"Architecture should speak for its time and place, but
yearn for its timelessness" -Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry is a famous architect whose work you would
recognize from class. Gehry is most famous for his Walt Disney Concert hall
which looks like a giant metal sculpture and rather than a building of any
sort. Once I discovered that a couple thousand people can, and have fit into
that building, my first question was how?
Many buildings today in this postmodern era are like this.
Buildings are made to look like two cultures from across the world collided
(disharmonious harmony) or built with a huge hole in the middle (absent center),
or even made to look like a human head (anthropomorphism). This is architecture
in the 21st century. Something that is so different and out of the box, that
sometimes I don't even recognize it as a building.
In reference to the quote from Gehry above, “but yearn for
its timelessness.” Gehry is doing something with these buildings that is so
different and new that he will not doubt be put in architecture text books and
be remembered for his radical designs, but are they going to be timeless? When
I think of timeless, I think a very traditional house that was as popular 500
years ago as it is today. Are Gehry’s radical designs really something that is
going to be timeless?
This is something that makes me think about postmodernism
architecture and postmodernism as a whole. These new and world changes ideas
are things that are taking people off their feet. But these new, “out of the
box” ideas come along every day. I wonder if the world will be so ununiform that
it gets out of control, and that we won’t even recognize the places we are or
the significance of them.
Our world is changing faster than it ever has in the past, and
that change seems to only be increasing. Will it ever change too fast?
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