Building Compound Shapes

Building Compound Shapes | Frank Gehry | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 15:43
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Building Compound Shapes

Frank Gehry (Gehry Partners LLP)
BARCELONA FISH SCULPTURE IN OLYMPIC

VILLAGE SHOPPING AREA
©Frank Gehry & Associates Inc.
I've still been pursuing the idea of movement using inert materials in buildings. I
guess it's a way of, another kind of decoration, it's a modernist notion about
decoration I suppose. And I'm still fascinated with it. So the original idea for it came
from looking at sculpture and the Siva figures from India where you look at the stuff
and you think they're moving.
2
FISH SKETCHES
https://www-pidgeondigital-com.proxy-auth3.iuav.it/talks/building-compound-shapes/chapters/ Pagina 1 di 20
And then I did all this stuff with fish because I used the discipline as a critique of Post
Modernism. It was like Greek temples are anthropomorphic and fish are three
hundred million years before. So I got angry and said "if you want to go back why
don't you go back...". And somehow the collision of making those fish studies and
drawings and sketches...
3
FISH LAMP
...and then lamps, and then a few rooms and things, that whole study taught me how
to build. I realised that with those, that I was getting this sense of movement, that I
could do it. And it also taught me how to build those compound curved shapes, and it
forced me to develop a process to build them. And I fortunately was able to hire a
few people that were tuned in to that kind of research and worked with me to
develop relationship to the aerospace industry. Actually it was the French aerospace
industry that helped us. And over a period of four or five years we were able to get
double curves up in space in a spectacular way.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: SKETCH

Like in the Bilbao Museum, the Guggenheim museum in Spain, which really looks like
some of our sketches. You know, you take the idea of the Japanese master who
works sixty years making one of these strokes and perfecting it. I haven't worked
sixty years but I've been perfecting these shapes and working with them a lot. And
then how do you build them? Getting them built with the energy of the sketch is
something that I'm very keen on from the very beginning. The product has to be the
building, the final building rather than the sketches and the models and all that stuff.
They're part of the process but they're not the end.
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: MODEL

OF BUILDING
So I focus on the end, the building. I know that we can draw and show ourselves, so to
speak, into thinking that these are beautiful, because the drawings are beautiful. But
a lot of it doesn't translate in the end into the building. So I focused on that issue in all
my work, that the end product had to have the energy of the sketches.
6
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN:
INTERIOR, MODEL
You know, you have to work through so many hands to build a building - the
contractors, the craftsmen, the material suppliers, the building department, the
codes - so there are so many obstacles along the way to forward any possibility of
realising a dream in three dimensions that a lot of good ideas don't end up finished.
You know, you see them in the models and sketches and they don't end up built. It's a
disappointment. So I focused on that issue in my work.
7
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: ROOF
PLAN
Also something that's always been of importance to me is the need to solve the
client's problem and to engage the client. The client is paying for it after all. And by
the time they get to me, the clients that I get are interested in what I do and they are
very willing to participate. And so I feel that it's necessary to help them participate
and to have them understand, through the process I'm working with, what they're
getting and what they're paying for so that they can see it and also they have the
opportunity to say "I don't want that".

INTERIOR, MODEL . ANOTHER IMAGE
That happens occasionally. It doesn't often, but at least at the end of the project the
client feels like they've been complicit in making a lot of the decisions. The way I work
with them, that it's not a shocking surprise. And we're very careful about the financial
arrangements of the project, the business-like arrangements between us and the
client, both in the way we run our office fiscally, very responsibly, so there's no
problems. I've been doing it for a long time and been fiscally responsible in the use of
their money to get the best in all the issues crucial to me. And by the way, they
appreciate it and we have some people that we keep clients because of that. The
other area, urban issues of a building how do you fit into the environment that you're
playing? Do you pander to it, copy it, become part of it? How do you do that? And
that's always been of interest to me. That's very basic, that's like being a good
neighbour I think. It's respect for your neighbour whether you like what they do, or
not.
SPILLER RESIDENCE, LOS ANGELES: IN CONTEXT

The building that I was building in California, this I think was misunderstood by
Europeans about my work who couldn't come over here and see it. They would see
pictures of the work taken out of context, they didn't realise that LA was chaotic and
that I was fitting into this context. And I think the people that come over and see it
have gotten it.
10
NATIONALE-NEDERLANDEN BUILDING, PRAGUE:

VIEW FROM RIVER
So when I went to Prague, it's a nineteenth century environment, it's very beautiful.
Mr. Havel lived next door to the site. He asked me to do a modem building not
mimicking the nineteenth century, and that was what drove the design. And if you
look at the design, you can come down some of the streets, it totally fits in and at
some points you can see the strength of the ideas. So I think that building is a clear
picture of my idea of how to fit in, how to relate to a neighbour.
11
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: MODEL
OF BUILDING
It's less obvious in Bilbao where the building is very exuberant, it relates to a bridge
and a river and a nineteenth century town, to a lot of different vectors of influence
that one has to take into account. I think that's hard to show in pictures. If you go
there and see it, if you get the long view, if you see it up close, you see the models,
you might think it's pretty pushy. But if you get there and the long view, and you walk
around it, it fits pretty nicely into the city and I'm kind of proud of that.
12
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: THE

BUILDING UNDER CONSTRUCTION. AIR VIEW
It's a very big building. The requirement from the client was to build a building that
people would want to come to see because it's difficult to get to Bilbao. So the
Museum that's built there had to have everything going for it, so they asked for a
very strong architecture and since the Guggenheim had built the Frank Lloyd Wright
building, their brief to me was "challenge it" (laugh). So l think I did. People seem to
like the building: it isn't finished yet so I don't know what they're relating to, so far.
It's getting a lot of excitement.
13
CARDBOARD FURNITURE: FOUR PIECES
As part of the work, we explore building processes and materials. I've always been
interested in materials research. We practically have a materials research
department, although it's not official. There are two or three people in the office that
work full time. They're gathering up possibilities for buildings.
14
TITANIUM CLADDING
Of course I've done a lot of work with metal in Bilbao. We weren't able to use lead
copper which we've used on a few buildings. Lead copper is now outlawed in most
countries because the lead comes off into the water table and so it's not legal. But
lead copper does some beautiful things with the light, with the sun and with the
weather; and we started out hoping to use it, and then it was outlawed. So we did a
lot of research and found titanium, samples of titanium that were encouraging
because, unlike stainless steel which is a bit on the cold side - no matter what you do
to it, it tends to have a cool demeanour - the titanium has some warmth to it. It's
buttery sometimes and it's interesting. I don't know what it is but when we really
tried to do it, it was hard to achieve it, and our people worked with the mills that
were rolling for a year in Pittsburgh until we got the right acids and oils on the rollers
to recreate that buttery look. Because you just couldn't describe it and create it.
They didn't know how they did it, they didn't know where I got this piece that I had.
So it was a little more difficult. The material, it's amazing metal. It looks better on a
grey day than it does on a sunny day, and Bilbao gets a lot of grey days. And in the
rain it comes to life like no other metal I've seen. We had a lucky turn at the time we
were bidding the titanium. It was equal to the price of stainless steel which now is
twice the cost of stainless steel. So we had a lucky moment there to get it. The
material is less than one millimetre thick and it's very supple. When a strong wind
hits the building, it moves the surface and since it plays with the light it gets a kind of
funny glitter to it; it's a soft caress, let's say, of the light.
15
NATIONALE-NEDERLANDEN BUILDING, PRAGUE:

MOCK-UP OF DETAIL
The process of building this stuff has been exciting too, because if you show the
models and ideas to builders they just tum their head and say "Well, it's going to cost
a lot of money". So we don't do it that way.
16

COMPUTER DRAWING
We build mock-ups of the complicated pieces of the walls and the glass and so on.
We build a computer data-base, so we give each sub-contractor a disc that
delineates exactly, for instance, in steel each piece of steel, each joint, the exact
dimensions of each joint; and it's much more detailed than an architect normally
gives with the engineers to the contractor. You're getting closer to where you're
ordering materials, like going to the grocery store... you know, twenty potatoes,
twenty tomatoes. Because it is like that, it is very precise. And so the contractor is
less likely to make an error. On the Bilbao building, the steel bids came in eighteen
percent under budget, and on that building which you wouldn't have imagined. And
there were six bidders and they were all within one percent of each other. It wasn't a
fluke.
17
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: THE

BUILDING UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Now in the process of building it, they discovered that they had been a little bit
optimistic, but we still had the eighteen percent cushion and so we were able to stay
within the budget, even with some of their misunderstandings which were pretty
small, and that only two pieces of steel had to be rebuilt, re-made by the fabricator.
So that the margins of error are very small. The contractors liked that because, if
you're a contractor and you see a building that I've designed and you're not
emotionally involved with it, you know, you'd be suspect ("can you build it?") and
there'd be a worry. In the past, the tendency is that the contractor in their
relationship with the client is parental, and the architect in their relationship with the
client becomes childlike. And if you want to relate it to the man-woman thing, the
creative architect becomes like the little woman in the equation. And the big man is
the contractor because they're the builder. With this process we found we reverse
that, and we become parental and the contractor becomes the child, and the
contractor prefers it because they know what they're supposed to do, and they don't
have to guess and they don't have to argue with anybody. So they know how to price
that and give accurate bids. This isn't to say a building like this isn't more expensive
than building boxes. It is certainly. But it's comparable for any other architect. I would
guess that any of the architects would have the same, their language would cost X
percent of a building. Say somewhere between six to ten percent of the cost of the
building relates to the architect's personal language. The rest of it is relating to
volumetric and as a matter of fact, even with all our wiggling and dancing and moving,
our budgets for the exterior and l was within those parameters.
18
WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL , LOS ANGELES:

MODEL OF BUILDING
Recently we compared a building of ours, the concert hall, because it's had a bad
time. The committee said "why don't you simplify it like the Pei building in Dallas?". So
we made a cost analysis of the Pei building in Dallas using the numbers that were
published - and I think they were probably optimistic, I don't think they were the real
numbers. But even with those numbers and inflating them to today's bidding, our
building on a per square foot basis is lower cost than the Pei building.
19
WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL , LOS ANGELES:

INTERIOR, MODEL
Everybody puts their money in some way. He does it in very elegant details and
expensive window walls. So what I'm saying is you pick your area to play with and use
the ten percent of the building to make it, and everybody does it differently. But it's
within those parameters. It's not in addition to it. And that's why it's buildable. I
mean, if it wasn't like that, I wouldn't have clients, they wouldn't do it, they're not
going to do it, nobody's going to bleed for me. The newest project after Bilbao is to
design a museum of modem art in Korea for the Samsung Foundation. In actual area,
it's twice the size of Bilbao, it's five hundred thousand square feet. But it's on a much
tighter site. It's actually on the site which was zoned for the high rise office building.
So it would lead to, if you follow the zoning, it would lead to building of towers and
office building line, which is antithetical to museum use. Although in New York in the
Museum of Modern Art we have several floors of galleries, in Korea the Korean
culture has been abused for many years and the Samsung Foundation would like to
encourage artists to a reawakening of an art component to their culture. That meant,
to me, that the building had to be built with galleries that were virtually equal in their
relationship to the outside, to light, to accessibility. Because if there were tiers of
galleries in which some were second class to the others, inevitably the less
developed art, i.e. the Korean art, would end up in the secondary place and the artists
would be therefore obviously second class to the international art scene. So the idea
was how to create a museum that could enrich this equality, so the Korean artists in
whatever gallery are going to be equal to the international. This led us to a square
spiral, a stair-stepping of galleries that, in order to get the program in, we had to go
twenty metres below grade. To start, there's a large gallery twenty metres below
grade - it has thirty thousand square feet which is a changing exhibition hall - and
then the galleries step up from that to sixty metres in the air as a continuum. The
gallery space, the spaces are interconnected. When you stand in any one of those
stair-stepped galleries, you look up to the next gallery or down to the next gallery
below. There's a spatial continuum. The galleries are, in this case by client request,
are rectilinear. In Bilbao we made a few galleries that had some shape to them. But
here the site is tight. There's no space around it get to use shapes. The client
preferred, you would say, the more conventional with the linear spaces, but it's also
appropriate for the site. We then had the circulation stairs and escalators to the side
of those galleries and. in contrast, those spaces could have some shape. It's that
shape that generated the exterior of the side of the building. So it has some
interesting shape to it. Our building appears to be floating up in the air, and from the
street you can look down and then there's an invitation in the architecture to come
down to the lower level, so you can get a sense of continuity between the street and
the lower levels and the galleries and the excitement of the building, which now fits
very well into the zoning envelope but doesn't look like an office building. It looks like
something or other, maybe it looks like a museum.
20
DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: THE THREE

BUILDINGS. MODEL
Several years ago I met an advertising mogul in Switzerland who was very anxious to
have me build a building in Dusseldorf. I can only do so much work at a time and his
time constraints were such that I couldn't take on the job. He asked for a
recommendation and my recommendation was Zaha Hadid. A number of other
people recommended her as well, and she was given the commission and worked on
it with this agency for many years to create quite a beautiful building, something that
I thought would be the pride and joy of Dusseldorf if it was built. She was
unfortunate in that during the time of her work, the economy of this company
changed they sold their company to Saatchi, the advertising company. They didn't
need the building anymore and their investors wanted us to continue, but they
wanted to build a speculative office building, not a single-use building. They called me
after they had completed their work in a very friendly way with Zaha, they called on
us to work on it.
21

BUILDINGS. MODEL
We made a proposal for three buildings instead of one, so that urbanistically opening
up the site so that the buildings in the city to the rear of the site still retained views of
the river. The first models we made showed these three buildings, and almost within
a fortnight the two buildings were leased, one sold actually and one leased, which
encouraged the developers to continue. We subsequently completed drawings for
the three buildings. One of them is brick, one is plaster and one is stainless steel, and
the brick building was the last one to lease.
22

BUILDINGS. MODEL
What we were trying to do, and something I'd worked on before, was how do you
make a series of buildings of different character that become part of a family? For
instance, in the heyday of the growth of banking and Wall Street, the Rockefeller
Foundation built Rockefeller Centre. That was a single tenant use, and so the
building was designed as a big complex as everybody knows, but it was all designed in
one language. In today's world there are smaller companies although we seem to be
going back to the bigger. But the idea of fragmenting these monstrous projects into
smaller pieces - and I even tried in Mexico working with two other architects,
Ricardo Legoreta and David Childs - it seems to me the breaking down of these
projects into small pieces fits better into the society we're living in now, it fits better
into our notions of democracy I guess. We struggled with having to have separate
identities of the architects and yet have the project identity, so that the buildings are
stronger because of the size of the project and yet have an individual identity. We
spent a lot of time working on that. The Mexico project fell apart - personalities and
financial problems in Mexico.
23
DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: COMPUTER

MODEL
When I started working on the Dusseldorf project, we didn't have time to bring in
two other architects, one for each building or the need to do it. It wouldn't be
acceptable and it would have complicated the time constraints. So I tried to be the
three different architects for myself and explore this idea. What I was trying to do is
accomplish that the project has an identity as a project, and yet has a separate
identity building by building, and yet the individual buildings have a connection to
each other. That seems to humanise a big building, it fits more into the scale of the
city. You see it in Japan, you know: just after the war you see twelve storey buildings
built next to four storey buildings next to temples that are one storey. And I've
always liked that. And then you see that now in Japan they're building monstrous
projects like in Shinjuku where the city hall by Tange which is all one language and
very big, and more like the Rockefeller Centre idea. And it's changing the scale of
Tokyo. The Tange building is beautiful but the bad ones are changing the scale in a
detrimental way so they look like New York 6th Avenue. So I think the idea of
breaking down the scale, is having many architects to work on it.
24
DIGITISING ERA: IN USE

Some of these shapes are difficult, as you're working on them, it's necessary to
understand the surface area. In order to stay within the budgets and to know you are
within the budgets with these funny shapes I use, we have a digitizer that digitizes,
that's used normally in the aircraft industry. You can take right off the shapes as I'm
working on it, the surface area, very quickly and very accurately, so that we can - if
we know we're going to be forty dollars per square foot skin or eighty dollars per
square foot skin - we know how much the skin is going to be, and then, as we go,
we're clear on the budget so we don't get ourselves into a jam. We consistently use
the computer and the ability to analyse the shapes very quickly to control the
budget. At the end we have the computer cut us a model, a three-dimensional object
of what's in the computer. We have a visual representation, like a visual shop
drawing, of what we're working with so we're confident that it looks like what we
want it to. These profiles and shapes that are in the computer are then given to the
structural engineer who has been involved in developing a structural attitude. But
for his final work, he then has something to fit the shapes of the steel and concrete or
whatever. So the structural analysis can begin. And it also works with the mechanical
and electrical and all the other engineers, they get these profiles which are very
accurate, and they can fit their systems into it. Now I don't know how to turn the
computer on I'm not literate personally with it. But my office is totally wired.
Everybody has one, except me. You know, it's the way of the future. What I like about
it is it's allowing the architect to become a master builder.
Related talks:
Frank Gehry Richard Murphy John Johansen

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Building Compound Shapes | Frank Gehry | Pidgeon Digital 14/05/20, 15:43

HOME ABOUT EXPLORE SUBSCRIBE FAQ CONTACT

BARCELONA FISH SCULPTURE IN OLYMPIC

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: SKETCH

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: MODEL

disappointment. So I focused on that issue in my work.

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN:

SPILLER RESIDENCE, LOS ANGELES: IN CONTEXT

NATIONALE-NEDERLANDEN BUILDING, PRAGUE:

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: THE

NATIONALE-NEDERLANDEN BUILDING, PRAGUE:

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN:

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, BILBAO, SPAIN: THE

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL , LOS ANGELES:

WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL , LOS ANGELES:

DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: THE THREE

DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: THE THREE

DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: THE THREE

DER NEUE ZOLLHOF, DUSSELDORF: COMPUTER

DIGITISING ERA: IN USE

Frank Gehry Richard Murphy John Johansen

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