A Futurist, but not a Brutalist - too ludic, too goofy
I guess Gehry (RIP) was considered a postmodernist, but I don't see what he is quoting, citing, reviving here... these are shapes and surfaces without precedent, surely.
I mean yeah it's not modernism in the sense of stark, unornamented, bracingly ugly, vaguely inhumane.
But it's more futuristic than that aging idea of the Future
There were many strands of postmodernism in architectural discourse, the one Gehry was attached to (despite his efforts to disown the label) was Deconstructivism, a short-lived and ill-advised branding effort that took its title from a combination of Deconstruction and Constructivism, and was mainly an excuse for architects to mention Derrida at parties. There was even a big exhibition in the late 80's at MoMA, meant to be a coming-out party, that killed the movement as fast as it started, and showcased the work of Gehry and other like-minded architects whose work featured purposefully weird (and interesting) shapes that were seen as challenging the established elements of built form.
ReplyDeleteArchitecture has not really had another "movement" since, unless you count "Blobitecture", which needs no further description. Music invents new genres daily but architects have long since stopped wanting to be part of a gang.
The shapes are without precedent because they are only possible with Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Modelling.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! So just like with music, progress in technology drives progress in style? And Gehry was to CAD/CAM what Hendrix was to amplification or Trevor Horn was to the Fairlight CMI?
DeleteIt's not just about the shapes, but also the stress calculations for the structure. I did a civil engineering module as part of my engineering degree, and the maths involved in calculating the bending moment of a beam are extremely convoluted.
DeleteI would guess with a conventional building you can rely on tabulated data or rules of thumb, but in a severely irregular building where all of the structural elements are subtly different lengths, then the computational power you would need would be enormous.
I suppose you are correct in that Gehry's key impulse seems to have been "let's see how far we can push this", and the aesthetics of his buildings, whether you like them or not, are the result of this impulse.
Digi-Whimsy? Pixar-Modernism?
DeleteGehrishness.
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