His latest completed building loves Frank O. Gehry so much, he is exactly where his 90. Birthday celebrations: in the Pierre Boulez hall in Berlin. In this case, both intimate and grandiose concert hall is a very atypical Gehry: From the outside you can’t tell the architects. Outside, the neo-classical shell of the former storage building of the Staatsoper. The Drama is interior.

And in the process, Gehry has gone but has always had the reputation to be a master of staging, the staging of buildings, regardless of their place in the urban fabric. This is not so only, but especially, and immovable, since the genius of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with the withered Northern Spanish industrial city in 1997, abruptly, a very popular tourist destination climb. Whether the exhibition halls, “work”, has not asked for the criticism even years later – by the way: you can do it, and quite excellent, but in the cacophony of like a sail billowing facade parts made of a silvery shiny metal is rubbed, the conventional idea of a building scoff at the laws of gravity. Gehry has early and may be used as the very first computer programs from the military aircraft, to find its in conventional mathematical equations can hardly descriptive designs – and to make it feasible. Without computer-aided designs and manufacture of the components had been one of his buildings is not possible. On the one hand. On the other hand, Gehry draws incessantly, and before the Computer is fired up, he has tried on the paper forms and constellations, and in such a way that the seemingly lurching lines come amazing close to what is growing until much later than the building up.

The freedom of southern California

in 1929 in Toronto, Frank Owen Goldberg born architect changed his name in 1954, in the unverfänglichere Gehry, in the year, when he finished his studies of architecture at USC in Los Angeles. He remained in California, built right conventional private houses, and moved with his (Second)family to a house in Santa Monica, which he rebuilt in 1978, with all the world, materials such as corrugated iron, plywood and mesh wire to a Manifesto against geleckte commercial architecture. It’s not entirely true that Gehry’s name first, then number of orders received, in which he could live out his new freedom – he was favored by the liberal climate of southern California, is already on the way there. In his adopted home of Santa Monica, he built a shopping center he had worked after graduation in the case of Victor Gruen, the inventor of this concept – as a huge panel of his self-advertising, and from a former chicken farm, he formed the local Museum of art.

the headquarters of advertising Agency Chiat Day in Venice, the seaside resort of Los Angeles, in collaboration with pop artists Claes Oldenburg, Gehry, in 1984, became internationally famous. Then he began to design sculptures in the shape of a fish. The Sculptural was to his own territory: in Many cases, in the Outer so irregularly and, above all, a bar for every right angle are seen to be building Inside “normal” use, and some users have asked for buildings of his since the nineties, numerous emerging office why the corrugated outer walls and the window must be wrong.

With the power of the oval. In addition to the Pierre Boulez hall, 2017 inaugurated, Gehry designed the DZ Bank at the Pariser Platz.Photo: imago/Sven Simon

Gehry became a signature architect, a Builder, buys the name and recognizable design, whether in Düsseldorf, Prague or the South of Manhattan. In addition, Gehry designed singular projects, such as the stock of financing want to win the long-running Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the Los Angeles connection to the Music capitals in the East of the USA. Later, the Fondation Vuitton in Paris, for the purpose-a plot of land in the Bois de Boulogne was made and the here, free-standing and is surrounded by lush tree stock, particularly good effect followed, and in the Interior of a sequence of remarkably “good” exhibition halls.

Warm, intimate mood

In Berlin, was able to show Gehry with the Bank on the Pariser Platz, and that he will fulfill the rigid requirements on eaves height, and stone facade and at the same time, with an exciting interior life – to be combined with a conference hall in the shape of a horse’s head – able. The order, better the request for a chamber music hall came next to the state Opera: the Boulez hall. It Gehry designed as an Ellipse within the Shoe box-shaped building skin, a floating rows of seats. The wonderful treatment of the wood, which some people don’t trust the metal shaper Gehry, but also to its architecture, the Boulez hall in its warm, intimate atmosphere.

prices Gehry has everything that an architect can, of course, begins after the age of 60. Year of life. But then: in 1989 Pritzker prize, 1992, the Praemium Imperiale, and finally, in 2016, the freedom medal from the US President. Today Frank Gehry is celebrating his 90. Birthday in Berlin and Daniel Barenboim to bring him a Serenade.

the concert, 28.2., 19.30, Pierre Boulez hall

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architects Gehry and Scharoun, The fight with the Shoe-box

Udo Badelt

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