Quoting Frank Gehry:
"Public buildings deserve to have a certain level of iconicity and personality. Historically, that's what makes them define the cities and communities they're in."
Frank Gehry gets prickly: "It's not just plop". Exclusive interview.
By Hugh Pearman
I'm sitting opposite Frank Gehry over breakfast in an impossibly pretty sunlit town square in Arles, Provence. He's here to launch the plans for his "Parc des Ateliers" project, described as a cultural Utopia. But I'm staring at a set of squiggles he's just drawn in my notebook, and wondering if I should ask him to sign them. He'd reached for a pen, as architects in conversation do, and started sketching away. "I'm doing these pop-up stores for Bono," he explains. "They're for his Product Red company. I'm really excited by them. They're like pieces of jigsaw." >>> Read More
07.25.2008
There's Something About Gehry
New Serpentine Pavilion's fractured design draws crowds
Iwan Baan/Courtesy Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery’s annual foray into temporary architecture has brought Frank Gehry’s first English building to the crowds of Kensington Gardens. The result, a tumbling composition of wood, painted steel, and glass, is the nearest the gallery has got to a pavilion, in the traditional sense, since Zaha Hadid’s take in 2000, which reinvented the marquee tent. After Hadid’s project, the pavilions have become more like buildings, losing the lightness of touch, temporality, and playfulness one might hope to find in London’s famed royal park. >>> Read More
