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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Notoriety first found Gehry in the early '70s, when his Easy Edges furniture hit the market. The fully functional chairs, stools, tables and one ottoman were life-size squiggles rendered in laminated cardboard and were an instant hit, though for Gehry they were not entirely successful. He wrote in '92 that with the cardboard collection he had set out to create "the Volkswagen of furniture" -- unique, engaging design that would also be economically accessible. But their commercial success made Gehry "a name" and his investor wanted to trade on that name for a higher dollar, including using Gehry himself to advertise the furniture. Gehry, a modest man, was uncomfortable with the P.R. campaign. He told I.D. Magazine that he "was freaked about going on the road and being marketed like Yves Saint Laurent."
Following Easy Edges came Rough Edges. Rugged and more abstract than the original cardboard collection, the Rough Edges pieces were produced in smaller quantities and sold at even higher prices through exclusive galleries.
In 1978, after more than 20 years in the business, Gehry finally got national attention for one of his buildings, ironically, an inexpensive renovation of his own home. Gehry and his current wife, Berta (who is also CFO of Gehry's company), had bought a pink, two-story bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif., and Gehry set out to personalize it using modest, industrial materials. He enclosed the first floor in a corrugated metal sheath that looks from the street like a jagged privacy fence, then expanded the ground floor space out to meet it. He punched miscellaneous windows out of the new wall, and giant shards of glass appear to have collided into the building to form window/skylights with the tilted wood-frame supports left exposed. Concrete blocks retain a small, terraced yard. Concrete steps, a plywood stoop and spare patches of chain-link and white picket fencing all provide accents. Meanwhile, the demure pink second floor with its pristine white trim, brick chimney and black tar paper gambrel roof peeks out above the whole assemblage.
The house (which was further refined in 1991) is still widely influential, as evidenced by the proliferation of corrugated-
The relative fame from his house led to countless commissions, a record-setting number of prizes and eventually another prominent line of furniture: the Gehry Collection by KnollStudio. Gehry detailed the painful process in his 1992 Design Quarterly essay, aptly titled "Up Everest in a Volkswagen." The designs -- several chairs, a table and an ottoman -- evolved out of an invitation a decade earlier from Rolf Fehlbaum, the director of the renowned German furniture company Vitra, to design a chair. Gehry wrote that designing a new chair was like being asked "to find the meaning of life while standing on one foot. It's like a Talmudic question."
Fehlbaum wanted a simple but innovative chair in wood -- a reaction to all the high-tech and ball joints of the '70s -- that could be used as a basic side chair or in cafe settings. Gehry didn't want to just "hang another coat on four legs and a seat." He reflected for a while on wicker furniture and bushel baskets and did some experimenting but quickly gave up on the project. When Knoll approached him in '89, he told them what he'd been through with Vitra. The only way he could see it working was if Knoll would set him up in a workshop similar to that of the mythic husband-wife architect/design team of Charles and Ray Eames, which he fondly recalls visiting in his youth. Knoll took him up on it, and he accomplished everything he'd hoped in reinventing the form.
Named for ice hockey terms (the Cross Check chair, the Hat Trick chair, the Power Play chair), the pieces in the Gehry Collection are made from wafer-thin strips of laminated maple, bent, woven and curled into fluid, featherweight yet sturdy forms. The chairs are variously composed of the strips woven bushel basket-style into a seat with the remaining length of each strip tilted upward to form a seat back or curled back on themselves to form arms or folded down and around to form legs and bases. The table is a round glass-top supported by a conglomeration of bent and curved strips. For the ottoman, Gehry wove the strips into a pillow shape.
Photos (and sketches, of course) of the prototypes quickly found their way into the pages of every design magazine. The Museum of Modern Art popped early production samples into a window display (three months before they were scheduled to debut at the American Craft Museum across the street), instantly elevating them to objet status. They were an instant sensation, and Gehry found himself, once again, pleased with his solution yet disappointed with the price.
But if the idea of reinventing the chair seemed daunting to Gehry, he apparently never felt the same trepidation about the house, the office building or the museum. Gehry's buildings defy classification -- he's a deconstructivist, a modernist, a postmodernist. His early work doesn't prepare you for his mid-career work, which doesn't prepare you for his current work. The sheer number of buildings he has produced is stunning, especially in light of the fact that, even with a staff of 120, he designs each building himself. And his firm is breaking virtual ground as well, pioneering the use of advanced software that allows the engineers to give the contractors more precise mathematical descriptions of whatever amorphic forms Gehry has dreamed up, closing the previously windy gap between design and construction.
