![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Since visiting Melbourne I've had a loose interest in architecture. I suspect that if you counted up my Flickr photos there are more of buildings than people. I watch the RIBA Prize every year.
I knew Frank Gehry was one of those star names - alongside Rogers and Foster the British giants and Liebeskind the latest must-have icon project man. I had the vague idea of the Bilbao museum and the dancing house in Prague, but more than that nothing. A little reading showed that it had taken time for his characteristic designs to get commissioned, and so he'd started with adding glass, wood and chain link fences to his own house.
It seems as if he begins with a series of scribbles, and moves from that to models, which he tirelessly fools about with until it is no longer the easy answer. Only then does it move into computer aided design and front and side elevations, although traditional plans seem to miss the point. I love his counter to pomo's neoclassical return to the human form: that's only raiding the last 2,000,000 years - why not go back to the fish?
Long time friend and film maker Sydney Pollack allows Gehry to talk, asking questions only a friend could ask, but Pollack also talks to other artists, architects or architectural critics such as Charles Jencks and Philip Johnson, as well as Bob Geldof. Hal Foster is left to put the boot in - perhaps we needed more of the negative. What about the dangers of reflecting surfaces for heat focusing? What about snow falls off slippy roofs? What if the gallery overwhelms the art it contains? (Make better art was the response to this point.)
Pollack does rather foreground the film making - he has a camera in virtually every shot he appears in, and I suspect he knows more about architecture than he lets on. But I was rivetted, and could have watched a whole lot more. I also want to go visit these places. f
I knew Frank Gehry was one of those star names - alongside Rogers and Foster the British giants and Liebeskind the latest must-have icon project man. I had the vague idea of the Bilbao museum and the dancing house in Prague, but more than that nothing. A little reading showed that it had taken time for his characteristic designs to get commissioned, and so he'd started with adding glass, wood and chain link fences to his own house.
It seems as if he begins with a series of scribbles, and moves from that to models, which he tirelessly fools about with until it is no longer the easy answer. Only then does it move into computer aided design and front and side elevations, although traditional plans seem to miss the point. I love his counter to pomo's neoclassical return to the human form: that's only raiding the last 2,000,000 years - why not go back to the fish?
Long time friend and film maker Sydney Pollack allows Gehry to talk, asking questions only a friend could ask, but Pollack also talks to other artists, architects or architectural critics such as Charles Jencks and Philip Johnson, as well as Bob Geldof. Hal Foster is left to put the boot in - perhaps we needed more of the negative. What about the dangers of reflecting surfaces for heat focusing? What about snow falls off slippy roofs? What if the gallery overwhelms the art it contains? (Make better art was the response to this point.)
Pollack does rather foreground the film making - he has a camera in virtually every shot he appears in, and I suspect he knows more about architecture than he lets on. But I was rivetted, and could have watched a whole lot more. I also want to go visit these places. f
Tags: