Attention L.A.: FREE Frank Gehry Lecture this Weekend!
I received this notice from Flavorpill today and first of all I just LOVE Shana’s writing. What an clever paragraph. It’s so much better than the standard event announcement:
Steve Martin famously said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture; tonight at the Hammer, audiences finally get to see that idea (almost) in action, as unpredictable architect Frank Gehry has it out with Bard College president and renowned classical-music scholar/conductor Leon Botstein, who commissioned Gehry to design Bard’s performing-arts center in 1996. Expect an entertaining chat about the progressive relationship between architects and cultural institutions, how to deal with large-room acoustics, and what they really think of the new LACMA down the street. - Shana Nys Dambrot
This will be a free lecture this Sunday at 2:00 p.m. at The Hammer Museum in L.A and it should be fantastic. While in hot demand all over the world now, Frank Gehry has had his longest and most significant design relationship with L.A. over any other city. Furthermore, he has been crafting relationships between music and architecture for many years. He redesigned The Hollywood Bowl shell in 1970 and again in 1980, The Walt Disney Concert Hall in 1989, and The Experience Music Project in 1999. I’d love to know what he was listening to while designing each project.
Regarding the Bard Performing Arts Center project, it is a great example of starchitect* vs. preservation. I remember my professor Will Riley discussing this project in my landscape preservation class. The interesting part was trying to preserve the landscape of The Hudson River School Movement, and how a Gehry building doesn’t exactly fit in with Washington Irving’s home. A controversy erupted over site selection and planning, and another site that Gehry liked even better was chosen for the center. Let me give you a visual - you can’t really put this…
…on a cliff overlooking something like this…
Storm on the River King by Samuel Coleman, 1886
…and preserve the feel of the landscape above! There were other environmental concerns as well, but I can’t seem to remember any of them, and the chances of me finding a grad school notebook are not good.
Before Gehry became the modern day king of all major starchitects (I suppose I would date that around the time The Guggenheim in Bilbao was completed), he was always interested in building materials and using them in unexpected ways, and creating unexpected forms. Though Bilbao is absolutely brilliant, I think my favorite it still his whacked-out house in Santa Monica:
I heard a rumor awhile back that this house was on the endangered list. Does anyone know what the status of it is now?
Bard Performing Arts Center photos by Hugh Pearman for The New York Times. For more gorgeous Pearman photos of this building, click here.
The Gehry House photo from greatbuildingsonline.
