BY MICHAEL GLUK

In print | Published February 5, 2009

The Philadelphia Museum of Art currently is currently featuring an exhibit about pivotal contemporary architect Frank Gehry until April 5. Unique to this display of the artist’s work is its focus. It’d hardly be surprising to find oneself confronted with a museum space dedicated to Gehry’s legendary Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, but one might be surprised to discover that this much-hyped exhibit focuses on a structure that was never built: the Lewis House.

The Lewis House was a private residence commissioned by Peter B. Lewis, former owner of Progressive Insurance, in 1985 and underwent a decade’s worth of designing and redesigning until it was scrapped in 1995.

As a private residence, the commission afforded Gehry nearly limitless freedom to experiment with his design. Examining the design process of the Lewis House, therefore, provides a truly singular opportunity to trace the developmental arc of Gehry’s ideas.

The organization of the exhibit’s rectangular space encourages the viewer to draw parallels between Gehry’s other works and the Lewis House. On the rectangle’s perimeter sit descriptions, photos, interviews and artifacts from Gehry’s other works, arranged roughly chronologically; in the center sit three long display cases which house artifacts from the Lewis House design process, culminating in a complete model from a stage of the design’s development.

The perimeter exhibit begins with a display of Gehry’s 1969 cardboard furniture endeavor called Easy Edges, explaining how it was partially in the process of creating furniture that Gehry developed his characteristic billowing lines and irregular shapes, forms he employed in his model of the Lewis House.

Down the line sits a display of the Vila Olimpica, Gehry’s first digitally modeled project. Gehry eventually used the same program, CATIA, in designing the Lewis House, as the program facilitated the creation of highly abstracted, zoomorphic forms. Gehry pioneered this technology, allowing him to create shapes and spaces never before possible in architecture and opening the possibility of a new architectural language for the new millennium.

The central displays deal exclusively with the Lewis House, showcasing Gehry’s models and the individual components he used to build them. One case houses an array of Gehry’s “fish models” — highly abstracted, zoomorphic forms resembling a fish that helped give the Lewis House design its loose yet coherent movement. Such displays contain information of particular interest to architects and architecture students, since they detail specifically and technically how Gehry crafted his models. They note how he modeled his signature billowing, undulating forms encased in sheet metal. In the models, as in his actual buildings, Gehry would wrap existing sheets of metal around a skeletal frame.

Other zoomorphic forms discussed in the displays include those of a stegosaurus and a horse’s head. Amazingly, in each of the three final designs presented, Gehry managed to merge these unrelated and compartmentalized forms into a coherent, continuous composition.

The aforementioned rectangular layout of the gallery truly proves conducive to understanding Gehry’s style and process as a whole. The technical details of Gehry’s construction and the evolution of his unique forms sit in the center of the space, and as one peruses the perimeter’s displays, one can easily see these processes and ideas manifested in Gehry’s legendary structures, both pre- and post- Lewis House.

One aspect of Gehry’s work notably missing from the exhibit was any discussion of his buildings’ interiors. Perhaps this exclusion was deliberate, though; Gehry and the post-structuralist style he is said to represent fall under much criticism for not heeding the adage that “form follows function,” arguably modern architecture’s manifesto since the period began around the turn of the twentieth century. Gehry’s architecture, detractors argue, places too much emphasis on the exterior shell, sacrificing the building’s actual “function” and context for “form” and aesthetics.

The exhibit’s narrow focus on Gehry’s Lewis House is deceptive; upon leaving, viewers should truly feel better sense of how to contextualize, examine, and understand this great contemporary architect.

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