Conversations with Frank Gehry Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Conversations with Frank Gehry? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Conversations with Frank Gehry. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Conversations with Frank Gehry ReviewThis is a breezily readable, generously and eclectically illustrated book, packed with personal, practical and historical revelations and observations that paradoxically don't really add up to anything.
But wait: that may very well be the point.
First the good stuff. There are many, many pages here that are worth the purchase price: a photo of the model for the Disney Concert Hall that won the 1988 competition and that looks nothing like the finished building, another photo of what the Disney Concert Hall would have looked like had it been clad in travertine as was the original plan, Gehry's stories about surviving the Army and Harvard, Philip Johnson's assessment of the Bilbao Guggenheim, Gehry's practice of leaving building models outside for a year to see what they'll look like in the changing light of the seasons--and many more. I don't want to spoil all of them.
Here's what isn't here: any singular philosophy or manifesto, anything admonishing or inspirational, any broad program or narrow purpose. In the sixties, Gehry started using rough, exposed framework and junky materials like chainlink and corrugated metal because, craftsmanship in construction had declined, and a perfect finish would have been impossible. In the seventies, he turned an ordinary house inside-out and outraged half of Santa Monica-because he needed extra space for his sons. In the eighties, he won the commission for the Disney Concert Hall by making an emotional appeal to Walt Disney's accessibility and unpretentiousness. In the nineties, he created the most astonishing building of the late twentieth century by first refusing a commission to repurpose an existing structure.
Is there a pattern here? A take home lesson? None that I can see. It's all collaborative, and contingent, and improvisational, playful, experimental. Let's try this. That's not going to work? Then let's try this instead. Follow your genius. Go with the flow. Maybe it's all a big mystery.
But no, there's not even any mystery. In one of the funniest exchanges in the book, Gehry says, (of the museum in Bilbao) "They wanted a Sydney Opera House;" to which Barbara Isenberg replies, "How could you tell that?" which prompts from Gehry, "They said, 'We want you to build us a Sydney Opera House.'"
And that's exactly what he did. No big mystery. Not even anything to puzzle over.
In many respects, this book is as open, obvious, user-friendly, and beautiful and witty as one of Gehry's buildings. But it's also, paradoxically, empty. The buildings are filled with music and people and art. The book is filled with words and explanations, which are, I think, playfully, delightfully, even insightfully, beside the point.Conversations with Frank Gehry Overview

Want to learn more information about Conversations with Frank Gehry?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now