Frank Gehry started off building cities with his grandma | Hacker News Reader

Frank Gehry started off building cities with his grandma

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50 pointspseudolus24 comments

I'm not an architect, but I have a fantasy about building a new type of city.

High density city centers have transport and other infrastructure largely concentrated on one or two levels. This means that it is impossible for most people to use vehicles because the streets cannot possibly accommodate so many. So there are trains. Trains sort of work, but they are still quite crowded and uncomfortable, and overall do not permit point-to-point travel and are slow compared to direct travel by vehicle.

So my thought is, plan for an area that has several say 60 story buildings in a group.

The basic idea is for tall buildings to be connected on multiple levels. For example, if you have a type of roadway every ten floors, in sixty floors there would be five elevated roadways. These would mainly need to handle small single passenger automated pods, or anyway vehicles less than 1000 pounds.

This requires the architecture to cooperate in a way that is not possible without sophisticated sharing of CAD designs.

Or it might be a type of cooperative enterprise to build a robust skeletal structure for reservation group, which would then be filled in by individual owners or tenants after the superstructure was complete.

Well, it's not entirely a new concept, since many people have had similar ideas, at least in terms of multi-level cities.

I am not an architect, and I've dreamed of building a new city for most of my life (I'm 43 now).

I tried to build a startup to address this desire in 2017. We ended up building something different, hopefully useful but far away from my initial dream. [0]

I recently decided to give it another try [1], and applied to the "Apollo Projects" program [2] just a few days ago. Hope to hear from them soon :)

[0]: www.fabrica.land

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtMybYBGCwc&feature=youtu.be

[2]: https://apolloprojects.com/

Edit: forgot to add one comment: tall (20+ stories) buildings are actually NOT the best way to have good density and "livability" of a city center.

It's a long discussion, but just look at the monsters that Le Corbusier (Radiant City [3]) and others tried to build in the past. Almost unanimously, architects and engineers agree today that these are not the right paradigm to build a city.

Great additional reads if you're curious: "Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander, and "The Death and Life of great american cities" by Jane Jacobs.

[3]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor...

Okay I am aware that many architects do not like tremendous skyscrapers these days. However, my concept, which I have not fully specified, would be unlike any existing design which they may correctly criticize.

Here is another very different idea I had before (which was criticized for not being dense enough): http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

But I am really curious to know what sort of structures or design you prefer.

That's interesting!

The ones I personally prefer are the ones that have been proven over decades, or better centuries. Pretty much any city center in most small/medium towns in Europe, for example.

Jan Gehl's Strøget in Copenhagen is, AFAIK, the best example of readapting a large city to a proven, older model.

[0]: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/urbanism-planning/j...

Gehry is a great example of how architects have lost touch with what normal people consider attractive or useful. I'm yet to meet anyone that hasn't studied architecture that likes his buildings.

"Great" architects get to build buildings based on their vision and have it be something with little to do with anything else.

There is a book called How Buildings Learn and the reality is that a lot of old buildings that are viewed as great buildings evolved into great buildings over a long period of time. They were added on to and tweaked as need arose and they became something wonderful and useful and valuable.

You are unlikely to see a building by a big name architect treated that way. They get enshrined. They get preserved. They are frozen in a moment of time. They don't evolve.

The very act of being known as a great architect tends to rob your buildings of the process by which wonderful spaces gradually come into being.

I went to architecture school, Gehry is extremely unpopular amongst most contemporary architects. He's considered more of an artist then an architect.

Are contemporary architects disliking his work a sort of counter culture sort of way (because he is everywhere)? What are fundamental complaints against his work?

Did Frank Gehry advance architecture in a way that people are standing on top of his work (figuratively speaking)?

There are generally two types of architects: white collar and blue collar.

White collar architects are artists, and spend their time designing. Then they hand their sketches to structural engineers and say "Figure out how to build this." These are generally the folks architecture magazines write about.

Blue collar architects are more engineers and tradespeople, and see success as a building that fits the purposes of the client, in budget, in a pleasing way. They're more likely to repurpose a historical form, if it's well suited for the request at hand.

One of the central features of architecture meta is that white collars think blue collars lack creativity and intelligence, and blue collars think white collars are pompous pricks.

I guess I disagree with this assessment.

There are many famous architects who are famous precisely for the criteria you listed as 'blue collar' here: Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron, Rafael Moneo, Alvaro Siza. They tend to work from the construction of the building up, they repurpose historical buildings. They are also massively famous, teach at prestigious universities and write a lot of books (Zumthor excepted, although he is likely the most popular of all of these guys). The 'white collar' type you mention here seems to resemble Gehry the most, but as I've detailed in another comment is not considered a great architect.

Who do blue collar type architects look to for inspiration or guidance?

There's many reasons why he isn't considered a good architect:

- Notoriously bad detailing (see the lawsuit associated with the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT). Precise detailing is a reflection of an architect's craftmanship, and something a lot of architects take a lot of pride in.

- No theoretical or functional underpinning to his work, it's literally just a large sculpture. Architects who do incorporate sculptural form (Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Alvaro Alto, Oscar Niemeyer, Preston Scott Cohen etc) are a lot more rigorous about how and why they deploy this strategy.

- A related criticism: little to no translation of his sculptural forms to the interior. If you cut a section through his building you'll see that the building contains a lot of empty, useless space at the corners, and then a lot of typical boxy rooms inside. Again look at someone like Koolhaas, Cohen or Zaha to see how efficiently and effectively they integrate their geometric experimentation.

- The most impressive part of his projects: the structural calculations, construction and implementation of his work was achieved by others at Gehry Technologies, a technology spin-off that he's basically outsourced all the difficult/interesting parts of his project to. If you look at architects who do structurally experimental work (Santiago Calatrava, Antoni Gaudi), they're actually integrating their analytical work with the design.

Gehry himself has said he's more of an artist then an architect. I will say though, that one of my favorite architects (Rafael Moneo) once wrote a pretty good defense of Gehry's work in his book 'Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects', albeit focusing mainly on his use of material.

ETA: Oh god. Reading the hacker news crowd confidently opine about architecture is excruciating. There just seems to be a huge gap between what people think architects do, and what the discipline actually does.

Are his designs impractical to use?

The world has plenty of room for a few Gehrys, just as it has need for art. Practicality can take second seat to art; this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

> Practicality can take second seat to art;

Architecture was supposed to be the conjugation of both, not a way to put together pretty façades.

Personally I like his forms. But I sometimes wonder if he is a good architect. Maybe he should be called a great artist.

The same can be said about some website/app designers. Beautiful designs but barely useable. Maybe those designers should also be called artists.

Have you lived in one of his buildings/have you insight if they really are hard to live in/use? They look that way, but the outside of a building doesn't necessarily translate to the same on the inside.

I've worked in one, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The Peter B. Lewis Building: https://weatherhead.case.edu/about/facilities/lewis/default

Among other problems: (1) no provision was made for the fact that Cleveland gets snow and ice, leading to barriers for pedestrians to avoid their evisceration via detaching ice sheets from the curved roof, (2) the glare off the roof is focused straight down a nearby street @ 5pm, creating driving hazards, (3) it's difficult to navigate internally from one side of the building to the other.

Most star architects are hacks, coasting one step ahead of being made to answer for the flaws of their previous projects. The more famous the architect, the more they feel obliged to ignore basic design.

I think this photo (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5PEXDshWZlA/UaTCV9uc1OI/AAAAAAAAAC...) perfectly illustrates why this type of architecture is a literal nightmare. It has no concept of its' physical surroundings or geography, it's just someone's abstract fever dream plucked from the sky and plopped into a setting where it makes zero sense.

MIT sued him for functional deficiencies in the Stata Center.

> Apparently, the three-year-old Stata Center leaks, mold is growing on the exterior, snow and ice fall off the curved roof and projecting windows, and MIT had to spend $1.5 million to rebuild an amphitheater that was cracking due to poor drainage.

Source: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/editorial/so-gehry-...

Interesting, but that source also says this:

Before we start blaming crazy Gehry or making excuses for him, let's take a collective step back. Is the situation really so unusual? Architects, contractors, and clients get embroiled in lawsuits all the time. That's why we have lawyers. For architects in search of a moral, the lawsuit in question should serve as little more than a timely reminder to get familiar with the new AIA contract documents. As it is, Gehry's famous, so the squabble is getting the kind of media attention typically reserved for Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan's latest stint in rehab. In that context, who cares?

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It seems it got settled in the end and we will never know if Gehry (or one of the contractors or no one) was really at fault: https://thetech.com/2010/03/19/statasuit-v130-n14

Are there any Facebook engineers who worked in the Gehry building? How was it working there?

I spent time there on a few occasions. It is an interesting building in that it is huge, but somehow it still feels kind of comfortable and localized. Kind of like a shopping mall but without the walls, but the walls aren't necessary.

The park on the roof is phenomenal. There are thousands of people working below you and you'd never know it, it's more like just being on a hill near the bay.

I’ve been to the Stata Center dozens of times for meetings, conferences, receptions, or just passing through. I like the exterior, but inside it’s horrible.

It’s cavernous, bad acoustics, drab and utilitarian, geometrically weird and therefore hard to navigate, and finding conference rooms is like a habitrail adventure with lots of dead ends and backtracking.

It’s just an all around unpleasant space (to me) that has no good explanation other than lack of caring.

But I do think it looks super interesting outside.

But I’ll never forgive Ghery for that horrific turd called the Weisman art museum at U of MN. Tear that thing down.

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