Tom Munnecke
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As an Architect, Frank Gehry would make a good sculptor.I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting at the Weatherhead school of management at Case Western Reserve University. It was my first time in the Peter Lewis building, designed by architect Frank Gehry. From the outside, it was a very interesting design, with flowing titanium shingles glistening on top of a rigid brick understructure. Entering the building, however, was somewhat of a shock. Squeezing through a slanted gap between the metal and the brick, I thought I might be coming in through a loading dock. I pushed my way in, as if I had to fight the building to enter. Once in, I was met with confusing mishmash of elements, consisting of a door to a conference room, a side hallway, and a desk which looked like a ticket taker in a movie theater. Confirming that I was indeed in the right place, I went to the conference room, which gave me the opportunity to watch other building novices go through the same experience.
I suppose that this is an interesting building, but it felt like an ice cube to me. Creating a building in which new arrivals frown and squint to figure out where they are strikes me as a really bad thing for an architect to do. Probing deeper into the interior did not help, either. Every feature in the building was locked in the architect’s scream “Look at me! Look at me!” The interior was full with suffocating STUFF everywhere I looked, often at a bizarre range of scale. There was no soaring atrium, but rather a pit over which an amorphous space-filling glob was suspended. The building had all the warmth of an ice cube. Leaving the building, I felt as if I was being squirted out through an airlock.
This is the entrance to the building, not to be confused with a loading dock. It feels as if you are squeezing in through an air lock when you enter, and are being squirted out when you leave. I asked many of the graduate students how they felt about their new environment. “Horrible,” said one. “Like living in a refrigerator” said another. “We used to have comfortable offices and gathering places, and had the most wonderful conversations. Now everything is so sterile, and the acoustics so bad, that we can’t do anything together. I have to go outside if I want any privacy.” The impact of this design could have easily been predicted from the pattern language work of Christopher Alexander. For example, his pattern about Intimacy Gradient describes how one moves from a public space through a portal into progressively more private spaces. In a home, for example, one would move from the public street to a front porch, the front door, a reception area, and finally a living area. Putting the front door in the master bedroom would violate this gradient. There was no such thinking in Gehry’s design… it was almost as if the entrance was an afterthought. I visited Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilboa, Spain Despite glowing descriptions about the careful design for displaying artist’s works, I found the same “look at me!” design ethic throughout the museum. It would be nearly impossible for an artist’s work to overcome the effects of the space. The only thing I remember remotely competing with the Gehry-trammeled space was an ominous wall of steel plates. I found an interesting contrast of this museum with the Louvre in Paris. One of the early World Wide Web conferences held a reception in the Greek statues section. I remember strolling through the exhibits in a kind of dreamy light, exquisitely displaying the subtleties of the marble. The rooms were elegant and well proportioned to their displays, and linked in ways which invited us to roam about. Although in company with pretty hard-core computer geeks, the conversation was surprisingly wide-ranging. Tim Berners-Lee, architect of the information space which we know as the web, was there. He was firm in his principles about decentralization and connectivity, but he was not designing “Tim’s Web.” His design was a gift to the world; he pushed it out the door to fly on its own, letting go. Frank Gehry could have learned a lesson or two from Tim about letting go. Artist/architect/humanitarian James Hubbell speaks of the need for an architecture of jubilation:
The conference itself was quite a counterpoint to the domineering architecture. Riane Eisler, author of the The Chalice and the Blade, could have been describing the building's design in her discussion of the "dominator" model.
Professor David Cooperrider stressed the importance of the phrasing of the questions we ask of ourselves - the role of appreciative inquiry.
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