Dancing House - Frank Gehry
Dancing House - Frank Gehry
“As a young architect I studied Frank Lloyd Wright. I did everything: I studied every drawing, every piece of work, every building, all the houses, I visited everything.”
Said the architect, addressing the crowd seated inside the Guggenheim rotunda — designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
“And then I got a chance to meet him, and I turned it down. I just didn’t want to meet him.”
He was told many times to never to meet your heroes.
Frank Lloyd Wright's most iconic building was also one of his last. The reinforced-concrete spiral known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City on October 21, 1959; six months before, Wright died at the age of 92.
Four decades later, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao—the curvaceous, titanium-clad affiliated museum in northern Spain—would launch a wave of cutting-edge architectural schemes for art institutions across the globe.
Many commissions followed for Gehry, taking the Walt Disney Concert Hall as an example, not only did this change the local landscape it also rejuvenated the Downtown area of Los Angeles.
Others include the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.
I ended up being a lot busier than I thought I was going to be in Prague but I did get to scout the Dancing House with local architectural guide and curator of my photography exhibit, Adam Stech. My original plan was to photograph it at night but after my scouting trip late one night I realized the lighting was, how do I say...not great on the design so I had to settle for a cloudy day instead. The Dancing House was designed by the Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunić in cooperation with Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry on a vacant riverfront plot. The building was designed in 1992. was completed four years later in 1996.
Gehry originally called the house Ginger and Fred (after the dancers Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – the house resembles a pair of dancers), but the nickname Ginger & Fred is now mainly used for the restaurant located on the seventh floor of the Dancing House Hotel. Gehry himself later discarded his own idea, as he was "afraid to import American Hollywood kitsch to Prague".
The style is known as deconstructivist ("new-baroque" to the designers) architecture due to its unusual shape. The "dancing" shape is supported by 99 concrete panels, each a different shape and dimension. On the top of the building is a large twisted structure of metal nicknamed Mary. So many nicknames to this design =)
If you are interested in seeing more Frank Gehry check out DANALKA.com. Dan is the photographer and I met him at my photography exhibit in Prague. He is doing the same type of project as me with Wright but he is photographing Gehry and has met and photographed Gehry as well. Pretty cool.