I saw him speak about that house and at that time he was having a really hard time living in the suburban mindset. He wanted to offend.

I’m jealous that you knew it so well and as just another house.

The Santa Monica spot was, personally, a bit of an eye-sore after about 8 years. I kept wishing someone else would rise to the flamboyance, but nobody ever really did. Well, I'm wrong of course, but I never did see such a striking spot until I got to Europe, or whatever ..

For nonarchitects like me, Gehry pushed more than cognitive envelopes, he was also an early tech pioneer

https://blog.bluebeam.com/gehry-technologies-industry-influe...

The MoPoP in seattle also carries his aesthetic, I would say it's funky, not beautiful

I don't have much to say about the focus of your comment, but I do want to talk about this:

"When you’re a kid you typically see wild new things like that as just normal because you have no context for how unusual they are."

NOT TRUE! I remember then (and even now) looking at unique things in awe and amazement, rather than something normal or ordinary.

Just what I think :)

A picture that was posted on at least a couple of doors in the MIT Stata Center (one of the Gehry buildings that looks a lot like that "sandwich" :-)

I worked in this building. It was terrible. Low light, completely open office, people walking around you all the time, extremely noisy, pretty ugly (the roof-top garden was the exception). My team expensed noise cancelling headphones because it was so loud.

MPK 22 was also designed by Gehry Partners, which was a massive improvement on the inside, but outside is still kinda terrible in my opinion: https://www.truebeck.com/project/facebook-mpk-22/

It’s really fun to explore, no two spaces are alike, and lots of nooks and crannies. Definitely in my top 5 favorite buildings on campus and in Cambridge.

Did he design the yellow pedestrian/biker bridge connecting Facebook to the the Bayfront? I recently drove underneath it and it's quite interesting.

The Gehry story is cool but you skipped over the important part.

What

I also worked there for quite some time and always enjoyed walking into that building each morning.

The 9th (top) floor cafeteria was such a nice touch and offered great views up and down the Hudson.

I took this photo[0] from up there of Space Shuttle Enterprise being delivered to the Intrepid in 2012.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XQpXXzE

By that stage the firm was a big user of Catia especially on the production side of things. They probably used Rhino at the design stage.

Rhino 3d was the first 3d modeling app I had ever used. I was in high school. It was so hard :-) but very cool.

Used to take an hour to render a simple teapot. I could probably render that in realtime now.

Agreed, such a great structure in NYC's skyline. Lived on 73 for a few years. The contoured windows and benches inside were just as fun as the exterior.

Still don't understand why they stuck a red brick school in the middle and didn't contour it with the stainless steel panels like the rest of the building.

The only thing they have in common is that if you look at one of their buildings you instantly know who designed it. But nobody ever confuses an FLW building with an FG building.

Beyond sharing a first name, they don’t share much in common. And Frank Lloyd Wright died about the time Frank Gehry started.

Nope

I think the only one I consider worse is Calatrava from an engineering perspective

I saw the (a?) architectural model for Stata before it was built. I was with an artist, and we just walked into somewhere it had been set up for an event. (Yay for MIT culture of letting students go most places on campus.) It looked pretty crazy at the time. IIRC, there was a clear sphere embedded in the top of one of the lower roofs. My joke was that the model looked like someone had taken a paperweight, and smashed up a previously ordinary-looking building. It was crazy when construction started, and you could start to see elements of the building emerge, like, they are actually building that. (Though they left out the paperweight sphere.)

Before it was built, a designer friend, who'd worked worked in a Stata building before, mentioned the frequent complaints of Gehry buildings, such as people in triangular offices, or with slanting walls, that couldn't fit a desk.

Years later, I was surprised and deligted to end up working in Stata. My office was pretty generic rectangular and functional, with big windows that opened. No complaints about the office, except the HVAC couldn't win against the early GPU compute my officemate was doing. Space in the building was in demand by everyone, yet there were large areas of dead space. I wondered whether some of the conspicuously unused space was because they could've figured out how to adapt it, but was being banked consciously, so that space could be made for PIs who arrived later.

Stewart Brand criticized IM Pei's building for the original Media Lab (E15), as not being malleable like the "temporary" Building 20, and maybe some of the same criticism applied. Though Stata, coincidentally built partly on the site of Building 20 that was razed for it, did incorporate plywood elements in the interior, I think as a nod to Building 20. This included large plywood tables that were moved around as needed for different purposes in the open ares outside the elevator on my floor (G10?), multiple times a day.

The strange bathroom placement, and the ones that used visibly dirty ("green") water to flush, weren't a practical problem, but multiple times were awkward to explain to visitors. I liked the big single-person bathrooms on the office floors, and they were luxurious for students and professors doing all-nighters to get in a discreet paper towel bath, compared to the indignity of trying to do it in a toilet stall.

One thing I liked about the larger building design was the main street ground floor, adding cafe and various random seating, which was a big improvement over the Infinite Corridor.

I toured at MIT when I was applying to colleges, and the student narrating the walking tour trash-talked the Stata Center pretty brutally as we went by it, mentioning the leaks, the lawsuit, how nobody liked it, etc.

I never knew if those were her actual feelings or if this was part of a script approved by the admissions office, or even which of those possibilities would be crazier.

The building replaced a beloved Ww2 era temporary structure that lasted 50 Years.

Making a statement with architecture rarely goes well, especially if you abandon rectilinear structures.

https://www.rle.mit.edu/media/undercurrents/Vol9_2_Spring97....

“ neglige0nce”

Weird article. Maybe OCR?

This is the starchitect shtick - build sculptural forms that can, incidentally, be used as buildings. It's literally the most superficial kind of architecture.

It's much harder and less self-indulgent to start from a human-scale brief for a working and/or living environment and build a functional triumph that is also visually striking and original.

You can get away with being transgressive and challenging™ for art galleries and museums, but offices and homes need a whole other level of integration.

Two random anecdotes: when the concept drawing were first shown to the graduate students, someone asked what the swooping walkways above the main corridor were for. The answer they gave was "lightsaber battles".

When we first moved in, there was a seminar room that made some people physically nauseous due to its sloping walls. For a time, they were trying to use masking tape on the walls to make the effect less pronounced. Some of the grad students tried to name it the "vomitorium", but the name never stuck. Fortunately,, once the room had a full compliment of chairs, furniture, and a projector screen the effect seemed to be much less pronounced.