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...
MPK 22 was also designed by Gehry Partners, which was a massive improvement on the inside, but outside is still kinda terrible in my opinion: https://www.truebeck.com/project/facebook-mpk-22/
I’m jealous that you knew it so well and as just another house.
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 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.
https://theonion.com/frank-gehry-no-longer-allowed-to-make-s...
(just a picture, no story).
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.
"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."
NOT TRUE! I remember then (and even now) looking at unique things in awe and amazement, rather than something normal or ordinary.
Just what I think :)
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.
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.
the news today brings that memory back with a kind of sideways clarity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHp7C2Ccu94
which engendered the opensource node editor Grasshopper eventually expanding to a ménagerie of animal-named support applications.
Gehry is somebody whos work someone else has to figure out how to build.
Used to take an hour to render a simple teapot. I could probably render that in realtime now.
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.
The roof was pretty nice though.
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.
He lived a long time to have built a lot of interesting places for his fellow humans to reflect, and live in.
An architect of light, mostly.
The 9th (top) floor cafeteria was such a nice touch and offered great views up and down the Hudson.
I took this photo[0] from up there of Space Shuttle Enterprise being delivered to the Intrepid in 2012.
https://www.gscinparis.com/frank-gehrys-experience-music-pro...
Me, it doesn't do it for me personally. I like that it's "different" though. Many museums are "different"
Making a statement with architecture rarely goes well, especially if you abandon rectilinear structures.
https://www.rle.mit.edu/media/undercurrents/Vol9_2_Spring97....
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.
https://blog.bluebeam.com/gehry-technologies-industry-influe...
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.
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.
Stata ended up costing a lot and having a lot of issues.
It was also somewhat justified at the time as being the showcase northeast entrance to the campus but ended up being overshadowed by several other bigger and blockier buildings.
I remember a Minnesotan musician incorporating it in a music video years ago, but framing it as if it was an alien spaceship because of its unusual design. I wish I remember the name of the band.
When we first moved in, there was a seminar room that made some people physically nauseous due to its sloping walls. For a time, they were trying to use masking tape on the walls to make the effect less pronounced. Some of the grad students tried to name it the "vomitorium", but the name never stuck. Fortunately,, once the room had a full compliment of chairs, furniture, and a projector screen the effect seemed to be much less pronounced.
