City of Sound is about cities, design, architecture, music, media, politics and more. Written by Dan Hill since 2001.

Sketches of Gehry’s Guggenheim

Written in

by

Inspired by a few posts today, I’m posting up some old sketches of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. iirc,  I did these from photos I took a few years ago, not long after I’d returned from the city. I’m posted because of a post by Peter Lindberg at Tesugen, reacting to Nikos Salingaros’ view that Gehry’s Guggenheim doesn’t deal with context. One of the key things I drew from experiencing the Bilbao Guggenheim was just how situated it was in local context, with the form echoing the great hulls of the now-departed ships from the docks and how the gallery actually absorbed the local traffic system, river, and local bridges. In rough sketches here, you can see how the existing road bridge merges into the new building itself, such that from inside the gallery the traffic sweeps around you, whereas from outside, in car, it’s almost as if you’re driving through a wing of the gallery. As Peter notes, the building means a great deal to the people of Bilbao. It’s contextual in design, and it’s contextual now. The sketches show that aspect of the Guggenheim, with the existing road bridge struts to the left, and the road curving around the structure to the right (these are details – click for the larger image):
gugg_bridge2_thumb

gugg_bridge1_thumb

I’m not going to apologise for the hasty, impressionistic style of the sketches. Having tried and failed to draw the thing vaguely accurately, I decided the only possible response was to let go. A decent monograph about Gehry’s work notes his own preferred drawing style (it’s amazing how many drawings he produces, given how his work is presumed to be entirely computer-generated) – Gehry lets his pen flow across the paper, rarely if ever lifting it from the page. He likens it to an ice-skater, sweeping around the ‘canvas’ but not leaving the ice. I wasn’t aware of this when I did these drawings, but inspired by Rodcorp’s recent experiments in ‘How simply and recognisably can we draw buildings?’, in turn inspired by Things Magazine’s post on buildings as logos (including ‘building logotype tennis’ by Jonathan Bell and I in the comments there), I’m posting these sketches here anyway. The only way I could think of representing the sinuous form of Gehry’s Guggenheim was let the pen go (again, these are details – click for the larger image) …

gugg2_thumb

gugg1_thumb

gugg3_thumb

Bearing in mind Rodcorp’s question, are these incredibly quick and ‘careless’ scribbles recognisably Guggenheim?

Tesugen: Salingaros on Deconstructionism
Rodcorp: How simply and recognisably can we draw buildings?
Thingsmagazine: buildings as logos

Tags

5 responses to “Sketches of Gehry’s Guggenheim”

  1. Submit Response Avatar

    Architectural Eavesdropping

    A criticism often levelled at weblogs is that they tend toward the circle jerk (or echo chamber, if you’re feeling…

    Like

  2. deconstructor Avatar

    The Imageability of Bilbao

    I’d like to make a few comments about some great recent discussion between Dan Hill of City of Sound and

    Like

  3. alan casey Avatar
    alan casey

    gehry is why i want to become an architect

    Like

  4. Dan Avatar

    Trackbacks on this post, received at the time (before I turned trackbacks off due to spam):


    » Architectural Eavesdropping from Submit Response
    A criticism often levelled at weblogs is that they tend toward the circle jerk (or echo chamber, if you’re feeling… [Read More]


    » The Imageability of Bilbao from deconstructor
    I’d like to make a few comments about some great recent discussion between Dan Hill of City of Sound and [Read More]

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: