By di Marcantonio Ragone
He does his part to foster such descriptions, which distinguish him from the more classic profile of his colleagues. He likes to present himself as an outlier in the community of architects, and still today he prefers to mix with visual artists, whether painters or sculptors.
His predilection for Rothko and Jasper Johns, his youthful frequentation of art circles in California, especially 1960s Los Angeles, his flair for constantly observing things and their spatial relations with a inquiring spirit have all come together to form the stylistic hallmark of his architecture.
His projects are always pervaded by a sense of enchantment, or rather “wonder,” since “wonder is the architect’s aim,” to paraphrase Giambattista Marino’s adagio addressed to the poet.
This sentiment prevails over everything: functional reasons, the relation to the context and in some cases even budget constraints.
This is how Gehry, especially since the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, became certainly an outstanding figure on the international architectural scene, but also one who is extremely controversial. He still arouses polemics, sometimes being the target of fierce invective but more often of admiration and unconditional acclaim.
His work is universally known for the way he uses titanium on the exteriors to bring out the forms of the volumes.
The complex wrap-around shapes with their strong visual impact define interior spaces with a more conventional design, making use of the commonest materials in current architecture, notably glass and wood laminate.
Despite his predilection for this boldly tactile architecture, Gehry does not use stone, the material with the highest sculptural vocation, in his architecture to the same extent as metal, though he does apply it to attain certain important expressive and symbolic functions. But Gehry still has an account open with this material and it could be settled in one of his upcoming projects.
This is the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which from the original conception of the design was meant to be built entirely in stone. The choice of steel to achieve the effect of “wing on wing with the wind behind you,” as Gehry himself described the building, was made necessary precisely because of technical problems but above all to keep the project on budget. Gehry visited Carrara in person to discuss the project with the only companies able to perform the work and to examine the striking mock-up of the wall cladding in Vicenza stone, built specially for the occasion. It proved impossible, however, to square the circle, and stone was used only for the plinth, a sort of pedestal on which the plastic mass of metal rests. The monumental access stairs are in Roman travertine.
The external paths are paved with a French limestone with a distinctive beige hue, also used to cover the vertical walls in the lower part of the building.
They reflect a color preference for beige which is common to Gehry’s other buildings. These are materials with neutral colors, without conspicuous veining or other decorative patterns and therefore easier to integrate with the rest of the work, leaving the bright enfolding steel volumes as the dominant feature, asserting their presence and making it stand out clearly against the masses and volumes of the surrounding skyscrapers.All the same, stone is also the object of Gehry’s juggling design. He always likes to grapple with the challenge of the extreme.
The low-key expressive function noted above contrasts with the complexity of the forms of some of the pieces produced.
Artifacts for the external stairs that are asymmetrical and shaped by irregular curved cuts; numerous special pieces fashioned using the latest computerized technologies; the surface finishes in variable thicknesses and shaped to fit the product to the profiles and forms into which they are set, and to maintain the morphological continuity of the whole: all this reveals the expertise of the architect, accustomed to demand the finest but not the impossible.
Stone appears to the same effect and with the same complexity of fabrication in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, another of Gehry’s creations to which he owes much of his planetary popularity.
The strong impression the building makes on viewers is due once again to its imaginative volumes and its cladding, in this case of titanium. Yet the impact of this complex architectural machine on the environment is not disturbing, despite its essential foreignness to the genius loci.
Certainly the work in Bilbao has a more prominent articulation of its volumes.
Stonework is used to signal the space reserved for the administrative area, embodied in an architecture conceived in a more current character and in a sense independent of the rest of the work, while titanium is dominant as a facing for the spaces devoted to the art collections and exhibitions, bearing Gehry’s unmistakable signature and defining the museum’s true identity.
All the same, stone is far from marginal in the Guggenheim. The paving alone (of both interior and exterior) calls for 12,000 square meters of Ambar limestone, quarried near Granada, with its darker hue chosen by Gehry also for the vertical cladding.
Slabs measuring 600 x 800 x 40 millimeters are used in most of the outer facing. They are installed with metal anchors and with the vertical grouting between the contiguous slabs staggered by only 100 millimeters.
A true tribute to stone, which again in Bilbao required Gehry to be innovative in its installation.
Very special treatment was required to achieve the perimetric curvatures imposed by the design of the external tower and the long passageway/corridor that gives access to it and other parts of the structure. All the problems were again solved with the aid of CNC machines and sophisticated design software which Gehry’s office was one of the first to adopt and has used with steadily increasing skill.
But stone also lies in Gehry’s deepest chords, as appears clearly in another of his most admired works, the DG Bank in Berlin, completed between 1999 and 2000. The building stands on a site before the Brandenburg Gate. The outstanding historical significance of the site called for careful and measured gestures in order to avoid altering the composed atmosphere that its memory demands.
Gehry embodied this restraint in a building that could be called two-faced, with two very different elevations. The side overlooking the Brandenburg Gate is rigorously orthogonal, rising five stories high and housing the bank with its offices. The second, facing the Alexanderplatz, is more animated. It rises ten stories high and contains thirty-nine apartments. Both elevations are faced with Vicenza stone of a beautiful pale yellow color which the passage of time will mellow until it harmonizes with the Brandenburg Gate.Here the architect used a cladding of stone slabs of impressive dimensions (180 x 350 x 60 centimeters), which imposed tolerances of the order of 2 millimeters on the fabricators and entailed substantial problems of transport and installation.
The facing on the opposite facade is more traditional, with slabs 4 centimeters thick, but its design is also original, with an undulating form which Gehry chose to combine with projecting windows in homage to Berlin’s Expressionist masters. The interplay of light and shade between the cladding and the windows is critical in transforming the “breaks” of the windows in the facade into soft continuous lines with an effect that heightens the overall plasticity of the cladding.The stylistic metamorphosis of the exterior, to some extent imposed on Gehry by expediency and the planning regulations, again gives rise to invention and a sense of wonder when one enters the building, where the designer’s hallmark is again evident, vivid and unmistakable, sealing the work like his signature set at the foot of a page.
|
|
