Building Art
The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger, a full-fledged critical biography of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time.
“Fascinating. . . . An informative, startling journey into the inner sanctums of modern architecture’s power structure.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Riveting. . . . Full of little-known facts about the Pritzker Prize-winner that will surprise the most knowledgable Gehry-philes.” —Architectural Digest
Goldberger follows Gehry from his humble origins—the son of working-class Jewish immigrants in Toronto—to the heights of his extraordinary career. He explores Gehry’s relationship to Los Angeles, a city that welcomed outsider artists and profoundly shaped him in his formative years. He surveys the full range of his work, from the Bilbao Guggenheim to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A. to the architect’s own home in Santa Monica, which galvanized his neighbors and astonished the world. He analyzes his carefully crafted persona, in which an amiable surface masks a driving ambition. And he discusses his use of technology, not just to change the way a building looks, but to revolutionize the very practice of the field.
Comprehensive and incisive, Building Art is a sweeping view of a singular artist—and an essential story of architecture’s modern era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Goldberger (Why Architecture Matters) finds no conflict between avant-garde aesthetics and practical buildings in this appreciative biography of celebrated architect Frank Gehry. Gehry's low-key personality makes him a dull presence compared to his flamboyant designs. His early infatuation with grungy plywood and chain-link fencing as decorative elements led to the mature style of his acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a flagrantly non-Euclidean assemblage of warped, crumpled, billowing shapes sheathed in metal. The book's drama comes from the struggle to superimpose these buildings over the misgivings of clients, civil engineers, and nonplussed neighbors. Goldberger defends Gehry against charges of being a capricious artiste foisting abstract sculpture on a baffled world; he paints the architect as a down-to-earth sort who designs eminently functional buildings that respond to their surroundings, exhibit continuity with the past, and embrace Earthlings despite looking like crashed spaceships. He contextualizes Gehry's work with smart discussions of trends in Modernism and the Los Angeles art scene that inspired such trends, and offers his usual shrewd, evocative insights into the look and feel of buildings. Still, his apologia may not shake the reader's impression that Gehry's designs are more self-conscious than organic studied attempts to blow people's minds with weird-looking structures. Photos.
