Built on the Process of Architecture

Santa Monica architect Frank Gehry has acquired an international reputation by creating symphonic, sculptural structures that defy and redefine our sense of what is possible in buildings of metal, stone and glass.

“What I’m trying to do as an architect is live in this time--I’m not trying to live in the past,” says Gehry of Frank O. Gehry & Associates Inc. “I’m struggling to express the present, to find what’s powerful today.”

And if Gehry’s imagination does not dwell in the past, neither do his working techniques. The fluid, bulging surfaces that mark Gehry’s most innovative designs are not well described with traditional architectural sketches and engineering drawings. Such two-dimensional representations are better suited to straight lines and box-shaped buildings and are particularly ill suited to the aggressively three-dimensional nature of Gehry’s architectural ideas.

About five years ago, Gehry and his associates at the 70-person practice found a critical new tool in the form of computer technology created to manipulate complex volumes and surfaces. The software, called CATIA, was first used to build fighter planes, which, for aerodynamic reasons, must be designed from the “skin” inward--a process similar to Gehry’s.

Typically, Gehry will begin work on a project with a rough pencil sketch, then move to model-building with paper. An associate will convert the surface of the model, or skin, into digital computer data by tracing the model with an electronic stylus that’s attached to a 6-foot-tall three-dimensional point digitizer.

That data is fed into CATIA, where the building’s design is completed. Gehry refers to the computer and the CATIA system as “the gadget”--a verbal vestige, perhaps, of what had been his lack of interest in the rectilinear rigidity of computer-aided design, or CAD, systems.

Computer technology such as the CATIA system is revolutionizing not only the architect’s creative process, but also the relationships of architects to contractors and providers of building materials. This has often been a problem for Gehry; the unfamiliar shapes he creates often draw immediate criticism from contractors, stone millers and others who gripe that the nonstandard shapes will drive costs too high.

Although he allows that his designs cost more to build than simple box-shaped buildings, Gehry says: “Everything about the design process goes faster with the gadget. It’s allowed me to do things that before I could not have done economically.”

More significantly, systems such as the CATIA are changing the building process. Currently, several different types of drawings and blueprints are used by the various teams of contractors, architects and engineers that work together on any single large project.

But, says Gehry, by linking architecture systems such as CATIA with computers used by materials fabricators at their factories and contractors at the building site, all the members of the building process can, for the first time, share a common construction language.

“When you get into innovative work, the contractor is put on the spot,” says Gehry. “With the computer; the design becomes very explicit, the contractors can trust the computer to describe the building.”

The great promise of this, he says, is a reconnection of architects and the builders--a shift that would reestablish the role architects had in earlier centuries, when they worked with tradesmen on the sites.

“Architects have been at the mercy of contractors because it’s the contractors who are controlling the money,” Gehry says. “This gadget has the potential of putting the architect back into the role of master builder.”

Recent examples of Gehry’s singular vision are an office building in a historic section of Prague, Czech Republic, and in the Basque city of Bilbao, Spain, where a new Guggenheim Museum is under construction. These days, however, Gehry’s local reputation, is largely the result of one of the most famous unbuilt buildings in Los Angeles: the stalled Disney Concert Hall.

Paul Karon can be reached via e-mail at pkaron@netcom.com

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Bio Box

Who: Frank O. Gehry

Age: 67

Profession: Architect

Computer: IBM RS 6000, a powerful RISC workstation using IBM’s AIX Unix operating system

Most Important Software: CATIA, from Dassault Systems, a French software firm that originally developed the 3-D design application to build Mirage fighter jets