The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World
by Deyan Sudjic · 27 Nov 2006 · 441pp · 135,176 words
, in theory, as astonishing a tableau as if George W. Bush had decided to tour Baghdad in the company of Jeff Koons, Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry. The dictator is demonstrating his priorities and making his intentions manifestly clear: Hitler, the great architect, is ready to redesign the world. And yet, somehow
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that he designed at the foot of the Seagram Tower. It is inconceivable that any other architect would have had the same treatment, not even Frank Gehry, who, with Brad Pitt in and out of his office, is certainly no stranger to stardom. The Vanity Fair photograph is a tribute not so
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much to the significance of Johnson’s contribution to the history of architecture as a reminder of his importance to the cult of fame. Frank Gehry sits on one side of Johnson, alongside Peter Eisenman. Arata Isozaki has flown in from Tokyo, Rem Koolhaas from Rotterdam and Zaha Hadid from London
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an option for such a symbolically charged project, and by all accounts none of the other American recipients – Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, even Frank Gehry – managed to hit it off with Clinton. What, the president was in the habit of asking, do you think of that museum in Balboa? And
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that he might be just the architect for the job. Disney’s Michael Eisner – who had transformed the Mouse Kingdom with buildings by Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock and Arata Isozaki – offered some names. But in the end it was the Clinton’s decorator who suggested that they talk
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without a tower invisible. All you see are the very tops of things. Bits of shopping centres, inspired at considerable distance by Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, bob up and down in the aimless flotsam of multiplexes and malls that come swimming into view as you head south. Then there is a
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Rome. Los Angeles’ new cathedral, a replacement for the earthquake-damaged nineteenth-century structure of St Vibiana, overlooks the freeways, just across the street from Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, but it feels as if it has all the weight and authority and wealth of a 2,000-year-old organization
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of the second millennium with Richard Meier’s Dio Padre Misericordioso jubilee church in suburban Rome, after an international competition in which other architects, including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, were also asked to compete, or in the monks of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, who commissioned John Pawson to build
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as a spiritual content. 12 The Uses of Culture The Guggenheim in New York sold 320,000 tickets for its exhibition celebrating the architecture of Frank Gehry, more than for any other show in its fifty-year history. It called it a retrospective but the reality, stretching all the way up the
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are in a time now when the architect kind of rules,’ he said at the time on TV. ‘I draw better in my sculpture than Frank Gehry draws in his architecture. Frank is parading right now, and so are all those mouthpiece critics that, you know, support him as an artist. Hogwash
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change business paradigms and create new markets that will shape the New Economy. It is this shared sense of challenge that we admire most in Frank Gehry. We hope it will bring you as much inspiration as it has brought us.’ Skilling, along with several of his executives, eventually faced his own
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with fourteen. Gehry tactfully suggests that the Lewis project allowed him to explore the themes that have shaped his work ever since. People who commission Frank Gehry to design houses for them are a group unlike any other. Among their characteristics, self-doubt is conspicuous by its absence. The client for the
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Guggenheim yet another $12 million to clear its outstanding debts, but tried to make it clear that the price was no more fancy architecture: ‘If Frank Gehry designs a public-service building’, as Lewis was by now calling the proposed new museum, ‘that gets built in downtown New York, I am willing
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when Lewis lost a bid to discipline Krens, and resigned as chairman in 2005. Unlike Lewis, Eli Broad has actually built a house designed by Frank Gehry. It’s on a 3-acre hillside site in Bel Air. Like Lewis, Broad has a taste for conspicuous art. In place of the 75
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, it’s not hard to guess the kind of thing that they had in mind: the opera house with the titanium fish scales designed by Frank Gehry as a free-form blob, or a gratuitously eccentric footbridge by Santiago Calatrava. Competitions such as this have become ubiquitous, leading all but inevitably to
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highly personal and completely uncalculated response. He had put everything into the project, suspending the scepticism that many architects felt about the flawed competition process. Frank Gehry won few friends by refusing to take part, suggesting that the $40,000 fee for participants was demeaning. ‘I know people say that the competition
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what might be called the practitioners of high architecture. Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, or Rem Koolhaas or Renzo Piano, Wallace Harrison or Frank Gehry, are not free agents. Their work depends on their engagement with the political context of the world. And in that world the totalitarians and the
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of the World Trade Center Site, London, 2005 Farah Pahlavi: An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah, New York, 2004 J. Fiona Ragheb (ed.): Frank Gehry, Architect, New York, 2001 Jane Ridley: The Architect and His Wife: A life of Edwin Lutyens, London, 2002 Peter G. Rowe: Seng Kuan: Architectural Encounters
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, 175, 178, 180–81 Dierksmeier, Theodor 42, 124 Diller, Liz 310–11 Doctrine 76 Domenig, Günter 48 domestic architecture 137 country houses 211–14 by Frank Gehry 277, 280–81, 286–7 Drexler, Arthur 244 Dubai 308 Dustmann, Hans 44 East of England Development Agency 295 East Germany (DDR) see Germany, East
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Gruen, Victor 149, 276 Guggenheim, Solomon 281 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 285, 288–9 Frank for 274, 275, 277–8 Guggenheim Museum, New York 274–5 Frank Gehry exhibition 274, 275, 278–81, 288–9 Thomas Krens as director of 274–5, 281, 284–6, 290 website 274–5 Gwathmey, Charles 249 Hacha
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Lefrak family 284 Léger, Fernand 186 Lehman family 290 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 50, 61 his tomb 54 Lewis, Peter Benjamin 281, 284, 285–7, 288 Frank Gehry and 281–4 Libera, Adalberto 73, 146 Libeskind, Daniel 5, 181–2, 315–16 his World Trade Center rebuilding designs 313–17; criticism of 314
Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays
by Witold Rybczynski · 7 Sep 2015 · 342pp · 90,734 words
that we find ourselves in places that are truly incomprehensible. This is not just because buildings fall into recognizable types (a concert hall designed by Frank Gehry is still a concert hall; the relationship between performers and audience follows a well-understood convention) but also because television and movies have brought us
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mirrored by the intricacy of the windows: there were half a dozen different shapes and sizes. The modest house was hardly in a league with Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, but it was busy. I realized that I had to say something more substantive, but I wasn’t sure where to start
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. Michael Eisner is an architecture buff, and in the past he has commissioned world-famous architects to design buildings for Disney: Arata Isozaki, Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi. Celebration, too, has a cast of celebrated architects. Graves designed the post office, Philip Johnson the town hall, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
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—to a large extent pioneered by Le Corbusier himself—of the white shoe-box International Style. After Ronchamp, modern architecture was never quite the same. Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim is equally iconoclastic. With its ballooning shapes and titanium swirls, its colliding forms and unusual spaces, it has been described as biomorphic
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forty-story Guggenheim on the East River in Lower Manhattan—yet more titanium swirls.1 While a Guggenheim museum in New York City designed by Frank Gehry would likely attract millions of visitors, will people really flock to New Orleans to see the Grammy Hall of Fame, a project that has recently
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are generally anointed by the public, sometimes a long time after they are built. So why do developers think that they can create instant icons? Frank Gehry and the Bilbao Guggenheim, that’s why. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, an industrial city in northern Spain, opened in 1997. Using innovative computer technology
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to draw buyers: people will come. Despite the success of the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Bilbao effect has not proved easy to replicate, not even for Frank Gehry. His Experience Music Project for Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, was supposed to put Seattle on the architectural map. Despite its unusual architecture, consisting of
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a gaudy Hindu palace, not one of his normally sedate classical designs. Is it Disneyfication when the Disney Company hires critically acclaimed architects such as Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki, and Aldo Rossi to design its office buildings? Apparently not, because these are three designers whom the author admires. The final chapter of
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landmarks, not only the Vanna Venturi House, but also Charles Moore’s weekend cottage in Orinda, California. Then there’s Richard Meier’s Smith House, Frank Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica, and Peter Eisenman’s House VI. There have been so many significant houses that it would be easy to
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were two shows on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one at the Whitney, the other at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a Frank Gehry exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum. In addition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major retrospective of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
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that ducks—or rather titanium artichokes, in the case of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao—not decorated sheds, were what clients and the public wanted. Frank Gehry is, of course, the architect du jour. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is not only at the cutting edge of architectural design but also a hit
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Mediterranean. Nor is Americanness an issue in the work of what passes for the avant-garde today. Not only is the outlook of architects like Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman international, like their practices, but if deconstructivism has any roots—other, that is, than in the Euro-American world of high fashion
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and would give credibility to the whole project.” There are not many contemporary American architects who bring that sort of cachet. Philip Johnson, perhaps, or Frank Gehry. But Johnson, despite his celebrity, has never received a commission for a national civic monument; neither (yet) has Gehry. Pei, on the other hand, had
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caps fit in just fine. * * * Safdie designed an unusual museum for Alice Walton. It is not an idiosyncratic sculpture, like the Experience Music Project that Frank Gehry built in Seattle for the Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, nor is it like the coolly sophisticated “machine for looking at art in” that Renzo Piano
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firsthand. The Smart Man from Hollywood In 1986, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis organized an exhibition of the “major works” of the American architect Frank Gehry. Although Gehry was fifty-seven, only a few large projects were exhibited—a branch library, a law school, an aerospace museum—and my chief recollection
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seem to bother Gehry. “Being accepted isn’t everything” was the nose-thumbing epigram he provided for the Walker exhibition catalog. That was then. Today, Frank Gehry is definitely accepted. More, he is acclaimed, feted, lionized. In 1989, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of the architectural world. He has
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in lieu of more mainstream practitioners, awarded Gehry its top accolade, the AIA Gold Medal. Prizes are one thing, but there is no doubt that Frank Gehry is the most important twentieth-century architect since Louis I. Kahn. Like Kahn, he was a late bloomer. Kahn was fifty years old when, after
California
by Sara Benson · 15 Oct 2010
’s up. Lifeguards wave to you as they go jogging by in their bikinis, and you take a moment to help some kids finish a Frank Gehry sand castle and kick a ball around with David Beckham. You skateboard down the boardwalk with Tony Alva to your yoga class, where Madonna admires
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second-largest US opera company after New York’s Metropolitan. Walt Disney Concert Hall was inaugurated in 2003, but the venue remains better known for Frank Gehry’s splashy design and the Los Angeles Philharmonic than opera. * * * Spot the next big writer or artist in California’s influential indie arts journal Zyzzyva
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. Richard Meier made his mark on West LA with the Getty Center, a cresting white wave of a building atop a sunburned hilltop. Canadian-born Frank Gehry relocated to Santa Monica, and his billowing, sculptural style for LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall winks cheekily at shipshape Californian streamline moderne. Renzo Piano
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abstract-sculpture garden and a lovely picnic area shaded by mulberry trees (with wines by the glass). In 2008 construction began on a long-awaited Frank Gehry–designed visitors center, due to open in 2010. Tours ($30) include barrel tastings and a glimpse of the new all-green-constructed winery building. Bottles
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district with edgy galleries, stylish lofts reclaimed from aging office buildings, and new quirky bars and restaurants, not to mention such headline-grabbing architecture as Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, longstanding ethnic neighborhoods and a booming entertainment area around Staples Center arena. Downtown is easily reached by subway or bus
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Hall The undisputed centerpiece along Grand Ave is this sparkling concert venue (Map; 323-850-2000; www.laphil.com; 111 S Grand Ave). Designed by Frank Gehry, the concert hall is a gravity-defying sculpture of curving and billowing stainless-steel walls that conjure visions of a ship adrift in a cosmic
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abound, much of it with a predictably bizarre bent. Cases in point: Jonathan Borofsky’s tutu-clad Ballerina Clown (Map; Rose Ave & Main St) and Frank Gehry’s Chiat/Day Building (Map; 340 Main St), fronted by a three-story-tall pair of binoculars, and now occupied by the effects house Digital
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gritty Arts District east of Little Tokyo, R-23 is a fantasy come true for serious sushi aficionados. Not even the bold art and bizarre Frank Gehry–designed corrugated-cardboard chairs can distract from the exquisite and ultrafresh piscine treats prepared by a team of sushi masters. Green-tea cheesecake makes for
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the baton to Venezuelan phenom Gustavo Dudamel, and by all indications he’s leaving the world-class LA Phil in excellent hands. Catch them at Frank Gehry’s amazing Walt Disney Concert Hall from October to June (Click here). Hollywood Bowl (Map; 323-850-2000; www.hollywoodbowl.com; 2301 N Highland Ave
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner · 16 Feb 2023 · 353pp · 97,029 words
way you think. 3. Think from Right to Left Start with the most basic question of all: Why? 4. Pixar Planning Plan like Pixar and Frank Gehry do. 5. Are You Experienced? Experience is often misunderstood and marginalized. 6. So You Think Your Project Is Unique? Think again. Your project is “one
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was time to get into detailed planning. The failure to ask questions about the goal of the project was the root cause of its failure. Frank Gehry, arguably the world’s most acclaimed architect, never starts with answers. “I grew up with the Talmud,” he told me when I interviewed him in
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whole conversation starts with a simple question: “Why are you doing this project?” Few projects start this way. All should. THE BOX ON THE RIGHT Frank Gehry’s most celebrated building—the one that elevated him from the ranks of rising stars to the pinnacle of the architecture world—is the Guggenheim
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, almost 4 million people visited the once obscure corner of Spain, injecting a little less than $1 billion (in 2021 dollars) into the region.5 Frank Gehry’s imagination, genius, and ego were certainly involved in the creation of the Guggenheim Bilbao. But the building was fundamentally shaped by the project’s
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to disrupt the psychology-driven dash to a premature conclusion by disentangling means and ends and thinking carefully about what exactly we want to accomplish. Frank Gehry’s question, “Why are you doing this project?,” does that. Picture politicians who want to connect an island to the mainland. How much would a
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itself but as a means to an end: The goal is the box on the right. That’s where project planning must begin by asking Frank Gehry’s question and thoughtfully exploring what should go in that box. Once that is settled, you can shift to considering what should go into the
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coffee and talking about the kitchen renovation. How should that conversation go in order to give the project a sound foundation? It should start with Frank Gehry’s question: Why are you doing this project? They would probably start with the obvious, something like “It would be nice to spend more time
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tinkering. Wise planners make the most of this basic insight into human nature. They try, learn, and do it again. They plan like Pixar and Frank Gehry do. This is a tale of two masterpieces. The first stands on a rocky outcrop of Sydney Harbor on the Australian coast. The Sydney Opera
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Jørn Utzon, a relative unknown when he won the global competition to conceive it. The Guggenheim Bilbao was also the product of genius. Designed by Frank Gehry, it is arguably the greatest work of an architect so original that the only category he can be placed in is his own. But there
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and more, giving the project very select company in the only 0.5 percent of big projects that deliver on all promises. That success vaulted Frank Gehry to the top tier of the world’s architects, leading to many more commissions and a vast and distinguished body of work all over the
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to design a concert hall for Springfield. Gehry crumples the letter and throws it onto the ground, but then gasps when he sees its shape. “Frank Gehry, you’re a genius!” he shouts. Cut to Gehry presenting a model of Springfield’s new concert hall, which looks remarkably like the Guggenheim Bilbao
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joke, but people took it seriously. “It has haunted me,” he explained to a TV interviewer. “People who’ve seen The Simpsons believe it.”17 Frank Gehry is indeed a genius, but everything else about that image of how he works is wrong. In fact, it’s the opposite of the truth
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at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of the delivery going smoothly and swiftly. It’s what Frank Gehry did for the Guggenheim Bilbao and has done for all his projects since. It’s what Pixar does to make each of its landmark movies
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. MAXIMUM VIRTUAL PRODUCT When a minimum viable product approach isn’t possible, try a “maximum virtual product”—a hyperrealistic, exquisitely detailed model like those that Frank Gehry made for the Guggenheim Bilbao and all his buildings since and those that Pixar makes for each of its feature films before shooting. However, the
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and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: Jørn Utzon (born 1918) was thirty-eight years old when he won the competition to construct his visionary building while Frank Gehry (born 1929) was sixty-two when he won his. In another context, that age discrepancy would be trivial. In this case, it’s paramount. Age
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need to look at the “unfrozen” kind—the lived experience of people. That’s because experience is what elevates the best project leaders—people like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter—above the rest. And in both planning and delivery, there is no better asset for a big project than an experienced leader
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to so much more. Polanyi actually developed the concept of tacit knowledge in an exploration of how scientists do science. Highly experienced project leaders like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter overflow with tacit knowledge about the many facets of the big projects they oversee. It improves their judgment profoundly. Often, they will
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pressing their own interests and agendas. Lacking relevant experience in navigating this environment, he was a babe in the woods. And the wolves got him. Frank Gehry’s climb up the ladder of experience, in contrast, gave him an escalating education in the politics of big projects. His toughest lessons came in
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we have to be deep into the delivery of a project, with our backs against the wall, to summon up that creativity. Just look at Frank Gehry. He is a wildly creative architect, but contrary to the ridiculous popular image of how he works—perfectly captured by that episode of The Simpsons
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worth every penny of the many dollars spent to hire them. Examine any successful project, and you’re likely to find a team like that. Frank Gehry’s many successes—on time, on budget, with the vision the client wants—have depended not only on Gehry but also on the superb people
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improvements in the benefits delivered by giant projects, and the gains would be in the range of the GDP of Sweden. Each year. But as Frank Gehry and the Madrid Metro leadership have demonstrated, a 5 percent improvement is nothing. Cutting cost by 30 percent—which is still modest and entirely possible
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my group at Oxford, for which I cannot thank them enough. It greatly facilitated intellectual exchange, and you will see their influence throughout the book. Frank Gehry and Ed Catmull are main practical influences. When Gehry built the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on time and on budget I knew I had to pick
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conclusions can thus be a helping hand in keeping an open mind. 3: THINK FROM RIGHT TO LEFT 1. Author interview with Frank Gehry, March 5, 2021. 2. Academy of Achievement, “Frank Gehry, Academy Class of 1995, Full Interview,” YouTube, July 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTElCmNkkKc. 3. Paul Goldberger, Building
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Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 290–94. 4. Ibid., 290. 5. Ibid., 303. The success in Bilbao was so significant that it gave rise
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), 23. 3. Matt Tyrnauer, “Architecture in the Age of Gehry,” Vanity Fair, June 30, 2010. 4. Paul Goldberger, Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 299; Bent Flyvbjerg, “Design by Deception: The Politics of Megaproject Approval,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 22 (Spring–Summer 2005
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. 8. Flyvbjerg, “Design by Deception.” 9. At the time, engineers concluded that Utzon’s original design of the shells could not be built. Decades later, Frank Gehry’s team showed that it could in fact have been built if Gehry’s CATIA 3D design model had been available to Utzon and his
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French company Dassault Systèmes. It is used in a range of industries, including aerospace and defense. It was adapted to architecture on the initiative of Frank Gehry and his practice. Gehry later renamed his adaption “Digital Project.” 14. For a photo of the Vitra Design Museum with the spiral staircase at the
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back of the building, see https://bit.ly/3n7hrAH. 15. “Looking Back at Frank Gehry’s Building-Bending Feats,” PBS NewsHour, September 11, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/frank-gehry; author interview with Craig Webb, April 23, 2021. 16. “The Seven-Beer Snitch,” The Simpsons, April 3
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, 2005. 17. Goldberger, Building Art, 377–78. 18. Personal communication with Frank Gehry, author’s archives. 19. Architectural Videos, “Frank Gehry Uses CATIA for His Architecture Visions,” YouTube, November 2, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEn53Wr6380. 20. Author interview with Pete
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, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 24. It should be emphasized that the cost and schedule overruns on the Walt Disney Concert Hall were not due to Frank Gehry’s lack of planning, although he was often blamed. Gehry was forced off the Disney Concert Hall project after the design development phase, when the
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Stephen Rountree, president of Music Center, Los Angeles, and owner of the Disney Concert Hall. See Paul Goldberger, Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 322; Stephen D. Rountree, “Letter to the Editor, Jan Tuchman, Engineering News Record,” Music Center, Los Angeles, April 1
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, 2010. The Walt Disney Concert Hall has a special place in Frank Gehry’s career as his near nemesis and as the project that taught him how to protect his designs from being undermined by politics and business
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[in Los Angeles] because I’m the local guy,” he later explained in an interview, “so they started a barrage coming at me” (quoted in Frank Gehry, Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process, ed. Mildred Friedman [London: Thames & Hudson, 2003], 114). Almost ten years after the fact, Gehry still called that period the “darkest
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times” of his life and said, “I have a lot of wounds from the process”; see Frank O. Gehry, “Introduction,” in Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, ed. Gloria Gerace (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 15. The nadir came in 1997, when after nine years of
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final drawings. The Disney family’s spokesperson, Lillian and Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller, issued a statement saying, “We promised Los Angeles a Frank Gehry building, and that’s what we intend to deliver”; see Richard Koshalek and Dana Hutt, “The Impossible Becomes Possible: The Making of Walt Disney Concert
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, and Natalie Kitroeff. 2021. “Construction Flaws Led to Mexico City Metro Collapse, Independent Inquiry Shows.” The New York Times, June 16. Academy of Achievement. 2017. “Frank Gehry, Academy Class of 1995, Full Interview.” YouTube, July 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTElCmNkkKc. Adelman, Jeremy. 2013. Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert
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, and Nikolaos Mavridis. 2016. “Why E-Government Projects Fail? An Analysis of the healthcare.gov Website.” Government Information Quarterly 33 (1): 161–73. Architectural Videos. “Frank Gehry Uses CATIA for His Architecture Visions.” YouTube, November 1, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEn53Wr6380. Aristotle. 1976. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J
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-well-invent-the-future/. Gehry, Frank O. 2003. Gehry Talks: Architecture + Process, ed. Mildred Friedmann. London: Thames & Hudson. Gehry, Frank O. 2003. “Introduction.” In Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, ed. Gloria Gerace. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Gellert, Paul, and Barbara Lynch. 2003. “Mega-Projects as Displacements.” International Social
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Theory and Research, eds. Jerry Suls and T. A. Wills. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 149–76. Goldberger, Paul. 2015. Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Goldblatt, David. 2016. The Games: A Global History of the Olympics. London: Macmillan. Golder, Peter N., and Gerard J. Tellis
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and Security Review Commission, US Congress. Koshalek, Richard, and Dana Hutt. 2003. “The Impossible Becomes Possible: The Making of Walt Disney Concert Hall.” In Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, ed. Gloria Gerace. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Krapivsky, Paul, and Dmitri Krioukov. 2008. “Scale-Free Networks as Preasymptotic Regimes
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Project Management Failure.” Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities 27 (3): 362–69. PBS. 2015. “Looking Back at Frank Gehry’s Building-Bending Feats.” PBS NewsHour, September 15. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/frank-gehry. Perrow, Charles. 1999. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, updated ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Phys
Spain
by Lonely Planet Publications and Damien Simonis · 14 May 1997
chimed in with its futuristic Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences; Click here) complex, by Santiago Calatrava (b 1951). Frank Gehry (b 1929) is responsible for the single most eye-catching modern addition to the Spanish cityscape (so far) with his Museo Guggenheim (Click here) in
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two base jumpers managed to get onto the site of Madrid’s still incomplete 250m Torre Cristal and launched themselves off the top with parachutes. * * * Frank Gehry has plans for five twisting steel-and-glass towers that will feature a large degree of solar energy self-sufficiency for the new railway station
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), a busy marina built for the Olympic sailing events, is surrounded by bars and restaurants. An eye-catcher on the approach from La Barceloneta is Frank Gehry’s giant copper Peix (Fish; Map) sculpture. The area behind Port Olímpic, dominated by twin-tower blocks (the luxury Hotel Arts Barcelona and Torre Mapfre
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, probably quite rightly, that structure overwhelms function here and that the Guggenheim is probably more famous for its architecture than its content. But Canadian architect Frank Gehry’s inspired use of flowing canopies, cliffs, promontories, ship shapes, towers and flying fins is irresistible. Like all great architects, Gehry designed the Guggenheim with
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Real Colegiata de Santa María (10am-8.30pm) contains a much-revered, silver-covered statue of the Virgin beneath a modernist-looking canopy worthy of Frank Gehry. Also of interest is the cloister, which contains the tomb of King Sancho VII (El Fuerte) of Navarra, the apparently 2.25m-tall victor in
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owner of the Bodegas Marqués de Riscal decided he wanted to create something special, he certainly didn’t hold back. The result is the spectacular Frank Gehry–designed Hotel Marqués de Riscal (945 18 08 80; www.starwoodhotels.com/luxury; r €595). Costing around €85 million to construct and now managed by
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims · 18 Apr 2011 · 207pp · 57,959 words
the ways that Pixar creates its films, the ways entrepreneurs and savvy CEOs like Jeff Bezos identify and develop new market opportunities, the ways architect Frank Gehry designs new buildings, the ways generals go about counterinsurgency strategy and training, and in the ways stand-up comedians generate new material. These methods are
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is the growth mind-set in action. One of those I interviewed who impressed me most in exhibiting a growth mind-set was the architect Frank Gehry. Now in his eighties, Gehry is best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In 1989, he
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the growth mind-set and the productive attitude towards failure that it entails is that it is not about not caring about failure. Not even Frank Gehry can inoculate himself from fears of failure. That is almost surely an integral part of the creative process for everyone to some degree, even those
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Learn Fast Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. After all, Chris Rock, the Pixar filmmakers, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs, and Colonel Casey Haskins are all perfectionists and yet they accept, even welcome, failure as they develop new ideas and strategies. Rock won
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making it. Prototyping is one of the most effective ways to both jump-start our thinking and to guide, inspire, and discipline an experimental approach. Frank Gehry, for instance, will begin a new building design by literally cutting up, crumpling, and folding pieces of paper or corrugated cardboard with colleagues. Portrayed in
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the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry, the paper is sturdy enough to be folded into something that resembles a rectangular structure. Soon a rudimentary building comes into view, perhaps standing several
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than perfect new ideas before showing them to potential users, people have started using low resolution prototypes made from duct tape or cardboard, much like Frank Gehry’s. Prototyping allows P&G staff to make things in order to think. “How do you let consumers experience it, even if it falls totally
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’t happen in a vacuum, which is why doing things, however imperfectly at first, opens us up creatively. CHAPTER 4 The Genius of Play When Frank Gehry describes his process for designing a new building, he emphasizes how much he values being able to play with his colleagues. “I don’t think
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. However, as John Lasseter expresses his perfectionism, “We don’t actually finish our films, we release them.” CHAPTER 5 Problems Are the New Solutions When Frank Gehry speaks, he likes to draw. Hunched over a yellow legal pad with a black pen, he sketches a wiggling, expansive cloud. An outsider might assume
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only to dive deep into particular, selected environments, as Muhammad Yunus did, but also to go wide. CHAPTER 7 Learning a Little from a Lot Frank Gehry’s early designs were fairly conventional buildings, like shopping malls and suburban houses, a far cry from the stainless steel metallic exterior at the Guggenheim
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got to know during the 1950s and 1960s. “The biggest influence on the design of my houses was Robert Rauschenberg,” Gehry says in Sketches with Frank Gehry. As a pioneer of abstract art known as Neo-Dadaist, Rauschenberg would use everyday objects that he’d find strewn on the streets of New
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of his craft for many reasons, but as in many professions, knowledge of diverse perspectives drives good journalism and original thinking. As any comedian or Frank Gehry will say, new insights, inspiration, and ideas are around us all the time, but they are not always obvious. Everyone from janitors to cab drivers
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able to create, navigate amid uncertainty, and adapt will increasingly be vital advantages. There is another way. As we have seen, General McMaster, Chris Rock, Frank Gehry, agile software developers, Pixar animators, and seasoned entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Muhammad Yunus, and Belkin’s Chet Pipkin all do things to discover
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, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. Little bets are their vehicle for discovery, whereby action produces insights that can be analyzed, as Frank Gehry might when he builds a new prototype model, in order to identify, frame, and reframe problems and ideas, so that he can then adapt and
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use strikingly similar methods inside their work processes. So, for example, they use lots of experiments and inexpensive prototypes to develop their ideas. Just as Frank Gehry uses crumpled sheets of paper to prototype rough building designs model after model after model, Chris Rock scribbles joke ideas on a notepad then reels
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. So, unlike the top-down nature of cold warfare, General McMaster frames and reframes the key problems from the bottom up before taking bold action. Frank Gehry can easily relate: he must frame and reframe countless problems and ideas in order to design a building like Disney Hall from the inside out
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the parallels, but the essential point is that it’s not as though someone handed Chris Rock, Pixar’s team, Chet Pipkin, General McMaster, or Frank Gehry a map and set of steps to follow; they learned their approach through their experiences. Creativity becomes a way of life. This then is the
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improvise ideas in collaboration and conversation with others; and, to have a willingness to be misunderstood, sometimes for long periods of time, despite conventional wisdom. Frank Gehry was trained in traditional architecture techniques and designed conventional buildings, such as tract homes and shopping malls, for much of his career. Inspired by how
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light on the creative process, including the degree of failure involved, even for Seinfeld. Creative processes follow similar patterns whether in stand-up comedy, Pixar, Frank Gehry, entrepreneurship, etc. The first part is extremely challenging and uncertain, hard work and iteration begin to clarify the problems and opportunities, and then it all
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, from art to science to writing to architecture to music to fashion. The importance of constraints resonated with everyone I spoke with, from artists to Frank Gehry to entrepreneurs. Working with no constraints, or no parameters, was unanimously seen as extremely difficult, if not impossible. Stokes’ book was the best in-depth
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Collective Creativity,” by Ed Catmull, Harvard Business Review, September 2008; and, interview with Pete Docter and visits to Pixar Headquarters in Emeryville, California. Frank Gehry: Interview with Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). Chapter 3 Forms of Perfectionism: “Positive conceptions of perfectionism: Approaches, Evidence, Challenges,” by
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experience of bringing the book home,” Lamott said at an appearance at City Arts & Lectures on April 19, 2010, San Francisco, California. Frank Gehry: Interview with Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). Obama new media team: Visit to campaign headquarters and follow-up interview with Joe
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Stanford d.school P&G collaborators. Results drawn from The Game-Changer by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan, Crown Business (2008). Chapter 4 Frank Gehry: Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). Charles Limb’s fMRI study and related research and reactions: “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical
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from Chris Yeh in response to Harvard Business Review blog posting: “What Google Could Learn from Pixar,” by Peter Sims, August 6, 2010. Chapter 5 Frank Gehry: Interview with Gehry. Visits to Disney Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “America’s Best Leaders: The Man With the Most Unusual Lines,” by Betsy Streisand
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and World Report, October 22, 2006. On feeling lost without constraints: “Interview with Frank Gehry,” Academy of Achievement, June 3, 1995. On Disney Hall design and configuration: Symphony: Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney, by Frank Gehry, Harry N. Abrams (2003), p 49; “How Frank Gehry’s Design and Lillian Disney’s Dream Were Rescued to Create the Masterful
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,” by Marissa Mayer, Business Week, February 13, 2006. Constraints: The importance of constraints resonated with nearly every creative person I spoke with, from artists to Frank Gehry to entrepreneurs. Constraints are also a core method from the Stanford d.school. Working with no constraints, or no parameters, was unanimously seen as extremely
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People of the Year,” ABC News, February 2004. John Lasseter: “Lunch with the FT: John Lasseter,” Financial Times, January 16, 2009. Chapter 7 Frank Gehry: Interview with Frank Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). Evidence from creativity research about the value of diverse insights: Individual level: Openness to
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, vol. 1, 41–48. Classroom: Taken from visit to the Nueva School, I-Lab, an experimental design thinking laboratory for elementary-school students. Frank Gehry: Interview with Frank Gehry. Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary film by Sidney Pollack, Sony Pictures (2006). In Gratitude Although this book has one author, it stands on the shoulders of
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processes, 15–17 SIGGRAPH, 143, 144, 148 Silicon Graphics, 44 Silicon Valley, 10, 19, 36, 53, 75, 84, 107, 146, 153, 197, 198 Sketches of Frank Gehry (documentary), 55, 117 Sleep, 66 Slemmer, Mike, 89–90 Small problems, 77–95 Small wins, 141–52 Smart-guy syndrome, 109 Smith, Alvy Ray, 30
Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt · 10 May 2021 · 291pp · 80,068 words
a registered trademark. As in the cases of Dr. Seuss and Martha Graham, boundaries need not be confining but serve as an opportunity. The architect Frank Gehry believes that the very secret to his creative successes is the limitations he must work through. “As an artist, I got constraints. Gravity is one
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,” MarthaGraham.org, accessed November 10, 2020, https://marthagraham.org/history. Frank Gehry on gravity: “Frank Gehry Teaches Design and Architecture,” MasterClass, video course, accessed November 4, 2020, https://www.masterclass.com/classes/frank-gehry-teaches-design-and-architecture. Gehry on building without constraints: “What It Takes—Frank Gehry,” American Academy of Achievement, April 6, 2018, https://learningenglish.voanews
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.com/a/what-it-takes-frank-gehry/4302218.html. On a French novel without the letter e: In 1969
Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan
by Lynne B. Sagalyn · 8 Sep 2016 · 1,797pp · 390,698 words
become a well-established strategy. Museums were opening in all kinds of places, built as destinations; the celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry brought worldwide attention to the phenomenon. Arts and culture were rooted in policymakers’ ideas of what makes a strong and attractive urban district, and cities
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of the former Deutsche Bank Building (site 5), but nothing about culture at Ground Zero was ever assured. The estimate for the structure designed by Frank Gehry was still very high ($540 million).30 On the other side of the economic ledger, the proposed PAC agenda gained significant momentum when the LMDC
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the City: Daniel Libeskind Envisions Ground Zero,” WSJ, March 19, 2003; Ada Louise Huxtable interviewed by Charlie Rose, “A Conversation With Architects Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry; Discussion with Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable,” The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, transcript, August 5, 2005. 12 Paul Goldberger, “Profiles: Urban Warriors,” New Yorker, September
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funds toward the creation of the Performing Arts Center. This is but “a drop in the bucket,” noted the Times weeks later, given that a Frank Gehry building would “cost eight times that amount.” Pogrebin, “Is Culture Gone at Ground Zero?” 40 LMDC board meeting minutes August 11, 2005; The September 11th
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the Signature’s production capability. In place of its one 160-seat auditorium in midtown Manhattan, the new seventy-thousand-square-foot facility, designed by Frank Gehry, would operate with three theaters: one with 299 seats and two with 199 seats. In addition, the new space would contain two rehearsal studios, a
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town officials of Bilbao, Spain, nor were they a matter of education. In that town made a compulsory destination by a Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava’s steel and glass Campo Volantin footbridge became a distinctive part of the city skyline upon its completion in 1997. The beautiful footbridge
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Related Companies on West Forty-second Street, near its current home and in the heart of the theater district. The new space, modestly designed by Frank Gehry, was expected to cost $60 million. “We worked rigorously to try to make that happen,” said James Houghton, the company’s artistic director, of the
Frommer's Seattle 2010
by Karl Samson · 10 Mar 2010 · 666pp · 131,148 words
ride in any city. You can even take a monorail straight out of The Jetsons to get there (and, en route, pass right through the Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project). EMP, as the Experience Music Project is known, is yet another of Seattle’s architectural oddities. Its swooping, multicolored, metal-skinned
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, a museum of rock ’n’ roll that started out as a simple memorial to hometown rocker Jimi Hendrix. The museum structure, designed by visionary architect Frank Gehry, is meant to conjure up images of a melted electric guitar and is one of the most bizarre-looking buildings on the planet. In 2004
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Pine St.). The elevated train covers the 11⁄4 miles in 2 minutes and passes right through the middle of the Experience Music Project, the Frank Gehry–designed rock-music museum. The monorail operates daily from 9am to 11pm. Departures are every 10 minutes. The one-way fare is $2 for adults
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’s museum, and a science museum. For most people, however, Seattle Center is primarily known as the home of the Space Needle and the bizarre Frank Gehry–designed Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum building. . 10 Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum If you’re a rock-music or science-fiction fan
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always an espresso bar nearby. By the way, that monorail ride takes you right through the middle of Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, the Frank Gehry–designed rock-music museum also located in Seattle Center. Paul Allen, who made his millions as one of the co-founders of Microsoft, has spent
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Lake Union Streetcar: Lake Union Park stop. Experience Music Project (EMP) The brainchild of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed by avant-garde architect Frank Gehry, who is known for pushing the envelope of architectural design, this rock-’n’-roll museum is a massive, multicolored blob at the foot of the
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look of things to come. Now that the 21st century is upon us, the reality of 21st-century architecture is far stranger than was imagined. Frank Gehry’s design for the building that now houses both the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is one of
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Place Market. 1511 First Ave. 80 0/727-4430 or 20 6/623-8747. www.metskers.com. Peter Miller Looking for a picture book of Frank Gehry’s architectural follies? How about a retrospective on the work of Alvar Aalto? You’ll find these and loads of other beautiful and educational books
B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic · 17 Feb 2015 · 335pp · 111,405 words
moment Graves was being described by Charles Jencks as the greatest American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, and he acquired much the same aura that Frank Gehry attained a quarter of a century later when he completed the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Since then, Graves has declined into the construction of a sequence
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have the energy and the imagination to be able to change everything that follows them. Charles Eames’s house in Los Angeles was equally influential. Frank Gehry’s own house from the 1980s in Santa Monica or Rem Koolhaas’s house outside Bordeaux are probably the most recent examples of this exceptional
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the architect Richard Meier over the Getty Museum’s garden, about which one of their mutually exclusive conceptions would predominate. The well-documented tension between Frank Gehry and Richard Serra reflected a similar lack of a shared view. They were once close friends, then Serra started to complain about Gehry, who, as
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, have a relationship that goes back a long way, and which is both superficial and profound. Half a century before Brad Pitt started hanging around Frank Gehry’s studio, and working on sustainable low-cost houses for New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was already fascinated by architecture. He filmed it, he designed it
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-light a film? It does happen occasionally when a developer, looking for a degree of visibility or an easy planning consent, commissions Norman Foster or Frank Gehry, and the bankers come up with the mezzanine finance to build a business park or a block of flats or a skyscraper on the strength
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from New York to the banks of the Ibaizabal river in Bilbao and the Grand Canal in Venice. It is the Guggenheim’s work with Frank Gehry that has gone furthest in turning the museum into the most flamboyant building type of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. With
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and Macao, Taichung, Helsinki and Monterrey. To date, none of them have been realized. Its plans for a massive new museum in Manhattan designed by Frank Gehry were abandoned a decade ago. The Abu Dhabi Guggenheim has been on hold, restarted and delayed, while a referendum in Helsinki rejected the mayor’s
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ways of organizing itself? This, according to Jencks, is the idea that unites the shattered fragments of Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum in Salford, Frank Gehry’s sculptural shape-making in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s opera house in Guangzhou, even if it sounds a lot like the same counter-cultural
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of the first years of the twenty-first century for icon building, one that has thankfully subsided somewhat from its peak at the creation of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim building in Bilbao. Not uncoincidentally, Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, a tribute from a jury that included
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Frank Gehry. And, perhaps equally revealingly, Utzon, who was born in Copenhagen and studied architecture at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worked in the
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