Frank Gehry, Architect (Guggenheim Museum Publications) - Hardcover

JEAN-LOUIS COHEN, director of the Institut Français d’Architecture in Paris, teaches at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York University.

BEATRIZ COLOMINA teaches at Princeton University.

MILDRED FRIEDMAN, the exhibition curator, also curated the first retrospective of Gehry’s work, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1986.

WILLIAM J. MITCHELL is dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

J. FIONA RAGHEB, editor of the exhibition catalogue, is associate curator for collections and exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Frank Gehry represents a paradox in architecture. Embraced by established financial and cultural institutions, his work is also viewed as avant-garde. Gehry first drew notice with his original use of ordinary materials, then progressed to nonorthogonal undulating forms, often employing a reflective titanium cladding. His highly sculptural buildings develop from lively, fluid sketches and study models that often include crumpled paper. All of this is ably presented in an exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum, for which this publication is the exhibition catalog. The primary didactic materials from the exhibition form the text, supplemented by five important essays: Mildred Friedman writes on the scope of Gehry's career, Beatriz Colomina offers an exhaustive analysis of his Santa Monica house, Cohen examines his urban work, J. Fiona Ragheb provides a comparison of Wright's and Gehry's approaches to form, and William J. Mitchell explains Gehry's dependence on computer-assisted design and modeling. Although the color illustrations are lavish, the photographs of models are poorly resolved, and there are virtually no floor plans. The book complements but does not supersede Francesco Dal Co and Kurt W. Forster's more discerning Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works (Monacelli, 1998); nonetheless, this volume should be acquired by larger architecture collections. Paul Glassman, New York Sch. of Interior Design Lib.
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