Frank Gehry, Gimmick Artist

From No landGrab

The glass menagerie

Frank Gehry's first New York structure is merely a gimmick molded into an office building

NY Newsday
By Justin Davidson

An underwhelming review of Frank Gehry's IAC building:

Frank Gehry's first New York City building is a minor mood piece, not the sort of rhapsodic extravaganza his adorers are used to. At one time, he had hoped to debut with a bent-metal Guggenheim Museum on the East River; he still plans to stage a full-scale invasion of Brooklyn with an all-Gehry district at Atlantic Yards. Meanwhile, there is this milky hulk on the Hudson, the headquarters of Barry Diller's Internet empire, IAC.
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When the white glass went on, some took it for a temporary protective film. Surely, they thought, it's not always going to look that way?

But it will, and its shape has finally resolved into a disappointment. Instead of being a marvelous mirage, it's only an office building wrapped in a gimmick.

article

NoLandGrab: When Gehry's IAC building is chracterized as a "gimmick" and "milky hulk," it doesn't give Brooklynites confidence that the incredible-hulking 16-tower Atlantic Yards will materialize into anything but a historically dense Gehry-palooza. If Gehry gets it wrong on a small-ish project in Manhattan, it's a "minor mood piece;" if he gets it wrong in Brooklyn, it could be more like a "major tantrum."

The myth is that it wasn't Gehry's idea that he should design the entire Atlantic Yards project, but the aging starchitect didn't have to accept.

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'Gimmick' describes Gehry's entire career. Observe his 1977 house:

The chattering classes at the New York Times and other 'theorists-critics' praise this as, well let me quote "Adhering to the spirit of ad-hocism... Frank Gehry's own house in Los Angeles is rather a collision of parts, built to stay but with a deliberately unfinished, ordinary builderlike sensibility of parts." Yeah, whatever, I know several poorer areas in rural upstate New York that also 'adhere to the spirit of ad-hocism' ....but they are considered 'blighted'.

Even if Gehry's designs were not silly gimmicks, they have reputation of impracticality - one building at a college in Ohio became a hazard during snow falls, another, in Los Angeles, created deadly 140 degree + temperatures...do we really want an aging architect who doesn't think about snow in Ohio or sun in California to design the largest building in Brooklyn, over a major transportation hub? There is a simple mathematical equation you can map out - the closer one is to the project the more they oppose it - the people who are not effected or stand to profit from it, support it. As with the war in Iraq- those who don't have to pay the consequences support it.

I am still flabbergasted that that in an age of concern about oil prices, pollution and terrorism that a throwback to the 'car is the future' early sixties could even be conceived of, let alone supported and funded by the state. Having Gehry as the architect is the represents much of what is wrong with this project- his buildings are among the most environmentally taxing built all show and no substance...just like this project.

What year is it again?