Frank Gehry has a few things to get off his chest | Hacker News Reader

Frank Gehry has a few things to get off his chest

torontolife.com

30 pointspseudolus60 comments

Nitpicking, but he lies right off-the-bat:

"Yeah. And the presumption is that I wouldn’t be able to stay on budget, which is the opposite of the truth. Every one of our buildings hits the budget."

MIT Stata Center was budgeted at $100M. It was well over 4x that cost before it was even finished (http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2003/09...). The costs went up from there, as when it rained outside, it also rained inside, and there were all sorts of other unforeseen problems. There were litigation, which Gehry shrugged off.

The inside of the building was a train wreck. You had walls at odd angle, where you couldn't fit a standard bookcase or file cabinet. The acoustics meant that you could hear conversations as far as a different floor. All the issues to make it a practical place to work still haven't been addressed.

But as much as it sucks as a place to work, it's a great monument to faculty and administrator egos.

> The inside of the building was a train wreck. You had walls at odd angle, where you couldn't fit a standard bookcase or file cabinet.

I once worked on the second floor of a two floor geodesic dome and the outside walls had that problem. Nothing insurmountable but it was a bit annoying. Here's a little more on that [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072

Busy at 90+ is inspiring. But I had to live near the Weisman Art Museum in the Twin Cities for some time, and I found it a fundamentally silly and depressing building. Especially in the winter. The facade has absurd and irrelevant appendages, the backside is a mundane red brick wall, which suggests the front is all for show. The interior is confusing. The last thing I wanted to see during the MN winter is more gray cold surfaces. It did not integrate at all with the Mississippi bluffs, and it had no integration with the neighborhood.

I happen to live in a neighborhood where Frank Lloyd Wright built a few homes. The homeowner experience is terrible, but the buildings are wonderful.

The building he designed in Cleveland, the Peter B. Lewis building on the campus of Case Western, suffers from the winter fate of having ice and snow avalanche off the classic Gehry roof design. Initially, I don't think this was accounted for and people were getting hit. Eventually, they figured out that they needed more specific walkways where the snow wouldn't hit pedestrians.

The building also stood out substantially for quite some time. That part of campus was mainly comprised of buildings from the early 1900's. Today, a lot of new construction has sprung up around that area so it's not quite as jarring, but like any Gehry building, it still stands out.

I was at Case when the Peter B Lewis building opened. I don't recall people getting hit by falling ice but they'd put up warning signs and maybe close the main entrance after snow (which in Cleveland was often). There was a shooting in the building too. It took 7 hours for the SWAT team to find the gunman and get the hostages out. Apparently the curvy walls and large atrium design are a complete tactical nightmare.

>Apparently the curvy walls and large atrium design are a complete tactical nightmare.

A building shouldn't be designed to facilitate giving concealment/cover to people who expect their entrance to be violently opposed. I would argue that if you're going to give design consideration to that it should be in the opposite direction.

I was at Case a few years after PBL opened so I could be misremembering or just hear of people getting hit anecdotally.

I was aware of the shooting nightmare that took place there and specifically remember how odd it was hearing the song "Pumped Up Kicks" playing inside of that building.

I'm convinced the guy is an architectural equivalent of Andy Kaufmann. The closest thing to an "anti-Frank Lloyd Wright" that exists. He knows he's making you uncomfortable, and he doesn't care because that's the point. Which is fine for an art installation, not so much for something people have to live with for decades.

The Simpsons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1p6rrn-PimU

look, I'm sorry to be negative here, but...

“Every tower in New York comes from a different planet, everybody is competing with each other. With Forma, I’m trying to create community”

Look at this garbage:

https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2022/0...

Only a modern starchitect could think that any sort of community could arise out of towering glass boxes (ah, yes, the yale box[1], wow, amazingly original) that look like they are about to fall over on top of you.

At least the brutalists were honest about wanting to alienate people.

The damage done by modern architecture will take a millenia to fix.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House

I don't think that any of the other "famous architects" measure up to Wright, but I do like a lot of the work done by Calatrava, Hadid, and I.M. Pei. Examples below:

https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5850/5b9b/e58e/ce32/8...

http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191120080400-04-zara-h...

https://desmoinesartcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IM...

Interesting to look at and liveable are orthogonal qualities at best and opposite at worst. One of those is truly important for inhabitants of a building, while the other is truly important to the architect's reputation. I'll let you guess which I think is which.

Personally, I'm tired of architecture being treated as a grotesque form of sculpture.

One of these is not like the other.

I've been in a few IM Pei buildings, and even worked in one. They were pleasant places to be and functional. I have the utmost respect for him. He's had a few buildings where the function was art (e.g. galleries), so they didn't follow that, but it made sense. He's had a few failures too.

But on the whole, I have the utmost respect for him as an architect.

Good to hear he's one of the orthogonals then :) at least occasionally

Calatrava is also well known for projects that go over budget and aren't designed with usage in mind.

Form over function.

That last one looks like an alligator enclosure at a zoo.

That was probably partially due to poor image selection on my part. Here's one that I think is a slightly better representation of the building:

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/3...

I think that while the building uses a lot of elements of brutalist style, it also does a good job incorporating natural light. The art in the picture below doesn't isn't particularly compelling to me, but I like the architecture:

https://live.staticflickr.com/1742/42628537001_fe8a195275_b....

is this the museum in Pasadena?

Des Moines

https://desmoinesartcenter.org/about/architecture/i-m-pei/

First picture shows a huge hall with no place to sit, no place to relax if you are hard of walking. No condensation places for people to hang onto and have a conversation or a break.

Piggy backing on the Wolfe link:

The criticisms of modernism in the 70s were already very precise and perceptive. See also for example Jane Jacobs or Christopher Alexander. However, instead, it pushed us into the pageantry of post-modernism, which, even though less bad, didn't really create a paradigm shift. It still conceived the building-proper as a sculpture, with all the idiocy that implies.

Architects tend to hate Christopher Alexander, but he is loved by everyone else. His debate with Eisenman is pretty classic.

Prince Charles is hated on by architects for the same reason. His book “harmony” is a deliberation about the types of buildings and town structures that produce vitality. I was skeptical but it is a great read.

As a wise man once said:

“That’s, like, just your opinion, man”.

I for one think if you’re hoping to build X number of apartments in Y space, where Y is priced at downtown Toronto land prices, then you’re going to make variations of a box (or a Gherkin, but then it’d be a gherkin).

Of course, Forma isn’t a cube, there’s a lot of texture there; there’s contrast and light.

But, that just, like, my opinion, man

At least brutalism gave us (at least here, in Eastern Europe) relatively cheap mass-housing projects (I’m writing from an appartment located inside one of those buildings right now), not that much cheap mass-housing projects coming from the stararchitects of today.

I liked my commie box when I lived in one. There is something to be said for having money left over after paying rent.

Having trouble finding early designs since the promotions of the finished building have buried earlier coverage of the project, but these buildings started out with a much more organic look and got turned into boring boxes along the way. Value engineering and all that. Also the fact that most of his designs start out disconnected from the realities of construction.

In NYC I lived in Gherry's giant apartment building. One thing that struck me was that the kitchen drawers were inside the kitchen cabinets, so if you wanted to get something from the drawer, say a knife, you first needed to open the cabinet. That was an action I could easily do dozens of times in a day and it always irritated me. Apparently, Gherry's office designed the kitchens and (I think) that was done to reduce the number of visual seams(?). Otherwise it was a mostly nice building.

Sounds like him and Jony Ive would get along.

Jony would design cabinets so slim that one can put only single knife lengthwise in a drawer.

If you need more than one knife then you are doing it wrong.

Surely you mean a single iKnife™

Sometimes, but aside from the use of stainless steel, Ive wouldn't approve of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Wright had the same kinds of problems, right?

In high school I hung out with a youth group at Unity Temple in Oak Park, which is beautiful but beset by problems. Repairing the cracking exterior surfaces was a major project.

Distinctive architecture is risky. At elite levels it amounts to signing up to live, or work, in a major artist's work of sculpture, made with novel methods and materials. Repair becomes equivalent to art conservation. Budget accordingly.

The MIT campus is full of similar stories, not just Building 32 (Stata Center).

I just remember a Wright exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry when I was a kid, and them explaining that all the furniture was built in to the house.

"At age 93, Frank Gehry, the original starchitect"

Nitpicking, but surely this title must go to Frank Lloyd Wright[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMXK_KtUVm4

They have a lot in common. Both made visually stunning buildings that were poorly designed. They are the Jony Ives of their field.

Frank Lloyd Wright homes sell for much less than they you might think based on their looks, because they're maintenance nightmares. Lots of newspaper articles about this over the last 50 years.

I don't think it's entirely fair to call Wright buildings poorly designed, a lot of the maintenance issues come down to the buildings' age.

He was designing buildings back in the late 1800s. While there is obviously a good deal work required in maintaining buildings from that era, I don't think that Wright's work has required a disproportionate amount of attention.

The Imperial Hotel in Japan survived a massive 1923 Tokyo earthquake due to several design decisions made by Wright.

I’ve owned several 1910s/1920s era single family homes. So not quite as old, as what you’re describing, but close.

As long as you stay on top of it, the maintenance is totally reasonable. Putting a new roof on is identical to any other house. Ditto siding, ditto paint (minus having to worry about lead).

I recently replaced >20 original windows on one of them. They were just held in with trim. Honestly it was easier than taking out an 80s era aluminum window.

In many ways they’re better than modern construction. The lumber they used is miles ahead of anything on the market today. Lots of old growth redwood and cedar that give you some natural rot protection.

I know little about the maintenance challenges of Wright buildings, but generally speaking old wood houses are not crazy expensive to maintain. But my house is a pretty standard shape, and it doesn’t have a waterfall running underneath it.

a lot of the maintenance issues come down to the buildings' age.

Your supposition runs counter to what has been documented many times by many industry publications and general purpose newspapers.

I know about ten very good architects who work on very large projects around the world. Two of whom would deserve to be called "starchitects," if they were interested in self-promotion. Wright is well-known in the professional architecture world as someone whose buildings are great when the go up, but quickly reveal their flaws once lived in and used.

The Imperial Hotel in Japan survived a massive 1923 Tokyo earthquake due to several design decisions made by Wright

One building out of over a thousand. Oak Park, Illinois has no shortage of homes that have become well-publicized money pits because of Mr. Wright's choices.

Heck, his very famous Fallingwater house is considered one of his crowning achievements, but is also a spectacular failure. He built it over a waterfall, and didn't take humidity into consideration. He built it in Pennsylvania and didn't take winter into consideration. Defects in the concrete floor designs were noted even during construction. Nothing to do with age.

> quickly reveal their flaws once lived in and used

Compared to a Gehry building that's flawed before the first occupant even steps foot inside, that sounds pretty good :)

I live in Oak Park and haven't really heard of any of these money pits. Can you give me some links?

https://chicago.curbed.com/maps/oak-park-frank-lloyd-wright-...

Promises 25 places on the map.

There are obviously plenty of Wright buildings in Oak Park; we're famous for it. I'm wondering about the infamous money pits.

Sorry. I thought it was well known since Veblen that that Mid-Western civilization was all about the blatant-not-blatant money pits.

Okay, here’s one about the latest in a long tradition of remodelling:

https://www.oakpark.com/2022/02/16/how-do-you-remodel-wright...

Alludes to longstanding issues with adapting prarie-inspired visuals to the local climate.

That's not what a "money pit" is. It's not a "money pit" when you decide to gut-renovate the place, nor when you flip it for $500k more than you bought it for.

I've been there & seen the houses.

newspapers.com is your resource for stuff that's not on The Google. Searching is much harder, though. You kinda need to know the dates things were published.

No, because I read it in the dead tree editions of newspapers and magazines. But there's a thing called Google that might be of some use to you.

I did that before I asked, and found a Wright house 2 blocks from where I grew up (in Beverly, not Oak Park) that was a "money pit", because the previous owners had built an addition and plastered around the interior, and they decided to restore it and add period-appropriate window decorations. I didn't find any references to money pit Wright houses in Oak Park.

I'm the weirdo who actually reads our local newspapers, for what it's worth. Like I said, I actually live here.

For those of us too stupid to guess the appropriate search terms to get relevant results, would you kindly offer up some hints?

Try searching with “remodelling”, “cold winters”, etc?

Have you ever been inside a Wright building? They just feel fantastic to be in. The way a cathedral interior creates this powerful sense of space? Wright could do that with a living room.

Yes, I have. Many times. Homes, office buildings, religious buildings, and other structures, including the SC Johnson campus in Wisconsin. They look great. They feel great. They work terribly.

The Johnson labs, for example, was designed to allow in lots of natural light through glass and glass block walls. Great for reading. Terrible if the people inside work with substances that react to light.

Again, great concept. Visually wonderful. But not well thought out.

I've been to the SC Johnson headquarters building in Racine (not the labs, as you said).

They are still working there. It took a lot of post-construction work to make it usable and rainproof. And it's beautiful, which you certainly can't say about 99% of the corporate buildings in use nowadays.

> maintenance nightmares

Wright was always pushing boundaries in construction technology and ended up using a lot of techniques and materials that weren't quite ready for production.

I'd bet that almost every design of his could be made today with no long-term maintenance issues whatsoever.

Not to Le Corbusier?

Wright was designing buildings before Le Corbusier was born, although Le Corbusier definitely fits the bill as another architect who was well-known even among non-architects.

That's the Satanchitect, making hell freeze on Earth.

Frank Lloyd Wright groupie here: I've been to Oak Park, the Robie House, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax headquarters, and Taliesyn (WI).

He was certainly an arrogant asshole. Like Steve Jobs, he inspired a lot of people who thought that just being an arrogant asshole was the secret sauce.

His buildings were also poorly made and required endless renovation just to be usable. But they were beautiful, and they integrated with their surroundings (OK, except for Taliesyn, which was uninhabitable in the winter). Those two things are not true for Gehry.

I went with my brother (not a builder or architect) to Taliesyn. The first thing he noticed was how the glass wall corners didn't meet flush.

Outstanding interview, regardless of what you think of Gehry. Well prepped interviewer, few softball questions, good give-and-take. Gehry's impressively sharp for his age. Ever contrary.

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