This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

NOTE: This is an article I am fleshing out, and I posted some of it to Metafilter about Frank O. Gehry, and style.
I really think that the problem with Frank Gehry, is that he is trapped in his fame. Once he completed the Guggenheim Bilbao, and everyone went nuts over it, that is all he has been allowed to do. Client’s love that stuff: it is flashy without being terribly earth shattering, his designs make for fairly pretty pictures, and for awhile institutions who had “graduated” to the next just had to have a Gehry building. So, there are literally hundreds of Bilbao’s around the world, with different programs (internal space requirements), different locations, different users, all built at a different point in time.
It is if Corbusier’s Modernism (big M, the 1930’s German version of Modernism) was taken out of storage, given a new coat of paint, and unleashed on the world. Le Corbusier (not to mention Mies van der Rohe) were champions of a modernism that was beyond time and place, and which extolled the virtue of modern technology. Gehry is almost a photo negative of this idea; Gehry’s buildings have no contextual frame – both in time and space, do not take into account human occupation, and (when we get down to it) are merely surface creatures. Program spaces are manipulated and then wallpaper, in many cases (expensive) titanium and stainless steel, are applied to that exteriority.
Corbusier’s fetishism of the luxury ocean liner, the train, concrete grain elevators has been interchanged with Gehry’s reliance on CATIA software (3d positioning software), computer modeling, and stainless steel. Both Corbusier and Gehry reacted to technological progress; Corbusier responded to the horrors of mechanized warfare of World War I and Gehry responded to the acceleration of the computer in design. Corbusier’s city for a million people and Plan for Paris could be built anywhere; and that was the point. Many of Corbusier’s designs employed devices, such as pilotis (short columns) and large squares in which the buildings were placed, in an attempt to bring order to the unordered. The building, as an object, in a perfect field. Gehry places the building, as an object, but in an imperfect field. Yet, bracket Gehry’s buildings, and any single building could have been built anywhere else.
The tabla rasa has come full circle, yet tweaked by Post Modern sensibilities.
Gehry and Corbusier diverge, of course, on many counts. Where Corbusier seemed to grow from a restrictive geometry and ordering system to a more playful modernism, Gehry creates no organizational system for his blobies to operate in. There is no “normal” for the “abnormal” blobs of his to juxtapose. Gehry places his buildings in the heterogeneous landscape because he knows he can no longer control the land.
For example, Corbusier’s Villa Savoy operates in a very ordered geometry and organization, with a few objects breaking free of the organizational field. Gehry creates no such rigorous interplay between the rigid and flexible; it is literally all play. Which might sound great, but think of the suburban sprawl, where every house tries to project its own identity, and you get a Geography of Nowhere. Gehry does operate on a type of internal organization, developed from the program brief, yet this internal organization is suspended when the outer wallpaper is suspended over the spaces.
Gehry freely admits manipulating program spaces for aesthetic value – which is fine – but should not be the base of a design-wide organization scheme. There is something glorious in the formal manipulations by Gehry, but the intellectual underpinnings of his work I believe to be weak, especially his one-size-fits-all mentality. He is the great McMuseum builder of our time.