at least they have a website... H&dM doesn't have one, and don't seem to need it..:
"Anthony Hoete: I am interviewing you on behalf of KultureFlash, which is a free weekly web-based newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Given this format, in preparing for this interview I decided to undertake two forms of web research on your office: to consult your website and to consult our own network of architectural enthusiasts by sending out a single emailed question: "If you could ask Jacques Herzog one question, what would it be?" This research went out the window when I surprisingly learnt that there is no Herzog & de Meuron website...
Jacques Herzog: That is correct. We do not have a website.
I find that surprising given your global visibility or perhaps it is because of this you have no need for web-based PR. Does Google act as proxy for the absent Herzog & de Meuron homepage - when searched for, 594,000 results came up?
The function of a website as I see it is purely as archive - a potentially efficient informational store.
This suggests that the architectural website is a retrospective space only...
Yes, with 594,000 results there is a necessity to edit and curate information not directly generated by the architect. This means we could edit and organise this plethora of information regarding our own architecture and urbanism as it has been perceived, written about and "pressed" into existence by others. Why do our own press when you are doing it for us?"
Not sure how I feel about that - is it arrogance, laziness or just that they don't need/care to have one? I doubt the latter, considering every architect at their level has some kind of monograph (that only serves as a website does, in the context of what Herzog is talking - an archive to stroke one's ego and satisfy the young students/architect's hunger for inspiration).
Better having nothing than something horrible, though, like Hadid's site.
Jun 28, 08 8:47 am ·
·
my guess:
The Swiss can be a very frugal people. No evident or inherent income generating potential, hence, no website. And it certainly helps when there's an obfuscation card always in your hand.
yes why do you need a website if a tens of books, hundreds of essays, thousands of articles exist about you. i doubt that the head of the (insert cultural institution, skyscraper developer, oil sheik here) does a google search for "famous architects who can design a high profile super shiny instant icon with a hole in it".
Books are expensive.
Architects who don't have comprehensive websites, even if famous, are selfish, in a sense.
Nt hat everyone is anxiously awaiting information, but it wouldn't hurt for it to be out there.
This is just another aspect of the elitism of so called "starchitects", in my op.
HdM highjacking a thread - sweet! But I have to agree, but I really wish that they would do a site. Curious to see how it would look, especially since dem sWiss beats rock dem materials so well!! <- please repeat with an Ali-G accent.
Silverlake I think those guys are too old to know what a website is. But seriously those that life and breathe tactility find it unnecessary and are into the craft of architecture and care about the PR side, with snot nosed archi student saving multiple images to place over their beds at night so they can wank off to.
learning from my friend working for hdm, they don't have a website because their boss do not like students. likewise, they reject the idea of letting students visiting their studio in basel.
they regard website as something that primarily serves students while potential clients and enthusiastic job applicants would know how to write to them.
this is much about the culture of the practice. in stark contrast to hdm, rogers celebrate publicity and legibility of architecture. rsh-p.com reveals plenty of text and images for every rogers project published, perhaps much more comprehensively among the million google results of "richard rogers".
how does one get in contact with their office if they're looking to work with them or to commission them? The whole thing does smack a little of arrogance even though i hear the two of them rank as some of the better starchitects to work for.
[b]As for the critics, Gehry has a point. On the plane to Los Angeles, I read a copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's lifestyle quarterly. Gehry is described as "the one trick pony's one trick pony", suggesting that all he does is repeat his origami-like design for the Bilbao Guggenheim. True, the stainless steel-sheathed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA is the son of Bilbao, but this is pretty much as far as the look has gone. Would Gehry's critics have said the same of Palladio or Mies van der Rohe? Or Bach and Picasso? Artists are surely free to explore a particular style until they exhaust it. And Gehry has worked in any number of styles over a career that spans decades, long before the Bilbao Guggenheim was more than an idea in his sketchbook.
Sitting in Gehry's inner sanctum - a cosy office dotted with framed ice-hockey shirts, family photos, swooping cardboard armchairs (Gehry's design), Mickey Mouse figurines, paintings by friends and a big wooden fish - the architect shows me through drawings and books of designs and projects before Bilbao. Here are Japanese-influenced private houses, schemes for social housing, box-like cultural buildings, adventures in the colourful, cartoon-like postmodernism that failed to export well across the Atlantic.
Gehry's creative drive stems from a very particular upbringing. He starts by saying he doesn't want to talk about this, preferring to show me the latest work in the office, but in the end he does both. "I began by building little model cities with my mom on the floor of our home in Toronto," he says, "while grandad read from the Torah. Mom's family was from Lodz in Poland; they left in 1913. Dad's family was from the Russian-Polish border. He made and sold furniture. For a time it was little papier-mache rocking horses for kids."
The Gehrys were "pretty poor. At school, I got beat up by Catholic Polish kids, miners' sons, who called me 'kike' and 'Christ killer'. But the French Catholics, the underdogs in Toronto, were on my side and I learned to fight back. I even got good at ice hockey. One of my favourite projects has been 'Disney ice', a rink we did in Anaheim in the mid 90s close by Disneyland."
When he was 11 years old, a handwriting expert told him he would grow up to be a famous architect. "When I was 16, I went to a lecture - a big cultural experience for me - at the Art Gallery of Toronto. This fine, white-haired gentleman showed photos of wonderful bent plywood chairs, all curves and nothing like I'd ever seen. I hadn't a clue who he was or what he was saying. I did later. It was Alvar Aalto - for me, along with Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier, the greatest of all modern architects."
The following year, the family moved to California to make a better living. Gehry became a truck driver, delivering and fitting kitchens. One of his clients was Roy Rogers, "King of the Cowboys". Rogers made the 17-year-old welcome in his home. "I was invited to Christmas dinner and got to attend film premieres and parties. I had a feeling of what California had to offer."
Freedom, in a word. Gehry, a US citizen, maintains his Canadian passport, but he is also very much a product of California. "I started going to night school, taking drafting classes - I got an F at first - then calligraphy, book design, ceramics and architecture. I was told I was good at architecture, the first thing anyone said I was good at except ice hockey, fighting and fitting kitchens. A compliment can work wonders with a kid. So I was all set to try and get into college, and then I was drafted into the army."
The Korean war was over, so he served his time designing furniture for the army. Finally, he got to architecture school. He showed his work to Richard Neutra, an Austrian emigre, who had done much to pioneer the modern California style of architecture: open-planned, geometric steel or timber and glass houses, blurring landscape and man-made structure. Neutra offered Gehry a job. With a wife and two kids to support, Gehry raised the question of a salary. Neutra was horrified: Gehry should be paying him for the privilege.
California, meanwhile, nurtured a particular sensibility in the young architect. "I was a committed Modern. I loved what Neutra, Schindler, the Eames and Pierre Koenig were doing, but I was looking, too, at somehow creating more delight in architecture. Vitruvius talked of the three things that mattered in architecture as being 'commodity, firmness and delight'. The first two aren't too hard to get right, but 'delight' seemed the real hard one."
It took Gehry a long time to find his way towards an architecture that expressed movement. "I love classical music, and somehow I wanted to create musical buildings, lyrical buildings with a lot of delight. But, because I was a paid-up Modernist, I didn't want to do this with decoration; it had to be with essential form."
For Gehry, the resolution was 1997's Bilbao Guggenheim, which has made him one of the most famous architects in the world. He even turned up in an episode of the Simpsons: his design for a Springfield Concert Hall was inspired by a screwed-up letter.
Gehry is thrilled that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has recently adopted his Disney Concert Hall as the city's symbol, in place of the famous hillside Hollywood sign. He is also delighted to be designing a $200m extension to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
"I first started on the whole movement thing by drawing fish, and then buildings that looked like fish. It was a kind of joke at first. Postmodernists, reacting in the 80s to the straight lines of Modern movement orthodoxy, were going back to classical roots and the whole 'man the measure of all things' shtick. I thought, hell, why not go back even further to the fish. So I started drawing fish everywhere - on my chequebook, I mean in my sketchbook [a fabulous Freudian slip]. Then I became obsessed with the flowing beauty and movement of fish and wanted that in my buildings."
Gehry caught the moving spirit of the times and has never looked back. We take a stroll through the studio. Here is the billowing model of the future Fondation Louis Vuitton building, Paris, rising like waves from the Bois de Boulogne. Here is an extension to the chilly neoclassical Philadelphia Museum of Art designed by Horace Trumbauer, an architect from a humble background who drank himself to death. Gehry's major contribution will be underground and out-of-sight.
We walk alongside models of the 75-storey, stainless steel Beekman Tower, Gehry's first Manhattan Tower ("I got there at last") and designs for the Joyce Theatre, a dance school and venue, Gehry's contribution to the redevelopment of Ground Zero. A colourful model of what looks like a mini-Manhattan skyline is a proposal for the Brooklyn Arena and public housing development, the subject of much local protest that its towers will overwhelm the local area. In another corner, a young architect is making a model for a children's playground for Manhattan's Battery Park.
"We do projects like the kids' park pro bono," says Gehry. "People come on to the phone asking me to give everything away for free - design, models, my sketches, the furniture in my office. Why not my shirt? You'd think Frank Gehry had already passed on. Not yet, I tell them. We're still a business, very busy and still pushing the boundaries in design. The big thing for me now, though, is to encourage all this young talent in the firm, to make sure we don't just vanish when I do. I'd love to see guys of Sami's generation making the office work, and making buildings that are much more exciting again. Architecture's a continuum; you need to look back and forwards at the same time and to keep moving."
"Like a shark," I suggest. "A fish," counters Gehry.
· Frank Gehry's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion will be in Hyde Park, London, from July 20 until October 19. serpentinegallery.org[b]
Gehry
I just went to FOG's website for the first time.
Kind of crazy to think about that level of success. He employs nearly 200 people and doesn't have a single building on his website. Ha!
It's insomnia. I'm sorry.
Their internal website is way more complicated, and has much more info, than their public site.
what's the point in that, then?
at least they have a website... H&dM doesn't have one, and don't seem to need it..:
"Anthony Hoete: I am interviewing you on behalf of KultureFlash, which is a free weekly web-based newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Given this format, in preparing for this interview I decided to undertake two forms of web research on your office: to consult your website and to consult our own network of architectural enthusiasts by sending out a single emailed question: "If you could ask Jacques Herzog one question, what would it be?" This research went out the window when I surprisingly learnt that there is no Herzog & de Meuron website...
Jacques Herzog: That is correct. We do not have a website.
I find that surprising given your global visibility or perhaps it is because of this you have no need for web-based PR. Does Google act as proxy for the absent Herzog & de Meuron homepage - when searched for, 594,000 results came up?
The function of a website as I see it is purely as archive - a potentially efficient informational store.
This suggests that the architectural website is a retrospective space only...
Yes, with 594,000 results there is a necessity to edit and curate information not directly generated by the architect. This means we could edit and organise this plethora of information regarding our own architecture and urbanism as it has been perceived, written about and "pressed" into existence by others. Why do our own press when you are doing it for us?"
http://www.geocities.com/medit1976b/herzog2.htm
Not sure how I feel about that - is it arrogance, laziness or just that they don't need/care to have one? I doubt the latter, considering every architect at their level has some kind of monograph (that only serves as a website does, in the context of what Herzog is talking - an archive to stroke one's ego and satisfy the young students/architect's hunger for inspiration).
Better having nothing than something horrible, though, like Hadid's site.
my guess:
The Swiss can be a very frugal people. No evident or inherent income generating potential, hence, no website. And it certainly helps when there's an obfuscation card always in your hand.
yes why do you need a website if a tens of books, hundreds of essays, thousands of articles exist about you. i doubt that the head of the (insert cultural institution, skyscraper developer, oil sheik here) does a google search for "famous architects who can design a high profile super shiny instant icon with a hole in it".
Books are expensive.
Architects who don't have comprehensive websites, even if famous, are selfish, in a sense.
Nt hat everyone is anxiously awaiting information, but it wouldn't hurt for it to be out there.
This is just another aspect of the elitism of so called "starchitects", in my op.
Elitism? Selfishness? Why do architects have an obligation to produce a website for you? Seems more selfish on your part, actually.
Glen Murcutt + Peter Zumthor don't need 'em...
I think there's a kind of stubbornness there.
by the way... Gehry has this other site, which is not exactly his portfolio but has some interesting things
HdM highjacking a thread - sweet! But I have to agree, but I really wish that they would do a site. Curious to see how it would look, especially since dem sWiss beats rock dem materials so well!! <- please repeat with an Ali-G accent.
Silverlake I think those guys are too old to know what a website is. But seriously those that life and breathe tactility find it unnecessary and are into the craft of architecture and care about the PR side, with snot nosed archi student saving multiple images to place over their beds at night so they can wank off to.
learning from my friend working for hdm, they don't have a website because their boss do not like students. likewise, they reject the idea of letting students visiting their studio in basel.
they regard website as something that primarily serves students while potential clients and enthusiastic job applicants would know how to write to them.
this is much about the culture of the practice. in stark contrast to hdm, rogers celebrate publicity and legibility of architecture. rsh-p.com reveals plenty of text and images for every rogers project published, perhaps much more comprehensively among the million google results of "richard rogers".
how does one get in contact with their office if they're looking to work with them or to commission them? The whole thing does smack a little of arrogance even though i hear the two of them rank as some of the better starchitects to work for.
The guy is on The Simpsons. Why does he need a website? Just call Matt Groenig! ;-)
This article in the Guardian is interesting:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2288297,00.html
[b]As for the critics, Gehry has a point. On the plane to Los Angeles, I read a copy of Intelligent Life, the Economist's lifestyle quarterly. Gehry is described as "the one trick pony's one trick pony", suggesting that all he does is repeat his origami-like design for the Bilbao Guggenheim. True, the stainless steel-sheathed Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA is the son of Bilbao, but this is pretty much as far as the look has gone. Would Gehry's critics have said the same of Palladio or Mies van der Rohe? Or Bach and Picasso? Artists are surely free to explore a particular style until they exhaust it. And Gehry has worked in any number of styles over a career that spans decades, long before the Bilbao Guggenheim was more than an idea in his sketchbook.
Sitting in Gehry's inner sanctum - a cosy office dotted with framed ice-hockey shirts, family photos, swooping cardboard armchairs (Gehry's design), Mickey Mouse figurines, paintings by friends and a big wooden fish - the architect shows me through drawings and books of designs and projects before Bilbao. Here are Japanese-influenced private houses, schemes for social housing, box-like cultural buildings, adventures in the colourful, cartoon-like postmodernism that failed to export well across the Atlantic.
Gehry's creative drive stems from a very particular upbringing. He starts by saying he doesn't want to talk about this, preferring to show me the latest work in the office, but in the end he does both. "I began by building little model cities with my mom on the floor of our home in Toronto," he says, "while grandad read from the Torah. Mom's family was from Lodz in Poland; they left in 1913. Dad's family was from the Russian-Polish border. He made and sold furniture. For a time it was little papier-mache rocking horses for kids."
The Gehrys were "pretty poor. At school, I got beat up by Catholic Polish kids, miners' sons, who called me 'kike' and 'Christ killer'. But the French Catholics, the underdogs in Toronto, were on my side and I learned to fight back. I even got good at ice hockey. One of my favourite projects has been 'Disney ice', a rink we did in Anaheim in the mid 90s close by Disneyland."
When he was 11 years old, a handwriting expert told him he would grow up to be a famous architect. "When I was 16, I went to a lecture - a big cultural experience for me - at the Art Gallery of Toronto. This fine, white-haired gentleman showed photos of wonderful bent plywood chairs, all curves and nothing like I'd ever seen. I hadn't a clue who he was or what he was saying. I did later. It was Alvar Aalto - for me, along with Erich Mendelsohn and Le Corbusier, the greatest of all modern architects."
The following year, the family moved to California to make a better living. Gehry became a truck driver, delivering and fitting kitchens. One of his clients was Roy Rogers, "King of the Cowboys". Rogers made the 17-year-old welcome in his home. "I was invited to Christmas dinner and got to attend film premieres and parties. I had a feeling of what California had to offer."
Freedom, in a word. Gehry, a US citizen, maintains his Canadian passport, but he is also very much a product of California. "I started going to night school, taking drafting classes - I got an F at first - then calligraphy, book design, ceramics and architecture. I was told I was good at architecture, the first thing anyone said I was good at except ice hockey, fighting and fitting kitchens. A compliment can work wonders with a kid. So I was all set to try and get into college, and then I was drafted into the army."
The Korean war was over, so he served his time designing furniture for the army. Finally, he got to architecture school. He showed his work to Richard Neutra, an Austrian emigre, who had done much to pioneer the modern California style of architecture: open-planned, geometric steel or timber and glass houses, blurring landscape and man-made structure. Neutra offered Gehry a job. With a wife and two kids to support, Gehry raised the question of a salary. Neutra was horrified: Gehry should be paying him for the privilege.
California, meanwhile, nurtured a particular sensibility in the young architect. "I was a committed Modern. I loved what Neutra, Schindler, the Eames and Pierre Koenig were doing, but I was looking, too, at somehow creating more delight in architecture. Vitruvius talked of the three things that mattered in architecture as being 'commodity, firmness and delight'. The first two aren't too hard to get right, but 'delight' seemed the real hard one."
It took Gehry a long time to find his way towards an architecture that expressed movement. "I love classical music, and somehow I wanted to create musical buildings, lyrical buildings with a lot of delight. But, because I was a paid-up Modernist, I didn't want to do this with decoration; it had to be with essential form."
For Gehry, the resolution was 1997's Bilbao Guggenheim, which has made him one of the most famous architects in the world. He even turned up in an episode of the Simpsons: his design for a Springfield Concert Hall was inspired by a screwed-up letter.
Gehry is thrilled that the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has recently adopted his Disney Concert Hall as the city's symbol, in place of the famous hillside Hollywood sign. He is also delighted to be designing a $200m extension to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
"I first started on the whole movement thing by drawing fish, and then buildings that looked like fish. It was a kind of joke at first. Postmodernists, reacting in the 80s to the straight lines of Modern movement orthodoxy, were going back to classical roots and the whole 'man the measure of all things' shtick. I thought, hell, why not go back even further to the fish. So I started drawing fish everywhere - on my chequebook, I mean in my sketchbook [a fabulous Freudian slip]. Then I became obsessed with the flowing beauty and movement of fish and wanted that in my buildings."
Gehry caught the moving spirit of the times and has never looked back. We take a stroll through the studio. Here is the billowing model of the future Fondation Louis Vuitton building, Paris, rising like waves from the Bois de Boulogne. Here is an extension to the chilly neoclassical Philadelphia Museum of Art designed by Horace Trumbauer, an architect from a humble background who drank himself to death. Gehry's major contribution will be underground and out-of-sight.
We walk alongside models of the 75-storey, stainless steel Beekman Tower, Gehry's first Manhattan Tower ("I got there at last") and designs for the Joyce Theatre, a dance school and venue, Gehry's contribution to the redevelopment of Ground Zero. A colourful model of what looks like a mini-Manhattan skyline is a proposal for the Brooklyn Arena and public housing development, the subject of much local protest that its towers will overwhelm the local area. In another corner, a young architect is making a model for a children's playground for Manhattan's Battery Park.
"We do projects like the kids' park pro bono," says Gehry. "People come on to the phone asking me to give everything away for free - design, models, my sketches, the furniture in my office. Why not my shirt? You'd think Frank Gehry had already passed on. Not yet, I tell them. We're still a business, very busy and still pushing the boundaries in design. The big thing for me now, though, is to encourage all this young talent in the firm, to make sure we don't just vanish when I do. I'd love to see guys of Sami's generation making the office work, and making buildings that are much more exciting again. Architecture's a continuum; you need to look back and forwards at the same time and to keep moving."
"Like a shark," I suggest. "A fish," counters Gehry.
· Frank Gehry's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion will be in Hyde Park, London, from July 20 until October 19. serpentinegallery.org[b]
Gehry has won a Golden Lion, btw
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