But it had lasted that long with its thin titanium panels flitting over the ceiling and pouring down the cast-iron columns: a conceptual "tornado" dreamed up by Miyake, sketched out by Frank Gehry, and made real by Kipping, then Gehry's protegé and now a professor at Columbia. The design outlived Gehry by a week and Miyake by three years - a small miracle by today's cycles of retail turnover.
Take the strange, faceless building at Melrose and Sycamore avenues, just up from the house where I grew up. It stood apart from the Melrose Avenue hodgepodge, which included an auto body shop, an old bookstore famous for selling movie scripts, and a trendy boutique that sold vintage fedoras and marked the beginning of Melrose's turn as a fashion mecca.
Gehry created a building that has moments where it is "quite conservative and elegant" but also moments where it is "quite flamboyant and over the top," he said. "Frank Gehry, while he's recognized as being an architect, really thought like an artist. He always looked at possibilities, always pushed the limits of materiality," Jost said. Gehry was a lot of fun, a "really great guy," and he "always approached every project as if it was his first project."
He may not have lived to see his $1 billion-plus vision to upgrade the Los Angeles River come to fruition, but architect Frank Gehry was able to shepherd through a transformational plan that is slated to reimagine one of the West Coast's most underused natural features. He's done almost everything you can possibly do as an architect, Bill Witte, head of Related Companies' California arm,
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, Gehry established his Los Angeles practice in 1962 and soon became known for a radically expressive approach that challenged conventional ideas of form, authorship, and materiality. His 1978 renovation of his own Santa Monica residence-an ordinary bungalow enveloped in plywood, corrugated metal, and chain link-announced his independent voice and aligned him with the artistic experimentation of Southern California.
"They're going to be within that collection, but right next to them, you'll have amazing contemporary artists that maybe, unfortunately, the vast public don't know much about," said Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, promising that the new institution would be "a lot more than a museum," per a report in the National. "It's really a civic space. It's a place that brings people together with music, food, dance and, of course, contemporary art."
