Building the Vitra Design Museum in the 1980s, construction workers hit a kink in the curvature of the roof. It was the architect’s fault. Frank Gehry’s spectacularly sculptural structure was simply too complicated to fully plan out with pencil and T-square. So for his next project, Gehry phoned up Lockheed, reasoning that the aerospace industry knew how to flawlessly model phenomenal complexity in 3D. Over the next decade, he became one of the first architects to enlist computers in his work. Without them, there probably wouldn’t be a Disney Concert Hall or Guggenheim Bilbao.
Yet that hasn’t made Gehry a convert. As a revealing new exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture shows, ambivalence about digital architecture was characteristic of most of the architects who pioneered it, including Peter Eisenman, Chuck Hoberman and Shoei Yoh. “The computer has become an opportunistic gadget for most of the profession,” Gehry tells the architect-cum-curator Greg Lynn in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. “The personal intervention, the brain that transforms it into art, is needed to get beyond the recognizable language of the computer program.”
If Gehry’s critique isn’t especially new or original, the ways in which these four architects have interacted with computers – and the reasons they approached computing in the first place – are revealing for any architect or designer or client confronting digital tools today. For Hoberman, who wanted his buildings to physically transmute, computers were tools for precision engineering. Yoh found aesthetic inspiration in computer renditions of structural forces: The shape of his buildings visualized the physics that held them erect. And Eisenman was interested in the architecture of computing itself, seeking to make the iterative process of computation a generator for novel architectural forms. In other words, for those three builders the use of computers was a calculated decision rather than an initial assumption.
Gehry’s early work comes closer to how computers are currently used. In a sense he was the forerunner to all he despises in architecture. Gehry was seeking to make more expressive buildings, and computers gave him the technical means, invisible partners silently crunching numbers. Frank Gehry is too good an architect, too rigorously trained, to fall victim to their default values. Yet the total integration that gave him such expressive freedom is what has given machines such control over the shape of our cities today.
[Caption: Frank O. Gehry & Associates, Inc. Lewis Residence, Lyndhurst, Ohio: Elevation rendering from Catia 3D model, 1989-1995. Image provided by Gehry Partners, LLP.]