Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
From its first placard, the exhibition pulled no punches. There, within corridors that were his own creation, came blunt questions of the man's achievement and legacy:
"Genius? Fraud? Artist? Who is Frank Gehry?"
Such was the introduction to a recent retrospective on Mr. Gehry's long career in architecture and design. The exhibition was held inside the architect's first Ohio building - the sculpture-for-living that is the University of Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts.
Adjoined to the Toledo Museum of Art, the center opened 15 years ago next month as a home to the university's art department and the museum's reference library. Outside the 51,000-square-foot building is an agglomeration of boxy shapes and zig-zagging angles clad in gray lead-coated copper plates.
Mr. Gehry has described the building's skin as a jazz excursion, complete with visual riffs and syncopated rhythms that lift the eye up, then down, then back around. One critic called it "a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum's grounds."
The University of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts adjoining the art museum has been called by one critic ‘a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum’s grounds.’
It's just such design creativity that lifted Mr. Gehry to the pedestal of the world's most well-known living "starchitect." Yet that iconoclasm has often generated controversy for his projects in Toledo and elsewhere.