by Dale Cotton
Much fanfare has followed the opening of Princeton University’s Frank Gehry-designed Lewis Library. Close to two years late and well over the original budget (the university will not reveal the amount), the shimmering forms of the Lewis Library were well worth the wait.
Every building that Gehry produces now gets a full range of scrutiny, since his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao created a stir back in 1997. Known early on chiefly for the deconstructed aesthetic that he established in the 1970s, Gehry created collage-like structures from found materials that were ever present in the built environment, such as chain-link fencing, corrugated metal, and plywood. His own house, rather than the high-tech vision he is noted for now, was a modest bungalow in Santa Monica when he and his wife purchased it in 1978. Rather than starting from scratch, he soon let loose with the anti-aesthetic vision that defined him in that era, taking “off-the-shelf” materials and sticking them together into a deliberately eclectic package that surrounded the original house. This risky endeavor – no doubt inspired by both the assemblage work done by artist Robert Rauschenberg at the time, and Picasso and Braque’s earlier 20th-century forays into cubism – is what opened the door for him as architectural risk-taker extraordinaire.
Not only was this work against the grain of the current aesthetic, it was also about as low-tech as you could get. But as Gehry continued to work against both the Modernist boxes and postmodern recalls of traditional forms, he began to see the expressive possibilities of new technologies and materials. His Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rheim, Germany, completed in 1989, is cited as a turning point in this new direction, where curves began to infiltrate his aesthetic. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1989), the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), and Stata Center (2004) have cemented his reputation as the progenitor of curvaceous metallic structures that defy convention. Essentially he has dropped the collage aesthetic but retained the cubist one.
His whimsical, expressionistic designs attract significant attention, but the viewer is often left wondering how on earth such structures are created. This is where Gehry’s drawings come into play; the show of drawings is accompanied by a book of the same name (Frank Gehry: On Line, copublished by the Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press). And the book’s appearance draws from Gehry’s oeuvre; the cover has a metallic silver sheen and is housed in a corrugated cardboard slipcase.
The drawings show covers the first step in Gehry’s process of designing a building. But the drawings themselves do not provide a clue as to his working methods; on their own, without the excellent context supplied by Esther da Costa Meyer (associate professor of art and archaeology at Princeton), who wrote the book, they appear cut-off from the finished buildings, as if they were drawn by another hand.
Da Costa Meyer teaches modern architecture from the late 18th century to the present, and is in the process of completing a book on urban change and social history in 19th-century Paris. I had the pleasure of working with her early this summer. She needed a couple of photographs for the book of drawings, one of Lewis Library and one of Gehry’s horse’s head sculpture/conference room in the Icahn Laboratory. We met at a local coffee shop and after briefly discussing the project, I hastily called the drawings “scribbles,” and was chastised and reminded that they were “drawings.” As she puts it in her book, “Gehry’s drawings record the intellectually driven exploration that fuels architectural investigation.”
But I continued to see the drawings as scribbles because it was inconceivable to me that these sketches were used as tools for moving from idea to finished building. It was not until I watched Sydney Pollack’s documentary film, Sketches of Frank Gehry (2006), that I was able to comprehend that in a tight-knit architectural firm like Gehry Partners a nebulous sketch could be understood as something more than a gesture made with lines.
A scene in the film showed Lewis Library project designer Craig Webb (a partner in Gehry Partners) sitting at a table with Gehry, cutting pieces and fixing them to an informal model. Gehry’s not sure why something isn’t working with the model, but says it’s pompous and gestures to Webb to strip a couple of forms. Webb cuts them out from the model and Gehry folds them into a kind of accordion, suggesting that they need to “get corrugated.” (Gehry has used this corrugated look in his furniture
Webb cuts and folds the stiff paper with the metallic silver sheen and applies it to the model. Gehry laughs and says, “it’s so stupid, it’s great.”
So somehow they got from pompous to stupid in quick succession. By “stupid,” I take it that Gehry meant that there was a simple solution to the problem at hand, and that solution required thinking out of the box—but not the one made from corrugated cardboard. Having taken a corrugated shape and fashioning it into an architectural form, they had followed Gehry’s preferred path, to create using uncommon channels of inspiration.
If he and Webb can work together intuitively in such a way that they can interpret each others’ meaning, perhaps the team can indeed translate Gehry’s sketches into a model, and from there continue modifying successive models (sometimes up to 30) through verbal banter and cutting and pasting. Where do they go from there? Once a satisfactory model is reached, a more sophisticated technology takes over.
When his team scans the final model into the CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application), a computer program originally developed by the French aerospace industry, Gehry says in the film that he sees the resulting image as “a dried out version of what he’s thinking.” He has trouble keeping the original idea in his head when confronted by the imagery spit out by the computer. Yet, this software program is what allows him the freedom to design with some abandon, since the dimensions of the elements and forms are all calculated within the program and allow the contractors to work without traditional detailed drawings.
In 1992, as Gehry’s work shifted to more complex shapes and arrangements of elements, he and his research and technology team changed the way his practice approached design. Paper-based documentation of architectural projects could not accurately express his designs. Gehry built a team of technologists and practitioners that began using advanced 3D aerospace technologies to design, document, and go directly from design to construction. The team founded Gehry Technologies (GT) in 2002 to bring technology and methodology advances to the wider architecture and building industries. Gehry Technologies develops and sells Digital Project™, a suite of powerful 3D building information modeling (BIM) and management tools that operates on the CATIA platform.
Ideally, the BIM software eliminates the guessing game of presenting the multitude of forms and dimensions inherent in any Gehry building to a contractor. As the architectural project manager for Lewis Library, Greg Ondick of Barr & Barr, Inc. Builders, the general contractor for the site, has said, “you couldn’t build a building like this without the modeling software” (Princeton Weekly Bulletin, Sept. 15, 2008). “It tells us where to put a brick, where to erect a beam, how much glass to cut,” Ondick says.
Even using BIM however, the Lewis Library design created some problems for the contractor. According to W. Barksdale Maynard, in “The Gehry that Landed on Ivy Lane” (Princeton Alumni Review, Oct. 8, 2008), the expansive forms that hover over the “treehouse” (the reading room at the extreme western reach of the library) required two expensive tries to get them right.
And in 2007, Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a negligence suit against Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge, caused leaks. According to a Nov. 6, 2007 article in the Boston Globe, MIT says that both Gehry Partners and the construction company, New Jersey-based Beacon Skanska Construction Company, now known as Skanska USA Building Inc., violated their contracts with MIT and are responsible for construction and design failures on the project. Skansa blames Gehry, claiming that he was warned about the flaws in his design. The suit has yet to be settled.
As Neil Rudenstine, a former president of Harvard (class of 1956 and a university trustee) who helped oversee the library project, said to W. Barksdale Maynard (Princeton Alumni Review, Oct. 8, 2008), “you don’t choose Frank Gehry if you don’t want to be daring. That inevitably involves some level of risk. You don’t know exactly how it is going to turn out.” The scheduled completion date of Lewis Library was December 2006, but ended up taking over a year and a half longer.
Gehry himself has admitted that people sometimes have the misconception that he crumples up a piece of paper and out comes a new design. In fact, an entire episode of The Simpsons (Season 16, Episode 14, 2005) cartoon showed Gehry fulfilling just that role. The character had his voice and looked like him. In the episode, one town wants to impress its tonier neighbor town by building a concert hall. Gehry, as the reigning “starchitect,” (celebrity architect) is sent a design invitation by letter, and when he opens it at his mailbox he simply crumples it up and tosses it on the ground—which, of course, becomes the inspiration for his design.
Gehry was willing to play the pawn in his own character assassination, which shows that he has a sense of humor about how he is perceived. Similarly, in the Lewis Library a star-shape opening cuts through the second floor of the library over the checkout area below
Having been criticized in the past as part of a cadre of architects labeled “starchitects” by critics who see them as emphasizing popularity over substance, Gehry has confronted this label head-on. It is also rumored that this star shape will be added to his line of jewelry at Tiffany’s. Once again, Gehry has the last laugh.
However, there may be some truth to this label, given the difficulty of negotiating the multiple entrances and floors of Lewis Library. Once the visual spectacle has worn off, the day-to-day details may present problems for actual users. Entering the building through the formal entrance off Ivy Lane, the expansive atrium
opens up to a variety of choices of where to go, but without guidance it is difficult to navigate. Do you want to get to the library, or just to the reading room within the library? From this entrance you will need to climb down the 22 stairs and one landing to the library entrance below. Once in the library, you must either take a set of concrete stairs back up to the second floor, or the elevator, to walk down a long hallway to the “treehouse” reading room.
You would think that this would be easier than it is. Truthfully, you can enter the building at the library entrance level, but unless you are a repeat visitor you wouldn’t know this.
The drawings too provide much fodder for questioning Gehry’s intent. Are they artistic renderings or actual elevations that reveal information useful in the building process? As da Costa Meyer points out, Gehry takes his art seriously, and these sketches reflect his attempt to keep his designs fresh and imaginative. He said in the Pollack film that he aims for the emotional immediacy of painting in his work—that he would prefer to maintain more of the sketchy quality of his drawings in the finished buildings. So whether the sketches are credible renderings of the finished buildings is somewhat beside the point.
What the Gehry’s sketches do show is his mindset as an artist. He has been influenced by painters, sculptors, and musicians throughout his career. Richard Serra’s sculpture, The Hedgehog and the Fox is seen from many strategic locations within Lewis Library, as if Gehry wanted to showcase this piece of art.
When Gehry describes his drawing technique as a “kind of grinding into the paper, trying to find the building” (Gehry: On Line), this is an artistic mind using his imagination and intuition in producing an image, not an architect putting pencil to paper in order to describe his plan.
Following her brief but illuminating history of architectural drawings and their significance, da Costa Meyer explains in the book that “today, architectural drawings have their own institutional clients, which include specialized galleries and art collectors, not to mention that most ephemeral of modern clients, the auction house.” It is this auction house mentality of today’s starchitects that some object to. One of Gehry’s principal detractors is a prominent member of Princeton’s faculty, Hal Foster, professor of art and archaeology and department chair, which is the department where da Costa Meyer also teaches.
In his other role, as a cultural critic, Foster sees Gehry as too easily succumbing to the demands of the marketplace. In his 2004 self-described polemical book, Design and Crime, he noted that Gehry’s “masterpiece” to date, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, overwhelmed the art that it was meant to showcase. Even Gehry admitted to Pollack that he was almost embarrassed when he first saw the finished building in Bilbao. Its shimmering masses in the midst of a former industrial city must have at first seemed somewhat overblown to him rather than what others saw, which was a masterful diamond-in-the-rough.
Regardless, Foster points to Gehry as another signpost in today’s culture of consumption. A town, institution, corporation, or individual has made their mark if they have a Gehry building to their credit. Why is that a crime, as Foster’s book title implies? Because, as he puts it, “everything—not only architectural projects and art exhibits of everything from jeans to genes—seems to be regarded as so much design.” He sees Gehry as part of the design-centric culture where status is determined by the must-have culture of consumption rather than more authentic qualities. Consumers purchase Adidas, for example, for its brand status rather than its utilitarian or aesthetic value. In the case of the arts, in Foster’s view this limits the field to what the marketplace determines to be of quality. Architecture that is controlled solely by marketplace demands automatically places limitations on creativity and utility. And thus the need for entertainment – spectacle – trumps the need for a functioning building.
Now Gehry has several lines of furniture and sells his jewelry designs through Tiffany
He designed the hollow plastic cubes 
that one sees scattered throughout Lewis Library. They are used as seats or tables. Ironically, my brief web search for an online retailer came up with the site, highbrowfurniture.com, for these distinctly lowbrow plastic creations. His name alone most likely translates into sales.
Gehry claimed in a 2007 New York Times (July 23) article that two of his drawings that he had given to a friend had recently been resold for $20,000 each. And he is working through philanthropist Peter Lewis (who is also the Princeton trustee who donated $60 million to Lewis Library) to find a home for his archives. The archive contains more than 5,000 drawings, as well as models and many other items. Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said he had been approached about the Gehry archive and that the price range was “in multimillion dollars” (New York Times, July 23, 2007). Bergdoll said that “it used to be architects would be so grateful that there was someone interested in dedicating space to their work, and they would donate it. Now architects view their designs as a kind of profit center. Architects are getting valuations of them as though they were selling the studio of Picasso.”
Da Costa Meyer has stated that the “drawings are both elegant goals in themselves, as drawings, and at the same time, they are part of architecture, since he both seeks for a final form and a fine drawing at the same time” (October 1, 2008 email correspondence). Other experts see them more definitively. Horst Bredekemp claims that “drawing is the creative ferment of [Gehry’s] goals, so that it should be considered as much a part of his calling as architecture and sculpture” (Gehry Draws). It is this state of confusion though, that also characterizes his buildings. Are they primarily sculptures? Are they overly concerned with the pleasures of form and emotional content? Have they gone past the tipping point, where utility is subservient to art? And if it’s art, is that art too much design?
Foster’s approach in Design and Crime extends the argument made by Austrian architect Adolf Loos in his influential 1908 essay, “Ornament and Crime,” which calls out the then prevalent Art Nouveau design style as having a built-in obsolescence due to its extreme reliance on decoration. The same could be said of Gehry’s aesthetic. The extreme forms and showy materials could exhaust themselves over time. But the opposite is just as likely. Princeton’s magnificent High Victorian Gothic Alexander Hall and Chancellor Green, 2 separate buildings designed by William Potter in the late nineteenth century, were ridiculed at the time. One myth that circulated then was that Alexander Hall was designed by a student as his architectural thesis—and that he received a failing grade for his effort. Both buildings are now in high regard as top-notch examples of their period.
The marketplace demands change, and if Gehry’s spectacles ruffle the feathers of some critics (and those that cannot even look at anything on the Princeton campus that isn’t built from stone), that isn’t his problem. As the always outspoken painter/filmmaker Julian Schnabel relayed in Pollack’s film, if the artwork on display isn’t good enough to be noticed in the Bilbao Guggenheim, “maybe it shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
Ultimately it is a matter of choice as to whether one likes the Lewis Library building and the ideas (sketches) that perhaps inspired it. If Gehry is branded, as Foster believes, I do not see that this has limited his creativity. Each building, no matter if it contains his trademark metallic curves or not, is still unique and aesthetically pleasing. It is the play of those curves against the more traditional brick blocks that gives Lewis Library its distinction. On the other hand, a building’s functional deficiency is a legitimate concern. Is it worth it to have an aesthetic marvel that students, visitors and faculty cannot use properly? Only time will tell if the library is useful as well as beautiful.
As for his sketches, I now see the point, so to speak. Gehry has been actively drawing since he was a child, and he draws intuitively. De Costa Meyer sees in the drawings an affinity with Cy Twombly, whose seemingly random scribbles do show a resemblance. Add to Twombly Alberto Giacometti’s nervous pencil that darts and scratches until it finds a likeness in his portraits, and you have Gehry’s drawings. Gehry has reduced his buildings down to gestures with a minimum of detail. As he told Sydney Pollack, he always wished that he was a painter. He’s most “fascinated with that moment of truth. There’s the canvas, it’s on your easel, got a brush with a pallet of colors and what do you do? What’s the first move? I love that dangerous place.” Clearly the drawings help him continue his creative search using an artistic method that inspires him.
Dale Cotton
Dale Cotton, WRR Photo Editor
Dale H. Cotton is a freelance photograher who specializes in the built environment. He photographs everything from manhole covers to street signs to the buildings of Frank Gehry. Dale has also worked as an editor, producer, and art director/designer in the book publishing industry in Seattle, New York, Boston, and Princeton.
WEBSITE: www.hingephoto.com
EMAIL: cotton.photos@gmail.com
DALE COTTON IN THIS EDITION:
ALTERED SPACES: Blowing Apart the Rectangle — Behind the Scenes at Frank Gehry’s New Building
ALTERED SPACES: Odditorium: Times Square[d] Oddities
BLOG: Live @ PEN World Voices (photo)
QUARK PARK: Journey into the Male & Female Brain (photo)
QUARK PARK: Music in Stone (photo)
QUARK PARK: The Scientist as Rebel (photo)
SPOTLIGHT: Fly Me to the Moon — A Conversation with Mathematician and Artist, Ed Belbruno (photo)
QUARK PARK: Quark Park — Visions (photo)
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