Gehry Draws - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262182416 ISBN 13: 9780262182416

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2004

Synopsis

Drawing as Frank Gehry's way of "thinking aloud": tracing this part of Gehry's creative process through 32 major projects, both built and unbuilt; with more than 900 illustrations.

Everyone knows what the distinctive curves and lines of Frank Gehry's buildings look like. But where do they come from? Gehry has described drawing as his way of "thinking aloud"; Gehry Draws traces that thinking through 32 major projects (both built and unbuilt) with more than 500 drawings (many of which have never before been published) and more than 400 additional illustrations—providing a privileged view of the creative practice of a master architect. Horst Bredekamp's introduction relates Gehry's drawing methods to the concept of "disegno," as practiced by Leonardo and Durer—not only the act of drawing and modeling but also the dynamics of creative thinking—and shows how Gehry thinks through the curving movements of his hand on paper. Gehry himself describes for Bredekamp his method in several explanatory sketches, and Bredekamp applies this to a study of drawings made for specific Gehry commissions. Gehry Draws is produced in collaboration with Frank Gehry and his team at Gehry Partners. Project synopses and commentary by Gehry and two of his Partners and Project Designers, Edwin Chan and Craig Webb, guide us through the full range of Gehry production, from the small details of furniture design to such large-scale undertakings as the Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The drawings, illustrations, and text in Gehry Draws definitively place drawing at the heart of Frank Gehry's creative process. This book is published by The MIT Press in association with Violette Editions.

About this title

About the Author

Horst Bredekamp is Professor of Art History at the University of Humboldt-University of Berlin and a Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

Reviews

The shapes—of the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, of the unbuilt New York Times headquarters, of Los Angeles's Walt Disney Concert Hall—are by now familiar, if no less wonderful and estranging. This terrific book can hardly be called a set of sketches. It brings together drawings architect Gehry has done for 29 recent projects; to look at them in series is to watch a genius think out loud, so close does the link between thought and line seem here (before the projects have been computer simulated, modeled and hyped to death). Text-wise, signs are sometimes taken as wonders, with Gehry's most banal pronouncements given the status of pull-quotes ("We work with clients a lot. I listen to the client a lot. I spend more time with clients than most people would guess"), but the drawings themselves (950!) are arresting, and they lose none of their impact when put on the page. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262182416
• ISBN 13: 9780262182416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Frank Gehry
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544
• Editor: Mark Rappolt, Robert Violette