All posts tagged: Gehry

Gehry Partners sign on for Getty Center renovation

Gehry Partners sign on for Getty Center renovation

Published by Sam Flores

Gehry Partners will design a variety of upgrades to the Getty Center — including a major revamp of its entry experience — during its upcoming year-long closure, the museum announced Thursday. A variety of other partners and firms will also join the remodel effort including WHY Architecture and OLIN landscaping. The museum nestled in the hills above the 405 Freeway is scheduled to close next March. When it reopens, visitors will be greeted by a new arrival area, a revamped tram system including new cars, a garden cafe, a gift shop and abundant new green space. The bulk of the announced improvements will target the arrival system, including the parking and tram boarding area, and the tram itself, but plenty of work will also be done at the top of the hill, including the addition of a new Welcome Hall. The goal, according to a news release, is to create a more “gracious and efficient entry experience” for more than 1.4 million annual visitors. This includes school groups, which visit the museum at a rate …

Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture | Martin Filler, Jarrett Earnest

Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture | Martin Filler, Jarrett Earnest

Published by Jenni Sidey

In this episode of Private Life, Martin Filler joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about architecture criticism, Frank Gehry, and the art that makes us weep.  Click the “Subscribe” link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform. Martin Filler is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books. His first article for the Review, “Tall Stories,” about the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, appeared in our December 5, 1985 issue. In the forty years since, Filler has written about, among many other subjects, Richard Meier’s design for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Micheal Arad’s National September 11 Memorial, and the lost beauty and significance of department stores, alongside the opening of the new Printemps New York. Filler also frequently wrote about Frank Gehry—his Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—and eulogized “his boldly original approach…the architectural equivalent of punk rock” when Gehry died this past December. (This episode was recorded prior to Gehry’s death.) Three volumes of Filler’s collected essays, The Makers of Modern Architecture, have been published by New York …

Sophie Calle, Frank Gehry and the artist’s California story

Sophie Calle, Frank Gehry and the artist’s California story

Published by Sam Flores

Sophie Calle, “In Memory of Frank Gehry’s Flowers,” 2014, 11 two-sided plexiglass-framed color photographs and text, arranged on a painted, grooved, wall-mounted wood shelf; fresh flowers in glass vase by Frank Gehry 78 x 54 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (From the artist and Gemini G.E.L, 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris) This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced. Two days before the new year, I hopped on a video call with the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle. She was spending the holidays in her home in the South of France. I got the email notification when she signed on five minutes early, which I took as a sign of her professionalism. When the video came into focus, she peered down at the camera in her tinted, green-rimmed glasses. I thanked her for her time, told her I was a fan of her art and she gave me a smile. I jumped to the point, as I sensed she wanted …

Frank Gehry Designed His Own Home, and What It Teaches About Creative Risk

Frank Gehry Designed His Own Home, and What It Teaches About Creative Risk

Published by José Betancourt

Few pro­fes­sion­als tend to live as long, or mature as slow­ly, as archi­tects. Frank Gehry died late last year at the for­mi­da­ble age of 96, with sev­er­al projects still under con­struc­tion. But he’d only real­ly been Frank Gehry for the past half-cen­tu­ry or so: not in the sense of hav­ing changed his name from Frank Gold­berg (a choice he made in his twen­ties and lat­er came to regret), but in hav­ing plant­ed his first rec­og­niz­able flag in the built envi­ron­ment. The envi­ron­ment was a qui­et mid­dle-class res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood in San­ta Mon­i­ca; the flag was his own home, a mod­est Dutch Colo­nial fix­er-upper orig­i­nal­ly built in 1920, and trans­formed by Gehry into what resem­bled a high­ly con­trolled indus­tri­al dis­as­ter. “He for­ti­fied parts of the pas­tel-paint­ed, shin­gled exte­ri­or with cor­ru­gat­ed steel, wrapped lay­ers of chain-link fenc­ing over oth­er por­tions in angu­lar planes not seen since Russ­ian Con­struc­tivism, and slammed a tilt­ed cubic sky­light, which looked as if it had fall­en from out­er space, into the kitchen,” writes New York Review of Books archi­tec­ture crit­ic Mar­tin Filler in …

Frank Gehry, The Liberator | Martin Filler

Frank Gehry, The Liberator | Martin Filler

Published by José Betancourt

One of the first things I thought of when I heard that Frank Gehry had died was a line from Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A reporter visits the title character’s former business manager, Mr. Bernstein, to interview him following the newspaper mogul’s death, and he comments that the old man had known Kane since the beginning. “From before the beginning, young fellow,” Bernstein interjects. “And now, it’s after the end.” I first met Gehry in 1979, when I was a young editor at Progressive Architecture magazine, where my colleagues and I concurred that he was the most gifted of a new generation of architectural aspirants in this country. We were taken by his boldly original approach, which juxtaposed exaggerated, off-kilter forms executed in cheap materials such as corrugated metal, unfinished plywood, chain-link fencing, and chicken wire glass—the architectural equivalent of punk rock, then in its heyday. We were also convinced, however, that his aggressive aesthetic would never catch on with the masses and that he was destined to remain an esoteric cult figure …

How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

How Frank Gehry (RIP) and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Changed Architecture

Published by José Betancourt

It felt, for quite some time there, like the age of Frank Gehry would nev­er end. But now that the lat­est defin­ing fig­ure of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — or tech­ni­cal­ly, Cana­di­an-Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture — has died at the age of 96, the time has come to ask when, exact­ly, his age began. Or rather, with which build­ing: Walt Dis­ney Con­cert Hall in Los Ange­les? The Louis Vuit­ton Foun­da­tion in Paris? The rad­i­cal ren­o­va­tion of his own hum­ble San­ta Mon­i­ca home often cit­ed at the ori­gin point of the metal­lic, delib­er­ate­ly incon­gru­ous, often near­ly alien aes­thet­ic now rec­og­nized around the world? Accord­ing to the B1M video above, it is to the Guggen­heim Muse­um Bil­bao we must look to if we wish to under­stand the archi­tec­ture of Frank Gehry — and much else besides. The Guggen­heim Bil­bao was a chal­leng­ing project when it was first con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, but then, Bil­bao was a chal­lenged set­ting. Once a pros­per­ous port city, the Basque metrop­o­lis had fall­en on hard times indeed, rapid­ly dein­dus­tri­al­iz­ing with­out much in the way of alter­na­tive appeal. Bil­bao’s slight his­to­ry with …