Festival dell'architettura

The work of Frank O. Gehry gives the chance to meet a rich universe of alternative compositional techniques than those of the architects of the ‘900. The Californian architect, with his ironic dimension, caricature, anti-classical, talks about an alternative way of presenting the architectural object in the city and about an alternative way of understanding “the proper placement of things” and the “choice of the effect of the works”, as evidenced by the large urban building built in Berlin, in one of the most important places of European history.

“If you try to understand my buildings according to the perspective point of view, the structural coherence or formal definitions, certainly you will be disappointed”.

(Frank O. Gehry)

According to some critics, it is difficult to talk about composition, a discipline that requires the rules, in the work of Frank Gehry. And yet, if the composition is an activity, you can find ways, techniques, devices, the internal laws of the architect uses.

The repertoire of the operations of composition is essentially based on the principles set by the classic treatise, among which also ranks the Vitruvian, then endorsed by French neoclassicism: the hierarchy between the parties, symmetry, perspective perception of space, harmonious relations in the sizes of bodies, distance, pace. We can hardly argue that this repertoire is still in the arts and architecture of the twentieth century, who have gained a new awareness of reality, new intentions, a new way of doing. They were beaten paths independent from time to time the research horizon has changed. Or Rem Koolhaas, nor Peter Eisenmann, or Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry make composition in the classical sense of the term. What unites the different trends is the choice to break a coded system and the proposition of a new system of rules. While this has happened in the music, with Schoenberg, through the disappearance of a major and minor, in architecture this trend leads to the abandonment of the perspective space, the symmetry in which “the eye rests” [1].

The “Course of the Knife”

In 1985, at the third International Architecture Exhibition of Venice, directed by Aldo Rossi and entitled “Project Venice”, Frank Owen Gehry is the protagonist, along with Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen and Germano Celant, of a performance called “The Course of the Knife” [2].

In its final version the three actors come near the Arsenal, the theater of representation, aboard a barge shaped like a huge swiss knife. Gehry wearing a brimmed hat in the shape of fish and a huge tympanum on the shoulders, from which dangle soft Doric columns. In the role of Frankie P. Toronto - where the P. was about to Palladio and Toronto for his hometown -, draw their sketches, through an overhead projector, directly on the most important Venetian palaces. Dal Co describes it as “a sort of mannequin of classical, teasing, with some confidence, the language adopted recently by the post-modern, ready for the Carnival of Venice. Playing the part of the joker in the pack of cards of the architecture of the ‘80s, Gehry deplored the pomposity of contemporary design” [3].

This performance is a kind of manifesto for Gehry on the past, as he himself says: “Being in the center of Venice, so close to Palladio - and lots of architecture today refers to Palladio - and speak of disorder, another type of order, is a bit irreverent... Western culture thinks of only one type of order... to symmetry, to classicism, the idea of the central perspective. But the world can not be built only along the axes” [4].

DZ Bank, Berlin (1995-2001)

“I think this is one of my best projects. The prospects are not the result of compromises. This building represents the synthesis of all the impressions and feelings that Berlin gives me” [5].

(Frank O. Gehry)

Design a building on Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate, it means working in a critique urban area, one of the most important in the history of Europe.

Gehry solves the main front by drawing a strict facade of five overlapping orders, covered with large stone slabs of Vicenza. The façade, built as a classical temple, is punctuated by seven openings, deeply set, generating deep shadows and give it thickness and weight, emphasizing the highly tectonic.

As has been noted, “the lack of limits and conclusions is the characteristic feature of this facade, (...) that performs only its indefinite repeatability in a place where every building is disguised as unrepeatable” [6]. His face deliberately incomplete is offered as a “fragment unfriendly, (...) a strident presence compared to everything around him, from the graceful and seemingly educated building facades” [7].

But the reticence of the main front is pure deceit. Behind its “contextual”, carefully constructed, the building hides another story, of which nothing shines outside. In Berlin, city-theater par excellence, Gehry uses the facade like a giant curtain: “Its full and its voids are shadows produced by the folds of velvet. Behind these folds, unlike what happens in many other constructions of the new Berlin, the space undergoes a process of mostrificazione” [8].

The rear elevation of the building, overlooking Behrenstrasse, with a succession of nine floors of apartments, has a completely different character. Its surface, which is also built in Vicenza stone, draws a wavy face that makes the building, at least from a perspective point of view, less imposing. The proportions of both sides are commensurate with the urban area with which each is compared.

The complex is opened at the center in a large courtyard, 61 meters by 20, covered by a huge skylight. At the center of the court, slightly elevated and accessible via six footbridges, a hollow structure externally coated stainless steel, in the shape of “horse head”, hosting the conference room, resting on a glass floor and arched. The four internal fronts, covered with wood, are scanned in five rows, corresponding to those of the facade on Pariser Platz. They appear as real urban fronts bordering a “square” covered.

Composition of three elements

Looking at the next study models is known as the architect assigns a decisive role in the composition of three elements: the conference room; the glass roof that dominates; the floor, which is also glazed.

They are not individually developed: the modification of both causes the modification of the other two, in a concatenation of uninterrupted variants.

“During the competition we placed a sculptural form in the center of the court (...) to show that we wanted to create an element of contrast in the center of the rectangular wooden box (...). The abstract form acquired a presence and a power that was increasing as we eliminated the other elements from the court”.

(Frank O. Gehry)

At the heart of the tensions, the space between the two membranes of glass, appears the sculptural form of the “horse head”, which culminates in the “staging” built by Gehry, director of an amazing theatrical show.

The horse’s head

The shape of the conference hall, 29 meters long, 12 wide and 10 high, was derived from a physical model which was then scanned into a model of three-dimensional surfaces with the CATIA software. Its structure is formed by a sequence of iron beams shaped according to the sections of the volume, arranged at regular intervals of 80 cm and connected by tubular cross-members 10 cm. The images of its construction phases enhance the character and remind osteological large skeletons of ancient animals.

“While this was happening manipulating the shape became more soft and biomorphic. He began to have a presence that was neither animal nor ever expected” [9].

(Frank O. Gehry)

Above the “bones”, the “meat” is formed by thick insulating panels, coated with more than 100 plates three-dimensional curves of stainless steel of about 150x250 cm. It is a nervous tissue in motion, traversed by a tension that culminates in the cavity of the eye, such as a gash inflicted on the right side of the head, caused by the subtraction of a sheet of the coating.

Turning our attention from the object to the architectural space of the court in which it is inserted, it can be seen as Gehry uses the compositional technique that a complex form, when placed in a simple container, increases its expressive power. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine this building without the “horse head” inside. Although from functional point of view would not change much, shapes of the other architectural elements, which are dependent on it, would not have any sense: would not cover neither the floor, whose lines would not find any justification.

An alternative way to present the city the architectural object

The giant bucranium, from Dadaist tone, is a coup de theater, and as such is deliberately ambiguous. It is the unexpected act inside the conventional story of a courtyard building. It’s like an intruder, but becomes the identity of the entire building.

It can express irony to the world of banks, but it can also make sense tied to Judaism, to violence, to cruelty, to a desire for revenge, accentuated by the fact that you are in Berlin.

It is not merely a cosmetic, not only intention provocative, not just the assembly of images found in nature, which then is caricatured. Or, rather, is this. It’s a severed head that breaks the order of the building. A monster (from the Latin “monstrum”, marvel) that, “with its apparent radical gratuity evokes the innumerable monsters of which Berlin tries in vain to break free” [10].

But above all it tells of an alternative way – deeply dialectical, theatrical and full of meanings and interpretations – to present the architectural object in the city, to understand “the proper placement of things” and the “choice of the effect of the work” and to develop the relationship between architecture and the contemporary city.

Notes

1 These considerations are treated in A. Gallo (edited by), The Clinic of Dissection of Art, Marsilio Editori, Venice 2012.

2 The project was born a year before, in 1984, when Celant called the three Americans to conduct a workshop on architecture and art, entitled The Course of the Knife, with students of the Politecnico di Milano. That summer, in New York, the magazine Artforum published the projects performance.

3 F. Dal Co, Kurt W. Forster, H. Soutter Arnold (edited by), Frank O. Gehry. The complete works, Electa, Milan, 1998.

4 G. Celant (edited by), The Course of the Knife. Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, Frank O. Gehry, Random House, New York 1986.

5 F. O. Gehry, Building on Pariser Platz. Considerations on the new Berlin, in Casabella 704, October 2002.

6 F. Dal Co, Frank Gehry: the monsters in Berlin, in Casabella, 691, July-August 2001.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 F. Dal Co, Kurt W. Forster, H. Soutter Arnold (edited by), Op. cit.

10 F. Dal Co, Frank Gehry: I mostri..., cit.

Comments (0)