For those of us who had given up hope that Frank Gehry would ever return to practicing architecture, this 2018 residence for the recently deceased artist John Baldessari, in Venice, CA, might be a restorative.
https://crosbydoe.com/address/898-commo ... -ca-90291/
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Recent Gehry
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Roderick Grant
- Posts: 11815
- Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 7:48 am
Re: Recent Gehry
Gehry is currently working on a complex of residential and commercial buildings on the site of the Garden of Allah Hotel ... as in Alla Nazimova of silent movies fame. Currently the site is vacant and inactive, I suppose having to do with COVID.
Re: Recent Gehry
Bookshelves with passageways through them....always satisfying.
Is the home a return to architecture, or a return to post-modernism?
Angles for the sake of angles....
Is the home a return to architecture, or a return to post-modernism?
Angles for the sake of angles....
Re: Recent Gehry
"Angles for the sake of angles." No one seems to say that about Wright's non-orthogonal plans. (What they do love to say, an inaccurate irrelevancy, is "There are no right angles in this house !" . . .)
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Re: Recent Gehry
There are a few prominent 30 degree angles in Wright's work that seem, um, extreme.
Even so, Wright's geometrical adventures always seem to be organized in an appeal to aesthetic beauty.
Additionally, and most puzzling, those rich geometrical displays always seem to mesh well with a natural setting.
(By definition, heavy-handed geometry and non-geometrical nature don't easily mesh.)
The "meaning" of Wright's work could be seen as geometrical aesthetic beauty in relationship with natural beauty.
Post-modernism, meanwhile, had no such interest in 'meaningful meaning'.
Instead, it opened the space for meaning with its obvious question "what is all this?" and gave its answer of "whatever you want it to be, buddy!".
Randomness, irony, eclecticism, whatever, etc. Hence a ladder in a living room for no purpose; a staircase that climbs to nothing.
That said, post-modernism clearly has some value given to aesthetics.
And there are plenty of "nice" elements about this Gehry house.
But it's excessive use of angles doesn't appear to be of a meaningful formal scheme of organization.
Instead the angles appear to be a purposefully 'meaningless' scheme of randomness.
To each their own!
Even so, Wright's geometrical adventures always seem to be organized in an appeal to aesthetic beauty.
Additionally, and most puzzling, those rich geometrical displays always seem to mesh well with a natural setting.
(By definition, heavy-handed geometry and non-geometrical nature don't easily mesh.)
The "meaning" of Wright's work could be seen as geometrical aesthetic beauty in relationship with natural beauty.
Post-modernism, meanwhile, had no such interest in 'meaningful meaning'.
Instead, it opened the space for meaning with its obvious question "what is all this?" and gave its answer of "whatever you want it to be, buddy!".
Randomness, irony, eclecticism, whatever, etc. Hence a ladder in a living room for no purpose; a staircase that climbs to nothing.
That said, post-modernism clearly has some value given to aesthetics.
And there are plenty of "nice" elements about this Gehry house.
But it's excessive use of angles doesn't appear to be of a meaningful formal scheme of organization.
Instead the angles appear to be a purposefully 'meaningless' scheme of randomness.
To each their own!
Re: Recent Gehry
I find Gehry's work too expressionistic and not disciplined enough. His work has the feel of being improvised on the spot. In that respect he's more an heir of Schindler than Wright.
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Roderick Grant
- Posts: 11815
- Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 7:48 am
Re: Recent Gehry
Gehry started out as a rubber stamp modernist. His Danziger Studio of 1965 is a perfect example of his by-the-book modernism of that era. But he wasn't getting enough attention ... or work. So, he became "outré" by swathing his own house, a modest A&C cottage, with chain link fencing and bare plywood. The ploy worked, and he was off to the races! While it was a cynical move ("Hey, y'all, look at me!"), it's as old as P. T. Barnum: "No one made a difference by being like everyone else." There was no intellectual motive to the subsequent trajectory of his career.
Re: Recent Gehry
AstuteRoderick Grant wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 11:12 am Gehry started out as a rubber stamp modernist. His Danziger Studio of 1965 is a perfect example of his by-the-book modernism of that era. But he wasn't getting enough attention ... or work. So, he became "outré" by swathing his own house, a modest A&C cottage, with chain link fencing and bare plywood. The ploy worked, and he was off to the races! While it was a cynical move ("Hey, y'all, look at me!"), it's as old as P. T. Barnum: "No one made a difference by being like everyone else." There was no intellectual motive to the subsequent trajectory of his career.