His car design is bad, but his buildings are worse.
Gerhy is for sure, The Anti-RQtect.

Oh shucks I will never be asked to work for that hack.
Thank God

Well you think thats bad (and I don't actaully think it's too bad. I mean what do you expect from big frank?), but what about his design for the hockey world cup? Now that is truly awful.


http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/TorontoSun/Sports/2004/05/13/457427.html

well its a concept car... its not a car.

sometimes you have to be fooling around to stumble across something interesting and smart... lets see what happens.

I think it is an innovative and interesting design. There are better images and concept background at MIT's site.

omg.. what's that
like a bug..

"well its a concept car... its not a car."


You can say this about anything. I called my box of fruitloops this morning a skyscraper, but i quickly realized im not a psychopath. Much like gehry, I can poop out some sheet metal and call it a museum too. How's that for a concept? Wouldn't that be some crap (no pun intended). I would love to do that and it sell it for 216 million dollars a load. Which, in turn, is yet another concept. And on and on and on.....

you get the idea, but in short summary.....

i hope i don't get stuck in traffic one day sitting behind a 2012 Bilbao G4

It looks like a shiny cat nip mouse.

i like that concept car, has cool features, better than the music thing in seattle is it ?

"you either have vision or you don't. concepts are for those lacking real ideas. in other words concepts are derived from radical design solutions to real problems so that others can understand the creators logic."

those who cannot possibly imagine anything new say they have vision. get off your high horse, whats YOUR real idea? The MIT media lab is a radical think tank. Their research is supposed to be radical, not ordinary. Not everything they produce is actually useful for production, but nobody who invented anything really new did it by being anal retentive and concentrating real hard, trying to shit out your vision...

"Gehry had a vision, its called Bilboa. everything else ???"

Actually, Bilboa was a fluke. He stumbled onto something brilliant. Was it vision? Did he know that he could revitalize an entire city's economy with flash metal forms? No. Basically, Bilbao would not have happened if not for experimentation.

Gehry doesn't to want to start some kind of "Gehryism" or anything, he simply focuses on his own work, and his clients and his clients love what he does, and many people love this kind of thing. The problem with some architects is that they have too much "vision" / too many bloody ideas about how their architecture is going to transform the world...

"Much like gehry, I can poop out some sheet metal and call it a museum too. How's that for a concept? Wouldn't that be some crap (no pun intended). I would love to do that and it sell it for 216 million dollars a load. Which, in turn, is yet another concept."

Funny thing, maybe some of Gehry's work should have been left as sculptural models. But his clients seem to love it, and if they are paying millions of dollars to make those forms into reality, maybe he is doing something right that we aren't... Or maybe he got lucky taking creative risks that we didn't.

gehry can go suck it. isn't he married to somebody rich?

design as a whole is kinda interesting. Not the greatest thing I've ever seen, not even close but it has some nifty ideas applied. Whats up with that hanger thing though?? I hate that someone has wasted his time designing that

So many critics, so few creators.

doZer he's married to a Panama girl, and actually he bought a lot of land when the states gave back the panama canal, cause he's expecting the whole touristic investment that is going to be there, and get lot of money from developers...so u still have lot of years of him... and.. expect more now that he has a huge warehouse as "office" and is also called now something like "Ghery design" or somehting isn't it???, seems he's spreading...

Motors and suspension are stuffed within the hubs

Sounds like an engineering nightmare.



MIT Media Lab, William Mitchell is discussing triangular wheels. It’s an inauspicious, if not absurd, starting point, but his students still produced several solutions—including an equilateral triangle with arced sides and a central gear that ensures that the axle remains the same distance from the ground. “We didn’t spend much time on that, though,” Mitchell says. “We had more important things to get to.”


Japanese auto companies (or company?) have done funny show cars (?) with square wheels. It's a company insider tradition.



but this quote from the article reminds me of the recent archinect thread about AIA specialties:

Gehry, who has designed watches, chairs, even a line of doorknobs,

the other pages are interesting.


Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are a low-power display technology that is self-luminous and thus requires no bulky backlighting. An OLED skin could be programmed to change the color of the car or to indicate where the driver is looking; it could make mechanical indicator lights and metal license plates obsolete.


Powered display doesn't seem a cost efficient replacement for vehicle ID such as plates. Those electronic odometers in current cars are annoying, because unreadable when not supplied with power.

But, I'd like to play with this. I've had application ideas for about 25 years. Maybe the concept's approaching economic feasibility.




This reduces the vehicle’s unsprung mass (the part of the car’s mass not supported by the suspension), making it more stable.


This sentence may be garbled. Or they're not describing how the complications of cramming inboard mechanisms into the wheel will REDUCE unsprung weight.

its interesting how architects (im saying this since ive stepped back a bit from architecture) are so stuck-up-in-their-own-asses.
gehry is a guy who has taken risks to make it big, and he has. does he involve himself in intellectual crapping like greg lynn and others?? no - does he talk a lot about urban contexts and crap and end up making a 'beautiful' form-z building like mayne, no...

he does what he like, the clients love it, the people love it and it looks far better than the postmodern crap that 'people' like..so whats wrong in doing that???

and if he's carrying the discourse of architecture ahead(more so than most of his contemporaries), i say he is,and the technological innovation coming out of his office is awesome.

sameolddoctor

yes- you are correct. he does not take part in the hobschnobbing that most influential or rising archies are involving themselves with now. and youre also correct- he's jumping outside the typical boundaries of the role of the simple architect with designing trophies, cars, doorknobs.

however

the design, basically, behind most of these items- including his monstrous buildings- are the same shit over and over again. thats whats pissed us off about it.

lets play a game:

put calatrava where gehry is (in terms of venues entered outside of typical architectural design) not sure about most of you, but to me i envision these designs ten times more improved and equally as thought out.

as a business man/power celeb soon to be in an action flick- gehry is untouchable

as an "aesthetic" designer- he absolutely posituvely fails. horribly.

I, for one, think it would be fun to ram into other cars during rush hour without any negative consequences, never mind that I'm in an egg. If we could just get the whole world to drive in these things, road rage would be a thing of the past, and commuting would be a child-like joy.

as a business man/power celeb soon to be in an action flick- gehry is untouchable

as an "aesthetic" designer- he absolutely posituvely fails. horribly.There you go... So that's exactly what all the bashing is really about. It's not about the concept at all, but whether or not that image looked "pretty"... Of course, aesthetics are subjective, and these images of this car are about a concept of a new kind of car, not a real car that is going to be built. This is the problem I think is that many architects pay attention to how something looks first, even when looking at a representation of a concept... If the renderings of Gehry's concept car looked more "aesthetically pleasing", maybe alot of the critics would be saying how innovative it was...

I wonder, did any of these critics actually read about the idea or technology that Gehry's team was investigating before bashing, or did they simply look at the picture and think to themselves how "ugly" it was...?

here's the way i see "corporate american frank gehry" thinks. "i see the demand, and i'm going to milk it any way i can."

what's difference from seeing a bunch of mcdonald's everywhere as to seeing gehry's work everywhere? has he really done anything reflecting more important pragmatic issues in architecture besides form?

i shouldnt have focused on "aesthetic" as the word of question within gehry's work. there is concept, analysis, technology- but technology will run rampant within any inventive car design. lets not act as if toyota, lexus, honda, and even fuckin yugo car companies are not investigating these "innovative technological advances in the automotive industry". then you have these MIT students- theyre up in it too- as is Pratt grad students, etc. etc.

and i read the article, yes.

gehry's TEAM is looking into these things- yes- i see that. but its safe to say that mostly any research that is being done for his concept car will have been completed by someone else down the road if not already being done- to be utilized in a completely different looking shell.

basically,

i commend the research within technological breaks in the automotive industry

i shun the designs of his buildings, trophies, and doorknobs

i'm neutral on the "aesthetic" appeal of the concept car

as a side note - the designs you see are conceptual studies that MIT's students came up with, NOT Gehry's design. he hasn't design anything yet.

Gehry does what he does because he is who he is. He doesn't let critics deter him from doing what he wants. As the matter of fact, I think he uses criticism as motivation to pop up more Gehry-like buildings. The more he’s being hated, I think the more he loves it. He even said it himself that sometimes he thinks his designs are “really funny”, he doesn’t like all of his buildings, but when someone brings him $200 million for him to design their new building, they’re definitely not expecting a box or something usual. Gehry’s been “typecast” and like Ben Stiller, he feeds on it.

I’m not a big fan on Gehry’s design either – and I’m terrified for the unveiling day of his concept car, but I am a huge fan of his process. The progression from concept to design to fabrication to construction and beyond is truly unique. I think the biggest contribution that Gehry brought to architecture is certainly not his forms – anyone heard of Gaudi? But the tools and techniques (mostly from the innovative mind of Jim Glymph) in which he uses to turn his sketches into reality.