他跨界打造之為數不多、卻樣樣經典的家具作品。例如老中青設計迷熟悉度 No.1 的瓦愣紙椅《Wiggle Side Chair》，在當時可是打破常見家具的設計與製造方式；而全世界僅只一張的《Tuyomyo》長椅，則代表著 Frank Gehry 不止活躍於專業領域，更熱衷投入公益活動的義舉。在這些家具的設計裡，Frank Gehry 除了融入他那招牌的雕塑線條，能結合紙、鋁、塑料及木材等不同材質，並逐一鑽研、嘗試發揮它們極大的可能性，或許才是這位建築藝術家在設計圈也備受尊崇的關鍵。


不過呀，大多數設計師皆樂見自己作品的價值水漲船高，唯獨 Frank Gehry 竟「反其道而行」地勃然大怒！而 Frank Gehry 的家具作品中除了線條美感，更多的都是他貪玩、古怪的一面！？雖然小編已說這是「家常便飯」，但相信仍滿足不了設計迷的好奇心啦！所以就讓我們再度走進【普立茲克大師與他的家具們】單元，瞧瞧這位建築藝術家的設計心路歷程吧：http://goo.gl/Dpst6C


‪#‎普立茲克大師與他的家具們‬ ‪#‎FrankGehry‬


【普立茲克大師與他的家具們】連空氣都在跳舞？建築大師 Frank Gehry 的曲線扭轉藝術 - MOT TIMES 明日誌
MOTTIMES.COM

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http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/438944405/frank-gehrys-lifelong-challenge-to-create-buildings-that-move?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&
Frank Gehry's Lifelong Challenge: To Create Buildings That Move
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015 4:33 AM ET



SUSAN STAMBERG

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Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "I love going to Bilbao. ... People come out and hug me," he says. "We all need love."

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images


With sculptural swoops and sweeps and unusual materials, Frank Gehry changed the course of architecture. His creations, such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, created a new architectural language.


At 86, Gehry is being honored with medals and museum exhibitions. He has unveiled a major river project for LA, and on Tuesday, Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker, will publish Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, a big new biography of Gehry.





Building Art


The Life and Work of Frank Gehry


by Paul Goldberger


Hardcover, 513 pagespurchase
nonfiction
biography & memoir


More on this book:
NPR reviews, interviews and more


Goldberger and Gehry have known each other for some 40 years. Gehry jokes that the biography gets "close" to capturing him — and that it even helped him learn a little about himself.


"I guess I do have an ego somewhere that comes out," he says. "I hadn't realized that I turn stuff down quite the way I do."


He has walked away from big jobs — wanting more collaboration, or more control. "I guess I'm ambitious," Gehry admits, adding that the work is artistically and emotionally fulfilling for him.


"I really want to make architecture. I love the relationship with the clients," he says. "I love going to Bilbao and people come out and hug me. We all need love. And it's nice to get it for doing things like that."


Gehry's audacious, glowing buildings capture movement, energy and light. He's taken hits from other architects and critics over the years who have said that the buildings don't work inside, or that they're too hard to construct — but stubbornly and passionately he has held onto one goal: to create buildings that inspire emotion.


"If you look at a great work of art in bronze from 600 B.C. and it makes you cry, some artist way back when was able to transmit emotion through time and space over years to today," he says.





Light reflects off the shimmering stainless steel panels on Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

David McNew/Getty Images


He believes architecture can do that, too.


Art and beauty were in Gehry's DNA from the beginning. Born in Toronto, as a little boy he watched live carp swimming in his grandmother's bathtub on their way to becoming gefilte fish. He loved the shapes and movements they made. Later, fish became a motif in the buildings he designed. After he moved to Los Angeles at 18, his closest friends were artists, not architects.


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Gehry stands next to his fish lamps at the opening of an exhibition in London in 2013. As a child, Gehry used to watch carp swim in his grandmother's bathtub, before they got turned into gefilte fish.

Joel Ryan/Joel Ryan/Invision/AP


"Their commitment to ordinary materials, to fresh ways to solve problems, making beauty out of the ordinary, affected him very, very profoundly," says biographer Paul Goldberger.


Take chain-link fencing — that basic barrier at construction sites and tennis courts. Gehry used it early on, in houses and commercial projects — and was ridiculed for it.


"I found the material that everybody hated," he says. It was a material "that was used ubiquitously by all cultures throughout the world, and that disconnection between those two ideas interested me, so I started looking at how I could make chain link — because I hated it, too — why not try to make it beautiful?"


Over the years, Gehry's materials got more sophisticated. The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is constructed with billowing, soaring glass and wood. Before that, he made a sensuous Disney Concert Hall out of supple stainless steel. And glowing silver titanium swirls in the curves of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.





With 12 huge glass "sails," the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images


"I was trying to express emotion," he explains. "The curves were from the fish — were a sense of movement with inert materials, which the Greeks did, the Indian cultures did it. We're living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive. Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there's some resonance for it."


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Gehry's "Dancing House" (also known as "Fred and Ginger") in Prague.

Caitlin via Flickr Creative Commons


Movement, emotion, unusual materials, going against current thinking. These lifelong Gehry themes got transformed when digital technology came along. Goldberger says the digital age let Gehry catch up with his artist friends, through architecture.


"Frank was trying to conceive in his head shapes and forms and curves that were not particularly realizable by engineers," Goldberger explains.


Software from the aerospace industry let Gehry move his dreams into realities. He and his staff could engineer what sometimes started as squiggles on paper and convert them into structures that would stand up. They made thrilling buildings unlike any that had ever been seen before.


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Gehry, 86, says his work can never be perfect: "by definition it can't because we're defective creatures." But that hasn't stopped him from creating inspired structures for decades.

Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images


Fame and admiration engulfed Frank Gehry. But Goldberger publishes a revealing quote that shows Gehry can't take unmitigated joy at his accomplishment. "I wish I could live in the place people are making for me. I want to be popular, but I don't trust it," he said.


Gehry feels his work is never perfect, never finished.


"It can never be perfect," he says. "By definition it can't because we're defective creatures."


Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry is a penetrating portrait of a "defective creature" who helped to transform architecture in our time.