Speaking bluntly, there are not many differences between the construction of the Statue of Liberty and Frank Gehry’s recent buildings. m odern architects often compared clothing with architecture, and tailors, fashion designers and editors talk about the ‘construction’ of clothes, where flat patterns become three-dimensional through a series of operations — cutting, sewing, and stitching. Drapery, though, is a word rarely mentioned in architectural discourse. What exactly is a drapery? It is the simplest method of dressing: a piece of cloth hung on the body without cutting or sewing. Drapery has no form by itself — it moves freely with the body and it behaves according to the thickness of the cloth. liberty The draped body was traditionally associated with luxury, wealth and nobility, yet the render- ing of drapery in architecture is quite rare. One exception is the 151 foot tall and 225 tons of green copper drapery on the colossal Statue of Liberty, designed in 1880s by the French neoclassical sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, in direct imitation of antiquity. The Lady Liberty is habitable; unlike other stat- ues, its skin encloses an interior space. Her loose copper drapery is hung over armatures placed on an iron skeleton designed by Gustave Eiffel.The inner surface of Liberty’s copper skin and the iron skeleton are not intended to be visually connected — this uncanny conjunction is part of the visitor’s experience. Bartholdi conceived Liberty entirely in terms of its outer contours. After settling the final form in a clay model, it was enlarged to a full-scale set of plaster fragments in his Paris workshop. Following the contours of the plas- ter, massive wooden moulds were built and thin copper sheets (2.5mm thick) were ham- mered onto the moulds.The copper panels are fastened together, hung on the iron skeleton and present her rippling skin. rock and roll Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, opened in June 2000, was the first large-scale Gehry building after Bilbao. EMP is a music museum dedicated to Seattle-born Jimi Hen- drix, thanks to the globally wealthy cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen’s love of rock music and his $240 million. The museum’s webpages explain that EMP’s structure ‘symbolizes the energy and fluidity of music’, while an electric guitar is the source of inspiration. One can imagine Gehry, a classical music fan, going to a guitar store and buying several electric guitars. After taking them back to his office Gehry ends up being inspired only by their shiny finish. EMP shimmers in vivid red, purple, blue, gold and silver, dominating the Seattle convention area.
tailoring William Zahner is the head of a steel company in Kansas City and, equally, a tailor. Working directly from the digital model provided by Gehry, Zahner’s firm produced the nearly 4,000 panels that form the exterior skin of EMP. Each panel holds about seven shingles that have a unique shape and size, tailored to fit exactly in a specific location and stitched to other panels in situ. The building’s surface looks like a patterned drapery. Consider the time, energy, and amount of money spent in draping these metal shingles over EMP’s struc- ture. Given the materiality and weight of the building, the making of a drapery is not an easy task. under the surface One sees in EMPs drapery both the represen- tation of technology and, beneath the glossy surface, the unlimited budget of the client. It seems that drapery continues to suggest luxury and wealth as it did in art for centuries. Depicting drapery in Renaissance paintings, linked to the rise of rich merchant families, had no purpose other than ‘to take delight in the way it looks’. Tellingly, such over-draped fabrics were derided by reformers in the nineteenth century for representing ‘a millionaire’s notion of the pretty and nothing more’. Anne Hollander explains the concept of drap- ery as ‘something which, while it conceals, yet confers an extra ennobling or decorative dimension upon the essentially wretched and silly human form’. What is behind the drapery in EMP comes to mind. Drapery directs one’s attention to the presentation of the object underneath, but what happens if the drapery becomes the object itself? Unlike the Statue of Liberty, EMP is a museum — the structure is not its only material presence. The museum desperately tries to push the content forward: ‘If you think its wild on the outside, just wait until you get inside.There you will find interac - tive exhibits, rare artifacts and a one-of-a-kind ride!’ Having us pay $20 to get inside, rather than stopping at the exterior skin, is their aim. The many connotations of drapery, luxury, excess, concealment and display seem uninten- tionally appropriate for EMP. The surface is almost a fetish. Although it appears as a loose drape laid over the structure, it is uniquely tailored, an expensive, shiny, boozy dress ready for a rock concert. Versace for buildings. 1 Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty, New York:The Viking Press, Inc., 1976: 119-50. 2 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1995: 120-1. 3 Anne Hollander,‘The Fabric of Vision:The Role of Drapery in Art’ Georgia Review 29, 1975: 431. 5 Gen Doy , Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London; New York: I.B.Tauris, 2002: 11. 6 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes. New York:Viking Press, 1978: 15.
Rock and Liberty Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry
Açalya Kiyak
in the outside In the complete monograph of Gehry only one section and a few plan drawings of EMP appear. There is an obvious reason: try to imagine describing the building in conventional draw- ings — building EMP from orthogonal drawings would be nearly impossible. Robin Evans wrote that in Scharouns’s Philharmonie project, con- struction workers faced serious difficulties in setting out the foundations. Only after taking large-scale sections at very closely spaced intervals across the breadth of the building, could workers build it. To describe EMP one would need billions of thin slices. Instead of this burdensome task, Gehry’s office used a digital three-dimensional model as the single source of information for the entire project. Working with a wire frame model of the exte- rior surface of the building, EMP was conceived from outside in, not unlike the Statue of Liberty. Similar to Liberty, Gehry begins with a study model. Once he decides on the final form, the model is digitized and scaled to full-size in the computer environment. At this stage the building is constructed, virtually, in three-dimen- sions.The software allows the three-dimen- sional forms to be charted two-dimensionally. In a method similar to tailoring, cutting machines produce each shape from flat sheets of metal.
Açalya Kiyak is a PhD student at the Univesity of Pennsylvania.
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