Word: designations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...list of conditions met to get the permit to break ground eventually ran to 107 items. Some were major design considerations. The neighbors didn't want Meier's signature white surfaces glaring at them in the Pacific sun, and the metal cladding panels were accordingly colored a pale tan. They insisted on, and got, strict limits to the height of the buildings. And they hated the idea of culture-curious hoi polloi, 1.3 million of them expected each year, looking down into their backyards. One woman feared that visitors to the Getty would look across the valley from a spur...
...corner, and--pow!--an apparition appears in glass and half-shiny silver (titanium, actually), massively undulating, something that seems at first glance to have been dropped from another cultural world between the gray townscape and the green hills that rise behind it. Not since Joern Utzon's 1973 design for the Sydney Opera House has a building so dramatically imposed itself on a city. On the river edge of a town planned in terms of axial Beaux Arts order, architect Gehry, 68, has inserted a startlingly irregular building that defies every convention of axiality, including the right angle, of which...
...Basque regional government in Bilbao really wanted the Guggenheim there; it backed Gehry's design to the hilt and poured money into the venture. It provided a free 249,000-sq.-ft. site on a bend in the Nervion, the river that passes through Bilbao; the basic construction cost of $100 million; $50 million more for new acquisitions; a $20 million advisory fee to the Guggenheim; and $12 million a year in operating costs. Hands up, anyone who can imagine an American city doing that entirely with public money...
...Gehry was astute in framing his design. He didn't want it to defer to the town architecture, but he did want it to chime with other aspects of Bilbao, particularly its industrial landscape: to commemorate its former power and presence. All along the Nervion are shipbuilding yards, loading docks, cranes, massive obsolete warehouses--the kind of context that not only Gehry but also some of the artists he is closest to, like the sculptor Richard Serra, love. Disregarded, blue-collar beauty. The rusty pecs of Basque industrial capitalism. Seen from the far side of the river, the museum does...
...horizontal ones. The biggest gallery, known as "the Boat," is 1 1/4 times the length of a football field (450 ft.), but with its curved walls and round ceiling trusses, it hasn't a foot of dull space in it. There are a few things in the design that seem arbitrary or merely rhetorical. The towering "parasol" that Gehry put over the river entrance is pointless except as a visual element--its roof is too high to give any protection from the weather. And the twin stone-veneer towers that rise downstream of the La Salve bridge are just...