- "What I am after, above all, is expression." --- Henri Matisse
- "It is hot-jazz in stone!" --- Le Corbusier (On seeing Manhattan for the first time, 1945)
Left to right:
1. Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Bilbao, Spain. Frank O. Gehry and Associates, 1997
[Photo online at http://www.bm30.es/homegug_uk.html ]
2. Experience Music Project, Seattle Washington, 2000; Frank O. Gehry and Associates
[Photo by Lara Swimmer/ESTO]
3. Proposed project for Guggenheim East River Lower Manhattan, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, 2000
[Photo online at http://www.guggenheim.org/new_guggenheim/index.html]
4. Casa Mila, Barcelona, Spain. Antoni Gaudi, 1910. [Postcard]
5. Wassily Kandinsky, “Composition V,” 1911. Oil on canvas, 190 x 275 cm. Private Collection
[Online at http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/]
STRANGE. Restless. Graceful. Muscular. Exuberant. Serene. Riotous. Poetic . . . all these things and more, the increasingly daring sculptural form making of Frank Gehry’s extraordinary architecture has taken the public imagination by storm.
Cities and institutions around the globe clamor for their own variation of Bilbao—the dazzling Guggenheim Museum completed several years ago in northern Spain (fig. 1). Chicago will soon get one. Seattle just did: the tough-minded Experience Music Project (fig. 2). Edgy, complex, and multifarious, part of it billows like a tablecloth in a Cézanne still-life, mettalized, then enlarged, warped, and torqued in order that its fractal surface might provide shelter from the banalities of the everyday world.
Ideally, New York, a metropolis that has contributed surprisingly little to the built record of the avant-garde, will also see a Gehry project added to its aesthetic landscape --- in the form of the proposed Guggenheim Museum on the East River in Lower Manhattan (fig. 3). (See http://www.guggenheim.org/new_guggenheim/index.html.)
Gehry’s buildings signify the emergence of an advanced free-form hyper-complexity, where sophisticated aerospace software, as well as in-house aerospace engineers, are required to realize the design and manufacturing of heretofore-unrealizable forms. Architecture without limits—creative, technological, and economic.
His isn’t the only progressive architecture being produced today. But Gehry has almost single-handedly advanced the art of CAD-CAM (Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing) in architecture to futuristic levels. Moreover, like a deus ex machina, his powerful form making has released architecture, at least symbolically, from literal-minded contextualism, artistic mediocrity, and a love affair with the past.
It is as if we are now being treated to what might have been accomplished early in the last century if Antoni Gaudi—the Spanish master of baroque, wavy, fluid built-form—were to have had a computer.
Gaudi’s work and that of contemporaneous avant-garde painters before World War I would be a good place to look, I believe, for the antecedents of Gehry’s expressive digital-age formal vocabulary. While Gaudi was working in Barcelona on his curvilinear masterpiece, Casa Mila (1906-1910) (fig. 4), Picasso and Braque were developing Cubism in Paris. They invented collage in 1912, and the spirit of Cubist collage, if not the angular aesthetic of Cubism per se, underlies Gehry’s architecture.
Also working then was the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, the leading non-Cubist trailblazer on the road to abstraction.
Kandinsky was among those painters and architects for whom music was the supreme art. Music uses an abstract language to express feelings. Its power is visceral. Kandinsky wanted the same thing for painting: To use color, line, and form not to represent the external world but to express the "internal nature" of art. To stir the hearts of viewers in profound, spiritual ways. Wagner, Scriabin, and Schoenberg, the atonal Viennese composer, at least as much as Cézanne and Matisse, were the fountainheads of his art.
Schoenberg's new musical ideas emphasized what Russian Formalist literary theorist Victor Schlovsky would later (c. 1917) define as defamiliarizing, strange-making devices, such as strange sounds, melodic-rhythmic tensions, disruptive cadences, unresolved dissonances, and formal complexities. "Composition V” (fig. 5) is one in a series of “compositions” and “improvisations” that reflects Kandinsky’s interest in these artistic devices. It was painted the same year, 1911, that his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Schoenberg's book Theory of Harmony were published. (See “Kandinsky: Compositions," by Magdalena Dabrowski.)
A high-contrast polychromatic landscape of whimsical curvilinear contours and amorphous irresolute shapes—squiggly, restless, free-form, and syncopated—Kandinsky's painting isn’t entirely liberated from associations with representational subject matter, such as foliage, hills, valleys, and clouds. It hasn’t escaped the conventions of traditional, illusionist space. Diminution and spatial recession from foreground to background are apparent. But these traditional phenomena are downplayed in favor of descriptive ambiguity and emotive ebullience.
Kandinsky’s musical expressions in paint helped liberate visual form and unleash a revolution in the plastic arts that still resonates today, as Gehry’s work attests. Gehry is a master-builder of inhabitable Kandinskys—ninety years delayed. Forms first expressed in two-dimensional paint have been given three-dimensional life through the solid elements of construction. This isn’t unique. From at least the Renaissance, painting has presaged aesthetic expressions in architecture.
“What I am after, above all, is expression,” wrote Henri Matisse in 1908. That is what Kandinsky and Gaudi were after. And it is what Gehry is after, too. His buildings represent untrammeled expression, unfettered freedom.
Sometimes they evoke the biomorphic forms of Nature. Gehry likes fish, especially their shimmering scaly skins, which he transposes to titanium. He also apparently likes flora. Seen from above, the Guggenheim Lower Manhattan is like a flower—a symmetrical arrangement with pistil and petals, in full bloom, on a lily pad (fig. 6). Seen at eye level, the metallic ribbons (fig. 7) evoke clouds and cyclotronic Mobius strips. It's like Gehry has cloned Wright's original Guggenheim Museum (figs. 8 & 9), transported it to Lower Manhattan, turned it inside out, so that the interior spiral ramps form the exterior surface of the new museum, then sent 50,000 volts of electricity through it causing the whole contraption to morph into Bloomingdale's gift wrap.
