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As Hal Foster, one of Gehry’s sharpest critics, would say “his beginnings were humble enough, and he has retained a rumpled sort of everyman persona.” Born in Toronto in 1929, Frank Gehry moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Southern California in 1954, and studied City Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. After periods at Harvard, in Paris, and with various architectural firms, he established his own enterprise Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1962. In subsequent years Gehry has built an architectural career that has spanned four decades and produced public and private buildings in America, Europe and Asia. “Influenced primarily by Richard Neutra, the Austrian émigré who also practiced in the area, Gehry gradually turned a modernist idiom into a funky sort of LA vernacular.” He did so mostly in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building like exposed plywood, corrugated metal siding, chain-link fencing, and asphalt. Gehry became known as an architect at the end of the seventies and his “image was that of the pioneer, the free spirit who takes it upon himself to invent a new architecture.” In his vocabulary he rejected the formal purities of modern architecture. Instead he preferred fragmentary architecture, sequence of autonomous pieces to each of which he assigned use. He burst open modernist architecture’s “abstract boxes, and plunged the rearranged fragments into the everyday ground of Southern California life.” His first landmark was his own house in Santa Monica (1977–1978); he redesigned it again in 1991.
Over the course of a nearly forty-year career Gehry has developed an iconoclastic vocabulary of architecture. Throughout his career he has experimented with not only the unusual materials that would become a hallmark of his aesthetic, but also with the modernist grid that he would eventually jettison completely in order to destroy the architectural box in favor of a more organic and plastic expression. Over years Gehry’s buildings have become curvy and, as art critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued, Gehry’s designs have moved “from straight lines to no straight lines at all, and from a very clear set of opposition between vertical and horizontal to a grouping of forms in which the distinction between roof and wall has been obviated, or blurred, or otherwise suspended or deferred.” His projects, after the success of Bilbao, show a continuous attempt of the architect to capture motion with an ever expanding vocabulary of forms. During the 1980s Gehry increasingly introduced eccentric collections of forms rather than adhering to formal architectural principles and his work has become what can be best described as sculptural architecture. In his signature designs, that also mark the second stage of his professional development, “architecture departs from a static reality to become a palpitating body. In this way, Gehry, liberated from the repertoire of preexisting forms, transforms himself into what he so much wanted to be, an inventor of forms.”
Inventor of Forms in the Architecture of Chaos
“I like the shaping that I could do when I am sketching. And when I was doing it, it never occurred to me I would do that in a building. The first thing I built of anything like that was Vitra.” In describing Gehry's buildings there is a tendency to employ art terms – sculpture, collage, installation, assemblage – because "building" just does not cover it. Gehry's love of architecture is about the process: the conceptualizing and mark-making and model-building, and that's what comes across in the final results. It's a rare story about Gehry's work that isn't accompanied by his wildly gestural sketches in place of the usual rigid, mathematical plans. The sketches are beguiling in their seeming lack of representation of anything other than the mysteries of Gehry's own imagination. Without the corresponding models and photos of the finished product, many would be indiscernible as buildings. But a story about Gehry is incomplete without them.
In respect to the gestural freedom of architect’s sketches, Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am Rhein, Germany (1987–1989) marks an important turn in his career where it is possible to observe, as Moneo has put it, a peculiar vision of the meaning of a unitary, continuous architecture, making it the key project in Gehry’s career. Vitra could be regarded as an important reference that reflects the continuum of development of Gehry’s further work. In this first European commission, Gehry was asked to create a unified plan for a factory building that would sit adjacent to Nicholas Grimshaw's 1981 factory, as well as a small museum to house company CEO Rolf Fehlbaum's collection of approximately two hundred Modern and contemporary chairs. The resulting design departed from the disparate layering of geometries and informal materials common to Gehry's southern California structures and evidenced a shift toward more organically sculptural forms. The angularity of his previous structures was replaced by the use of a curve, Baroque arcs and gentle spirals, implying collective movement – as if responding to the dynamic nature of the manufacturing center. In this first signature building, Gehry as if attempts “to dissolve the distinction between inside and out. He wants it to be impossible to make such a distinction in his architecture, and shows us that it is possible to build a reality in which exterior, appropriating movement, and the interior insisting on continuity and unity, are reflections of one and the same thing: an undefinable, fluid space.”
Gehry compares his signature design with the chaotic nature of life: “Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising. Buildings should reflect that.” Employing sensuous curves, myriad volumes, and surprising materials and forms, his architecture challenges the viewer to figure out exactly how the building works. This has created quite heated debate among Gehry’s critics who argue that by creating functionless forms and extra formal volume his buildings just waste structural resources. But this probably is the charm of Gehry’s designs – he practices “a regulated chaos, creating a realm in which buildings do unexpected things like swoop and sail but still function sensibly as habitable spaces.” In this regard, his attraction to the fish shape has played an important role, too. For Gehry, the fish represents perfection of form – sleek and elegant, its free movement is symbolic of creative energy. He repeatedly returns to the fish imagery. Literal representations of fish recur in his colossal fish sculptures, lamps, skylights, and other elements. Fish forms are also suggested in less tangible ways – in fluid curves, shimmering skins, and flashing movements. For him fish is a nature’s flawless blend of form and function, which, when translated in his designs, results in a sensually aesthetic polyphony of forms merged with function. Gehry’s architecture celebrates not just functionality or an aggressive, intensive use of space, exaggerating architectures servitude to the function. In his work aesthetic form and the artistic quality of the building prevail over the function – “his work as if does not belong to the conventional built realm: [..] he does not want his works to be taken for buildings. He would like them to be seen as something else. [..] the permanence of his buildings, their duration in time, comes from their being considered works of art.”
Artist in Architecture
"[..] Gehry’s is an architecture dominated by sculptural and visual qualities, even picturesque ones if you will.” Because of this reason, when talking about his designs, Gehry oftentimes have been referred to as an artist instead of architect. In the interview with a designer and brand architect Peter Arnell, Gehry has clearly expressed his standpoint about this assumption: “I am an architect. I get that a lot because I have hung around with a lot of artists and I am very close to a lot of them. I am very involved in their work: I think a lot of my ideas have grown out of it, and that there has been some give and take. So sometimes I get called an artist. I want to say I am an architect. My intention is to make architecture.” Gehry, however, works as an artist in architecture and through his work he has managed to change an image of a very conservative field. Contemporary artist Ed Ruscha has noted that “he mixes the free spirit of art with something that is really concrete and unforgiving, which is the laws of physics.” For Gehry form is not something closed and perfect: “Few architects are farther away from the Platonic ideal than Gehry. With Gehry there is no preliminary idea, there is no vision of what the construction will be. A building is the evolution through time of what originated as a dialogue between primary, elemental shapes.” From aesthetic stand point, he could be compared to a contemporary cubist sculptor who uses shapes and forms unlike anyone else has ever used them in the structure of a building. Starting from the end of the 1980s, his buildings more and more are blurring the line between sculpture and architecture. Also in practice he works like a sculptor, preferring to go straight to the point, to the architecture, to the ultimate reality, skipping the intermediate rung of representation – like floor plans, sections, and axonometries: “through deliberately imprecise sketches, he intuits what the masses of his building will be, and proceeds to construct the model.” And then the play with the models begins until the satisfactory result has been achieved. The architect also compares his structures with paintings: “Since the building ultimately is a surface, it eventually has something to do with painting. But I have never been able to achieve what in my mind is a painterly surface.”
Gehry’s well-known sympathy for the visual arts has inspired museum designs that demonstrate a deep respect for the artworks these buildings contain, no matter how provocative they may be as architecture. Frederick Weisman Museum of Art and Teaching Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis was his first commission for a public art museum which Gehry received in 1990. The design of the museum clearly demonstrates his artistic approach. High on the eastern bank of the Mississippi river he has created beautifully sculptural volumes clad in stainless steel. A seemingly random gathering of Cubist forms, including sliced cones and cylinders, adorns the west façade, which is in fact, a true façade: behind the stainless steel contortions lies a pragmatic, rectilinear building. University administrators claimed that they did not want “another brick lump” and, as the director of the museum Lyndel King explains: “We wanted a building that would be distinguished, that would have character, that would be symbolic for the university, and that would give the museum a strong identity. I think this building has achieved all of those.”
Supported by sturdy legs reminiscent of tree trunks, a stainless steel canopy shelters the main entrance to the museum. Beyond the museum’s brushed stainless steel panels are innovative yet highly functional gallery spaces, which are radically different from the anonymous boxes typical of museum architecture. Austere white walls are topped with geometric details of partially revealed trusses, and ceilings are punctuated by curvilinear slices, revealing skylights that permit natural light to bathe the interior. These striking elements complement the Modern and contemporary art housed inside. King remembers that during the designing process of the museum “Gehry’s opinion was that the interior spaces should have a strong architectural character, that it should not be a totally neutral white box. He believed that the added architectural character will not necessarily compete with the art work in the museum. There has to be a balance. We also new that he would never design a gallery space that would compete with the works of art."
Design, Art and Technology
Gehry’s buildings raise the question of how he as an architect work? How are these peculiar ideas rendered into three-dimensional space and structurally sound buildings? The answer to these questions goes back to 1987 when the impulse behind the Vitra design and the limitations that Gehry’s firm discovered during the course of the project initiated the search for a computerized solution to engineering complexities. A computer program called CATIA (Computer Assisted Three-dimensional Interactive Application), the software that had been developed in the late 1980s by French aeronautic engineers for use in building fighter jets, rescued Gehry’s less buildable designs from oblivion. The search for an appropriate software and hardware package was driven by the need to assist manufacturers and contractors in building his structures quickly and economically. The colossal Fish Sculpture at Vila Olimpica, located in Barcelona’s 1992 Olympic Village, was a landmark in the history of Frank O. Gehry & Associates, inaugurating the firm's use of computer-aided design and manufacturing. “CATIA has given life to Gehry’s more fanciful projects, allowing him to transform the products of his imagination into physical reality.” For Gehry the software was not needed as a design or presentation tool, but rather as a tool for facilitating production. Since the architect himself does not use the program, the system was ideal in that it allowed the firm to continue working in physical models and at the same time described to contractors how to build the unique structures, demystifying the material behavior, surface geometries, and structural principles of complex curves. Once Gehry is pleased with his scale model, it is scanned into the computer, tracing the forms with a laser stylus. The program then interprets the scan as a three-dimensional computer image, mapping each surface in detail and refining the design and engineering. Gehry’s partner and software specialist Jim Glymph admits that “the program emboldened Frank to go further. He could actually be more sculptural with more confidence and accuracy,” as well as it allowed him to explore more of the shapes and geometry of the building. The buildings in the years that followed reflect this freedom, and are among his most famous: the Frederic R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Experience Music Project in Seattle.
Design, Art and Economy: Spectacle of Capitalism or Cultural Capital?
Gehry’s most famous building to date, the Guggenheim Bilbao, is probably also one of the most controversial structures that has ever been built for the arts in the 20th century. "Time Magazine" has described it as “The Building of the Century”. And it is true. The Guggenheim has achieved the level of fame rare for a piece of architecture. Since the conception of the idea, it has experienced abundance of coverage – both positive and negative. It continues to be a topic of interest in the architecture community, where it is applauded for its sweeping façade, fundamental eccentricity, and undeniable presence. The museum encompasses 27,621 m² and is clad in gleaming titanium panels that change color with the shifting light. Sensuous forms curve and rise in a multitude of directions, resulting in a building that functions like a colossal piece of sculpture. Though metal cladding has long been a hallmark of the architect's work, the museum represents his first use of titanium. In searching for a metal finish that was responsive to changing light conditions, titanium's reflective qualities were found to be ideal.
In his design, Gehry has invented a condition of the ectoplasmic in which “the mass of the building becomes so complicated by its surface to the point where it seems more appropriate to describe it as movements than as volumes.” One can see this in the Bilbao Guggenheim, where sculptural mass is ordered by movement intensified by reflection. This project allowed Gehry to refine and polish the role that the computer had begun to have in his work – the fluidity of forms that could be noticed in his last works, which had been clearly evident since Vitra, was here brought to fruition, resulting in a free sculpture of curvaceous metal-clad forms. With this building the gestural quality of Gehry’s sketches was captured in built form for the first time. The Norwegian architect Sverre Fenh has described the building exactly as “a sketch, an instant sketch that has been realized. I am very moved by the freedom of creation and the freedom of poetry built into the creation.”
The museum resides comfortably on the industrial riverfront of the 700 year old city and the idea to shape the gigantic gallery wing like a boat was Gehry’s response to the river Nervion. The other side, more fragmented and covered with stone, appears more in scale with the city. “The whole thing is about fitting the building into Bilbao. So for me it is about the imagery of the river and the imagery of the city,” admits the architect. The museum is accessible through a lobby that leads to a dramatic 50-meter-high atrium, one and a half times the height of the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York. The atrium, which Gehry has nicknamed “The Flower” because it culminates in a series of angled geometrical shapes, serves as the organizing center for the entire museum. Glass-covered elevators and staircases cling to its walls, while balconies on the second and third floors lead to the more traditional spaces. The building departs from the supposed neutrality of the conventional white cube of museum architecture. Instead, three distinct types of exhibition space were designed to accommodate installations of contemporary art as well as rectilinear galleries for the presentation of easel painting and traditional sculpture. Relatively conservative design of the galleries that host the permanent collection here contrasts with more dramatic exhibition spaces designed to meet the needs of temporary collection and exhibitions of works of selected living artists.
As Jason Miller notes, “the realization of Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao design was a triumph not only of imagination but of technology” and, according to Rafael Moneo, the creation of this museum was also an opportunity for Gehry to prove that the program established at Vitra was applicable to a large scale work. But there was more to it. By reflecting chaotic, dangerous, and surprising aspects of life his buildings are reflecting something more tangible as well. Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao could be attributed to one of the key structures that indicate important recent changes in the cultural status of architecture and design in the West. Art critic Hal Foster, when reviewing Gehry’s achievements, has noted that this change “points to the new centrality of architecture in cultural discourse” and in strategic city planning and development. This collaborative project between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Basque Government, was conceived exactly as part of an economic redevelopment plan for the largest city in the Basque Country. As "The New York Times" had pointed out right before the big opening event, the conception story of this mega-structure was quite typical – full of economic calculations, charges of elitism, and populist jargon: “At first, many local taxpayers balked at the idea of their money being spent on what was called a “pharaonic” project. Local artists argued that the money should go to, well, local artists; opposition politicians said the money could be better used for schools and hospitals; newspapers warned that local culture would be controlled by an “imperialist” American foundation that was being paid a huge sum for the privilege.” Basque Government, however, argued that, after a grim 15 years in which the closing of steel plants, shipyards and port facilities had swollen unemployment, the museum would serve as both engine and symbol of economic revival and urban renewal. It also appealed to Basque nationalist pride, promising that a world-class museum showing the best of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's collection and drawing perhaps 500,000 visitors a year would put the city on the map. Culture has often been built up as a potential catalyst of regeneration, in urban and rural settings. But does it really have the ability to spark meaningful long-term social and economic renewal? There are some well-known instances where major cultural destination projects have been established to achieve exactly this aim. Bilbao City Government “asked for the Sydney Opera House. They said we want a building that does for Bilbao what the Sydney Opera House does for Australia, and I looked at him and I said okay,” remembers the architect. And he did. Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and most of performance and exhibition spaces that were built after it illustrate that architectural symbolism and a sense of place are more important than the content of a museum.
After balancing out the cost and the gain of this investment, it looks the Bilbaoans seem finally persuaded, even satisfied. 100 million dollars were spent, but, as the annually applied economic impact analysis that Guggenheim Museum started in 1998 clearly demonstrates already after three years of operation, museum had generated economic benefits that reached six or seven times its initial investment cost. It is estimated that in 2007, the museum’s economic impact on the local economy was worth 243 million euros. As a consequence of the expenditure made by visitors to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, wealth of more than 220 million euros GDP was generated, with additional revenues for the Basque Treasuries of nearly 30 million euros, contributing to maintain 4,399 jobs that year. And, in addition to 30,5763,515 euros spent inside the museum, visitors spent much larger sums in the city on accommodation (48 million euros), catering (96 million euros), shopping (31 million euros), transport (14 million euros), and leisure (23 million euros).
As Hal Foster notes, “to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle culture today, you have to make a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.” For the movers and shakers of Los Angeles, Gehry certainly was the man who could provide the big splash. Walt Disney Concert Hall is another example that illustrates the architectural symbolism as a contemporary trend in city planning. Conceived in 1987, the project experienced a long and controversial history that happily came to an end in October 2003. The project came close to collapse from 1994 to 1996. Spiraling costs, poor management, disagreements over the complex design and California's troubled economy led to a halt in construction. "By 1996 this project was dead, ready to be buried," said Eli Broad, the billionaire businessman and philanthropist and a top power broker in the city, who helped salvage it. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is Gehry's most ambitious project in Los Angeles to date. Like many of Gehry's larger public structures, the hall is intended to establish a sense of place. This is accomplished not only by the extensive gardens and outdoor performance spaces, but also by the building's distinctive design. In the years since Gehry was awarded the project, its design has undergone considerable revisions, including an evolution from a stone exterior to the current iteration in fluid stainless steel. Like Guggenheim in Bilbao the hall is a part of project aimed at revitalizing Los Angeles’ downtown area or giving it downtown it never had. This 230 million dollar worth structure – home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic – is a “crown jewel” project in transforming Grand Avenue into a more culturally vibrant and dynamic city center. According to an economic impact study, the revitalized area will generate more than $85 million annually in local, county and state taxes, and the redevelopment will generate nearly $809 million in annual revenue.
Design of the project had three principal objectives: to provide the best possible acoustical environment for the orchestra and to create the closest possible connection between the audience and the musicians; to create a visionary building reflecting the culture, character, and climate of Los Angeles, open and hospitable to a culturally diverse population; and to create a powerful relationship between the new building and existing cultural venues already there. It looks that Mr. Gehry succeeded again. His design for the concert hall provides striking evidence of his commitment to creating functional buildings that serve his clients and their required architectural program. His design produced an auditorium that is shaped like a convex box – bowed in the middle and raised on either end - a structure tailored to convey orchestral sound as effectively as possible. Clad entirely in wood, the 2,300 seat auditorium recalls the warm surfaces of a violin. The movement in the surfaces of the auditorium crescendos in the building’s exterior, where the boxy hall is enveloped by a stainless-steel wrapper that flutters and swoops around its perimeter. It looks that in his building Gehry has managed to capture the specific “body language” of Los Angeles, intuitively depicting its perpetual transformation, its ever changing and diverse character where fixed terms of reference do not exist.
“If the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a rebellious teenager, Gehry’s recent Experience Music Project (EMP) (1995–2000) in Seattle is its extroverted cousin. In creating a sense of a place, the museum in Bilbao drew worldwide attention to a city that had declined in tandem with the industries that had provided its economic base. But the EMP – dedicated to the history and celebration of popular music – attains spectacular new heights in this regard, unprompted by any need to be put on a map.” Set among the remnants of the 1962 World’s Fair, Gehry’s building had a challenge of an altogether different kind. Here it is competing for attention in the carnivalesque setting – the amusement park just outside its entrance. The EMP had to fit in with its peers while simultaneously trying to stand out from the crowd.
The EMP derives its name from the Jimi Hendrix experience. The client approached Gehry to design a "swoopy" building. In his design, the architect has captured the vibrancy of the subject while also reflecting the cacophony of the Seattle Center and the neighboring amusement park. The EMP's exterior – with its exuberant forms and vibrant colors – communicates the program of the exhibitions inside. An existing monorail that sweeps through the building to the Seattle Center enhances the sense of movement that has long been a hallmark of Gehry's work. The curved forms were sparked by the client's admiration for the horse-head shaped conference center at the DG Bank Building (1995–2001) in Berlin, and grew out of the architect's experiments with broken guitar pieces. The allusion to a shattered Fender Stratocaster is carried through in a glass sculpture that rides the crest of the building, suggesting the strings and frets of a guitar neck as well as the roller coaster nearby. The EMP’s skin is a story in itself and also demonstrates the potential for color in Gehry’s works. The exterior palette contains a number of musical references: blue for a Fender guitar, bead-blasted gold for a Les Paul, and of course, mirrored purple as a visual ode to Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”. The vibrant exterior is clad in some 21,000 pieces of stainless steel and aluminum whose outlines and random configurations are computer generated. The result is a rhythmic presence that introduces the musical history explored within the building.
This 13,020 m² structure, which carried a $100 million dollar price tag, is made up of six separate exhibit and public spaces that fit together like a three-dimensional puzzle. The data of economic impact analysis speak for itself. Since EMP opened in 2000, it has welcomed more than 3.7 million visitors through its doors. From its museum planning stages in 1998 through 2006, EMP has been a key economic driver among Seattle non-profit arts and culture organizations, with institutional expenditures and audience-member spending resulting in $545 million dollars of local economic impact.
In building exhibition and performance venues that have drawn people from all around the world at unprecedented levels, the impact of Gehry’s exhibition spaces resonate with a reversed version of Guy Debord definition of spectacle, which is ‘capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image’. With Gehry the reverse is now true as well: “Spectacle is an image accumulated to such a degree that it becomes capital. Such is the logic of many cultural centers today, designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate ‘revival’ of the city…” Although this Hal Foster’s criticism is quite true, it is also unfair and emphasizes just one side of the coin. Civic cultural engagement according to his theoretical calculations gets “0” gain in this sublime spectacle of design and architecture, making Gehry’s cultural centers appear just as sites of spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe, and as precursors and stimulants of corporate renewal. By being too critical, however, we should not completely eliminate the accumulation of considerable cultural capital and the revival that these places create around themselves. In this regard, Gehry’s museum in Bilbao along with the Disney Concert Hall and EMP are already classical examples with well established developmental plans for both economic and cultural capitals. Two of his university campus projects in this regard could be mentioned as successful examples representing considerably smaller scale. They are two university campus projects: already mentioned Frederick Weisman Museum of Art and Teaching Museum at the University of Minnesota and Performing Arts Centers at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Housing a performance theater and small teaching theater, Performing Arts Center at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson (1999–2003) references the continuum of Gehry's previous work. The design employs the undulating forms and reflective surfaces typical of the architect's recent large-scale projects. A dramatic canopy, formed of a layer of brushed stainless steel, shelters the entrance to the main theater, while soft billows of steel wrap around the exterior of the entryway. The smaller theater is also roofed in curved brushed steel. Despite these artistic flourishes, which visually mark the building as a cultural hub for the campus, the structure is appropriately humble in other aspects of its design. Covering the building in plaster and concrete, Gehry revisited his early emphasis on simple materials, and his ongoing interest in obtaining an unfinished aesthetic is captured in the exposed support system of the spectacular canopy, which is visible from inside the lobby and beneath the canopy itself. The center's simple construction and intimate size create a sensibility that is entirely fitting to the campus and its rural setting. "The New Yorker" has called the center as what may be the best small concert hall in the United States. Inside, the center’s two theaters are structured to accommodate acoustical requirements, with exterior façade serving as a mask for the predetermined interior forms. Each theater was planned to fulfill specific performance needs: to accommodate complex lighting and scenery, to provide the flexibility needed for diverse types of performance, and to enhance the rapport between performers and audience. The two theaters are simple in design to ensure that the focus will remain on the performance. The lobby is illuminated by skylight that permeates the steel cladding, and it is intended that this area might also function as an amphitheater for small lectures or performances.
The two campus projects should be mentioned particularly in regard to missing civic engagement that the critics of his design spectacles are often leaving out. President of Dutchess County Arts Council Benjamin Krevolin, when talking about the economic impact of the Performing Arts Center at Bard College, along with the more tangible developments of cultural tourism, revival of nearby businesses, hotels and restaurants, particularly stressed the building’s important impact on the civic engagement and the revival of local art community. The Gehry designed Fisher Center has complimented other regional arts organizations and therefore has helped the Arts Council to brand the region as an area with a concentration of world-class contemporary art and quality arts programming: the center “is having a positive impact on tourism, as well as on the general cultural awareness of local residents. Gehry’s building has an impact as a destination but the wider impact is created by the community leveraging the world's interest in this innovative architecture and building connections to other cultural assets.”
The director of Frederick Weisman Museum of Art and Teaching Museum at the University of Minnesota Lyndel King also has expressed similar sentiments, emphasizing museums role in building people’s awareness of the Mississippi river as a scenic and cultural importance that contrasts the usual assumption of the river as an industrial potential. After the museum was built on the banks of the river, new cultural and business developments started to appear along the Mississippi. “We can take credit for being the first building to very consciously say – we are on the Mississippi river, we are cultural building, we are going to make something of the scenic potential of the river. After us other buildings in the city started to do the same.” The museum could be seen as a catalyst of both economic stimulation and a new socio-cultural awareness.
When talking about the spectacle character of Gehry’s designs, the question about the balance between the outer form and the content inside comes to mind. “He has delivered the goods too quickly; he has given his clients too much what they want – sublime space that overwhelms the viewer, spectacular image that can circulate through the media and around the word as brand.” Matter of whether the architecture will overwhelm, swallow the art is a question? According to Gehry, “The building has to have wonderful art but it also has to be a draw,” and this is a part of the architect’s mandate for the buildings that are dedicated for the arts. In this regard, Lyndel King has a well founded argument emphasizing the relationship between the exterior design and the inside content as a balancing act: “It is not something that we can blame the architect for. It is our responsibility as museum directors and programmers – we have to make sure that what we, as museums, do – is as exciting as the building. We have to make sure that what we do in the inside is as stimulating as the architecture is on the outside. I want the visitors to remember what they saw inside as much as what they saw outside. Yes, the architect delivered that sublime experience, but I see it as a positive challenge to me. You have to have a program that is strong.” Foster’s criticism makes Gehry sound like a Walmart-friendly tool of the capitalist superstate: ‘the Bilbao effect’, has ‘spawned a fierce demand for similar feats by contemporary architects worldwide’. Definitely, Gehry is a brand – a brand symbolizing not just inflated, spectacular spectatorship or touristic awe, but also rich cultural engagement and innovative programming of the institutions that his buildings house. It is a brand that requires competitive content that should live up to the standards of his designs. Let’s be fair and flip both sides of the coin.
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