Conversations with Gehry

It’s a real skill for architects to convince clients to take a creative leap of faith with a unique design. How does one do it? Some answers can be found in the new book Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg. Becoming one’s own client seems to be the first step for many forward-thinking architects, using their own homes for experimentation. Gehry’s reinvention of his Santa Monica bungalow was a first step in establishing his bold architecture. And as we know, location is everything; California’s openness to new design and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous put Gehry in position to secure future innovative projects, including the Guggenheim in Bilbao,Spain. Watching Gehry assemble a model in The Sketches of Frank Gehry, one gets the sense that Gehry speaks the language of line and form with ease, communicating complex design principals with paper and scotch tape. Hopefully Isenberg’s new book add Gehry’s personal explication of his projects to that conversation.

Gehry Field Trip

I suppose you could call it Bilbao in the Hudson Valley-- though I'm sure Bard's concert hall would be dwarfed by the Guggenheim's museum-- but it did save us the trip to Spain. Needless to say Gehry's performance center for Bard was awesome. I literally got tears in my eyes at its audacity in the rolling hills of Annendale-on-the-Hudson. It is incredibly easy to visit-- just pull off 9G for a short stint and whammo-- there you are, face to face with a truly memorable building. It doesn't change the direction of our ideas for Potic Cottage for obvious reasons; however it is not lost on us that Gehry's early experimentation was on his own home. Who knows what sorts of lessons we'll learn on our Potic experiment?