The man who designed the Guggenheim Bilbao wants to adorn your body
By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Frank Gehry’s recent commissions: Atlantic Yards, a 22-acre project in Brooklyn. Beekman Street Tower, a 75-story apartment building in lower Manhattan. And earrings.
Tiffany commissioned the celebrated architect to design jewelry three years ago, and the results are now in the store’s glass cases. You can also see the pieces at the September 15 preview party at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
It’s Gehry’s way of defying gravity.
“When you design a building, you need things to stand up and stay stable,” explains Peter MacKeith, associate dean of architecture at Washington University. Freed from such constraints, jewelry is intimate in its relation to the human body. So instead of figuring out how to make organic curves in load-bearing walls, Gehry cut loose, imagining his sketches realized not in drywall but in black gold, pernambuco wood, cocholong stone ...
Knowing Gehry, MacKeith wasn’t surprised by the results: “His work is sculptural, freely formed, organic.” And the change in scale? “That kind of crossover has been going on much longer than we think. There’s an added layer in Gehry or Michael Graves associating themselves with specific companies. But early in human culture, designers were working across all scales. At our new school [MacKeith is also associate director of the new Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Wash. U.], this is something we encourage our students to do: work at the urban-design scale and at the scale of the human body. The boundaries are artificial.”
