How to Make a Frank Gehry Building

06-16-2005 7:57:37 AM

Posted by: Alex Marshall

April 8, 2001

How to Make a Frank Gehry Building

By ALEX MARSHALL

The Peter B. Lewis building in Cleveland, which will soon be the management school for Case Western Reserve University, began its life in Frank Gehry's Santa Monica office as a collection of wood blocks on a foam board. Using the blocks, Gehry worked with school officials over many months to lay out the basic elements of the building, deciding its overall shape and size. They fitted in all the classrooms and offices the school wanted, as well as a five-story atrium and an intricate system of "crossroads" designed to maximize encounters among students and teachers.

Once he had the blocks logically arranged on the board, Gehry began to wrap them, changing the cubes into swirls, cyclones and tubes. The process is improvisational, like a musician riffing around a set of chord changes. His materials are mostly paper and cardboard -- he might rip pages from a magazine and drape the sheets over the tops of several blocks or use a small bottle of white-out to stand in for a skylight he is imagining. Often, he says, he'll have two or three models going at the same time, so he doesn't fall in love with any one of them and forget that he's working on a building, not on a piece of sculpture.

On the Lewis building, which is named for a local insurance mogul, Gehry estimates that he and his staff worked their way through 60 or 70 models. This part of the creative process is relatively free and easy. With his models, Gehry can change anything on the merest whim. But to build, he is forced to rely on a cast of hundreds, if not thousands, all of whom must remain scrupulously devoted to his original vision. "The dream, as you prepare the drawings and the models, has to go through a lot of people and come out the other end with the passion and feeling that you invested in it," Gehry says. "A sea of humanity has to touch it." Here's how it's done.

1. Turn the cardboard model into virtual reality and then back to cardboard. When Gehry has a model he likes, a technician takes it and runs a tool the size of a dentist's drill across its contours. This instrument, which was developed to map the human spine, is hooked up to a computer monitor, where lines appear in a three-dimensional construct. On completion, the virtual rendering looks like what a child might produce using tracing paper, only in three dimensions. This is cleaned up by a technician, and a complete virtual model is constructed.

At this point, the Lewis building has entered the powerful computer program Catia, which stands for Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application. It will eventually contain the exact position of every joist, stud, floor plate and electrical socket, and everyone involved with the building, from the architects to the bricklayers, will use it to see what goes where. A French firm, Dassault Systemes, invented the program 20 years ago to design the Mirage fighter jet; on the computer, designers could see a plane's flowing curves more easily than they could on paper. Gehry's office discovered Catia in the late 1980's while looking for ways to realize ever more complex designs. His groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, could probably not have been built without it.

Once the Lewis building is inside the machine, the software spits out dimensions, which Gehry's staff uses to build another physical model. They make certain that it matches his original, and then, almost inevitably, Gehry will continue to tweak and tinker with it. Finally it goes back to Catia.

2. Ask the computer how to build it. What makes Catia indispensable is that it translates the language of the designer into the language of the builder, enabling Gehry to erase the barriers that have developed between the two disciplines over the last century. Catia, says Gehry, allows architects to be "parental." It turns a model into a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that the architects and builders solve together. "Instead of looking at the Peter Lewis building as a pile of ribbons," says Gehry's partner Jim Glymph, "you look at it as a series of components that you can build."

In this case Catia breaks down Gehry's voluptuous sculpture into "lines of ruling"; every curve is configured as a series of tiny straight lines, each one changing direction ever so slightly to form the arc of the curve. On the building, the lines are steel tubes one after another, arrayed like a fan, to create an internal structure that can then be papered over with stainless steel or the titanium shingles that Gehry loves.

3. Make contractors do things they've never done before. Each of the major contractors involved in the Lewis building's construction -- concrete, steel, drywall, roofing -- came up with a technical innovation that made their part of the job possible. Mariani Metal Fabricators devised a way to bend the steel pipe to form the serpentine curves, a process that combined ancient forging techniques with the precision of Catia. The GQ Contracting Company figured out a way to frame for drywall on the curved interior surfaces with conventional metal studs. "We've had to create framing systems that did not exist prior to this project," says Ed Sellers of GQ Contracting. "I can't go too far in explaining -- my patent is pending."

People say that Gehry's post-Bilbao buildings look alike -- all those shiny curves -- but they aren't built alike. The Guggenheim in Bilbao has all straight steel, similar to scaffolding. For the Experience Music Project in Seattle, which opened last year, Gehry and his contractors actually bent the I-beams to make the curving shapes. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, now about half built, is a cage of short I-beams and combines both straight and bent steel structures.

Structurally, the Lewis building in Cleveland is a giant hunk of sculptured concrete that forms the floor and the load-bearing walls; thousands of pieces of steel are stuck in the concrete like pins into a cushion and form the structure for the curving walls and roof, which is covered with a layer of shiny steel. The choice of materials is a combination of three things: Gehry's taste, the budget and, most important, the talents of the local work force. Plaster, for example, was never considered for the Lewis building, because compared with Boston or New York, Cleveland has relatively few skilled plasterers.

Gehry, for his part, considers construction part of the artistic process. "You start to create these relationships with craftsmen whose touch and feel you understand," he says. "It's like picking a color from a palette. You know the touch and feel of the paint."

4. Put the puzzle pieces together. On the job site in Cleveland, a crane operator lowers a two-story piece of steel onto an undulating concrete wall while a hard-hatted ironworker and a surveyor wait to receive it.

The ironworker positions the steel according to the instructions of the surveyor, who takes measurements through the sight of his level on a tripod. There are surveying points positioned all around the site, including one several blocks away on the top of a tall building, and the surveyor uses a machine to bounce laser beams off them to get a precise reading on where this particular piece of steel should go. The workers cannot rely on experience or intuition to get it right; they must do what the machine tells them. Each piece fits into imaginary dotted lines in space, dictated by the Catia coordinates.

This methodical puzzle-solving process is what makes Gehry's buildings so distinct and so difficult to build. "The typical stud wall in an office, you can measure it against another wall that is 10 feet away, working off a blueprint," says Dan Seib of Hunt Construction Group, the project's general contractor. "With our walls, you can't look at them and tell if they're correct. You have to work from a computer model that locates things in space. Looks are deceiving."

5. Don't make a single mistake. As Seib suggests, even the slightest imperfection can doom a Gehry building. In a conventional structure, if a carpenter puts in a stud two inches off, the guy who comes in to hang the drywall can fill in the gap, and nobody will ever know the difference. But on the Lewis building, with curves spiraling through space, two inches off at one point can mean several feet off somewhere else. "The old adage is, You measure twice and cut once," says David Krymowski, the project manager for Case Western Reserve. "Here, you measure a dozen times. The ripple effect of a construction flaw is extreme." At $400 a square foot (more than twice what a regular "nice" university building might cost), the contractor can't afford to let that happen.

It is the abilities and imagination of contractors and craftspeople, Gehry says, that determine how much further he'll be able to take his architecture. His dream is to build a curvy glass skyscraper, which among other things would require the invention of a mullion system to lay in windows along a contour. He's not sure there's a contractor out there who can do it, but that hasn't stopped him from looking. "I haven't found the edge yet," says the 72-year-old Gehry. "I don't see the edge yet."

Alex Marshall, the author of "How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken," lives in New York City.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Categories: Architecture