Art history specialists Greenberg and Jordan (Chuck Close, Up Close, 1998, etc.) unite again for an exciting, free wheeling mix of biography and architectural primer, taking readers from the outside to inside the life and work of the acclaimed yet controversial bad boy of international architecture—Frank O. Gehry. Now in his early 70s, he gained international recognition in 1997 when his astounding Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain. That building, with its springy titanium skin and unorthodox organic form (in which “hardly a straight line exists”), has transformed a small Basque city into an international destination with over one million visitors a year. More important, the computer-assisted and truly space-age design (using software originally used in the French aerospace industry) of this “silver dream machine” has changed the practice of architecture—utterly. Gehry’s work is playful, curvilinear, and site-specific, incorporating an unorthodox mix of unconventional space-age materials like highly reflective titanium as well as glass, steel, and limestone. Acknowledging that “life is chaotic” he makes buildings that reflect it. Projects explored include: the “shocking” renovation of his own Santa Monica tract house (featuring metal, chain-link fence, and unpainted plywood); furniture designs realized in corrugated cardboard and wood laminates; Colorcore fish lamps; the “binoculars”-shaped building in Venice, California; and the arresting towers in Prague known as “Fred and Ginger . . . as if one tower were a dancer being spun by another.” Oversized and handsome, the book’s design communicates volumes; it’s an eclectic mix of fonts and colors, enlivened with ghost images, sidebars, drawings, and photos. (glossary, bibliography, list of building locations) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
