Login
Registered users
In the fall of 2023, invited to reviews at SCI-Arc, I travelled to Los Angeles, anticipating a visit to the ateliers of Eric Owen Moss, Frank O. Gehry, and Thom Mayne. A few years earlier, Cahiers d’art had published Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings Vol I, 1954-78 as part of a proposed eight volume series on the oeuvre of this maestro (1929-2025) – an incredible anthology, conceived by Jean-Louis Cohen. At the time, I had been coincidentally invited to moderate an online forum and conference by Prof. Cohen entitled “Le Corbusier’s Politics: Between Naiveté and Opportunism”. The occasion provided a pedagogical context for a discussion on Gehry’s oeuvre as well.1
Resisting the conventional descriptions of Gehry’s projects, Cohen’s research went beyond the standard labels of spectacle or “deconstructivist” to reiterate the architect’s continuity with the Modern Project. For Cohen, Gehry took his imperatives from Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto.
In 2023, I also received an invitation from Gehry himself at the suggestion of SCI-Arc’s Director Hernán Díaz Alonso. In the course of a customary tour of the studio, Gehry, recalling the incomplete writings of Cohen, moved the conversation towards two seminal projects by Le Corbusier that had been inspirational for him: the chapel in Ronchamp, and the Sainte-Marie de La Tourette priory, both in France. Charles and Ray Eames, Reyner Banham, the Case Study Houses, Wright, Mayne, and Moss had set the scene for Los Angeles to emerge as a laboratory of architecture and urbanism. Gehry was central to that transformation.
Philip Johnson and Gehry’s biographer, Paul Goldberger, believe the Guggenheim Museum is a significant project because it reimagines a new spatiality of Baroque lightness, not because it celebrates sculptural exuberance. On being...
Digital
Printed
Relearning How to Inhabit the City: Housing and Shared Responsibility
Gloria Cabral
In the editorial “Rediscovering How to Live in the City: Housing and Shared Responsibility,” architect Gloria Cabral calls for a rethinking of con...
Restoration as an Exercise in Good Taste
Architettura Tommasi
In his Viaggio in Italia column, Valerio Paolo Mosco examines restoration, using examples from Architettura Tommasi...
Reimagining the Western Range of the British Museum
Lina Ghotmeh Architecture
In the Conversation column, Philip Jodidio speaks with Lina Ghotmeh...
