The Guardian has a good morning read on Frank Gehry and the critical backlash that's trying bite into his considerable legacy. The American architect is world famous for his weird, wobbly, eyesight-defying designs, one of which we have in our own backyard: The Weatherhead School of Management's Peter B. Lewis Building at Case. If you haven't seen it, it looks like a regular ol' campus bore of a building that's been microwaved.
But not everyone is into Gehry's stuff. A lot of cocktail party stiffs in places like New York bash on his work for its extravagance. But as the 82-year-old architect lays it out, his work is about putting some jazz into otherwise bleak landscapes. That pretty much sums up what his building did for Case. The story includes a quote that directly applies to the rest of Cleveland, and makes us wish we had a couple more Gehrys laying around.
"Most of our cities built since the war are bland," he says. "They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that. But there are people in the community who want a little more juice, something to relate to, and so they seek out artists and the artists they seek out have become very wealthy and they have big studios."
