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March 28, 2006
The Gripe Against Gehry
Rogue's Gallery
"Rogue #4: The Sculptor"
"By definition, a building is a sculpture, because it is a three-dimensional object." — Frank Gehry
Place Performance takes sculptor-slash-starchitect Frank Gehry at his word and explains why his giant "attention getting," "whimsical," "wobbling," "kick-ass sculptures" are generally "not made to live in" because "the concentration is always on how the building looks instead of how it performs, or how it feels."
An example is Cleveland's great mistake:
Clevelanders were heartbroken to learn that their beautiful new five-story Peter B. Lewis Building with the complicated titanium roof at the business school at Case Western University is a nuisance and a menace. When the hot Cleveland sun is shining, the campus pedestrians are blinded by all that shiny metal - the CNN report says, "the glint off the steel tiles is so powerful that standing next to the building is like lying on a beach with a tanning mirror."
And here during its first winter, they're finding out that this $62 million masterpiece dumps snow off its sloping surfaces and hangs dangerous-looking two-foot icicles off at least one roof edge.
Posted by lumi at March 28, 2006 7:21 AM