Frank Gehry - Vitra Design Museum 1990
Group Research
Vitra, a furniture company, have looked to variety of renowned architects to design the buildings that make up their manufacturing complex in Basel, Germany. These architects include Alvaro Siza, Nicholas Grinshaw, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.
The Vitra Design Museum which is the hub of the complex was Frank Gehry’s first building in Europe and was created with the help of Lorach Architect, Gunter Pfeifer. The museum houses temporary exhibitions on themes of furniture design, a research library and a restoration and conservation laboratory. It also holds workshops and organizes guided tours of the Vitra Premises.
Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum stands out as an architectural attraction in its own right nestling itself in an industrial plant cross model village environment. Gehry has used his trademark deconstructivist style in this building to a tee and unlike his previous buildings such as the Loyola Law School. Frank has consciously limited his use of materials in this design in order to not compete with the exhibitions the building is designed to hold. However unlike his previous work Gehry has utilized white plaster and titanium to create curved forms that break up the more angular components of this building. The whit curved form echo those of the Notre Dame de Haut chapel by famous architect Le Corbusier.
Architecural critic Paul Heyer describes the experience of the interior of the building as…
“... a continuous changing swirl of white forms on the exterior, each seemingly without apparent relationship to the other, with its interiors a dynamically powerful interplay, in turn directly expressive of the exterior convolutions. As a totality it resolves itself into an entwined coherent display…”
Initial Group Model Render
Case Study
Frank Gehry - Walt Disney Concert Hall 2003
The Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is located in downtown LA is a tribute to Walt Disney and his devotion to art. Designed by Frank Gehry and constructed from 1999 to 2003, this building is deconstructive sculpture architecture at its finest. The exploded-then-reconstructed free flowing objects are placed in such a way, that the building becomes an elegantly proportioned sculpture, demonstrating Frank Gehrys recognisable iconoclast style.
Images courtousy of Carol M. Highsmith. (2009).
Disney Concert Hall by Carol Highsmith.
Last accessed 25 September 2009.
