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In that sense, the artifice and the accounting that brought the IAC Headquarters into existence turned, in part, on the molecular configuration of glass. Not that this mattered to Gehry’s personal “creative process,” which exhibited its usual resourcefulness in recognizing aesthetic potential in the natural tendency of so unnatural a material as glass to deflect under pressure. But it does raise a number of questions. The first has to do with authorship. Who designed the IAC? At one level, the answer is simple: Frank Gehry. But maybe we should also say “Frank Gehry,” which is another name for the system behind the “star system”: long lists of extras and bit players, assistants to the assistant producer. To put it slightly differently, this may or may not be a “real” Gehry building. And oddly enough, this possibility makes the entire operation more revealing about what constitutes an authentic work of architecture in the first place, and about the world in which that work may or may not exist.
Presented with such a possibility, the task of criticism is not to reproduce the vernacular of movie advertisements and declare a particular building a “stunning achievement.” Nor is it to register disappointment, via the usual combination of scorn and condescension. Either response only offers more raw material to the culture industry. Instead, the task of criticism is to pose questions — to de-contextualize and to re-contextualize —to understand what is at stake in the situation at hand. So to ask whether (and in what sense) we are actually dealing with something that can be called a “work” of architecture here is to detach the object from the name (or “signature”) of the architect to see the social, economic, and aesthetic function of both more clearly.
Thus: Whether or not Gehry himself arrived at the insight to use cold forming at IAC, an entire team of professionals was necessary to pull it off, not a few of whom worked for the glass manufacturer Permasteelisa. Where is the line between architect / author and consultant / collaborator here? Unclear. Likewise for the building’s interiors, most of which were actually executed by STUDIOS Architecture. Though here, the demarcating line may be a little more visible. Generally, it can be drawn a few feet in from the facade at the perimeter cove light that lines the building on each floor and the accompanying layer of mechanical shades, each custom-cut (and many curved), that can be lowered to reduce or eliminate the sunlight. Regardless of what particular combination of architects and consultants actually designed this combination of details at the building’s perimeter, together with the fritted glazing they construct a layered depth that may be seen from the outside during the day and a phosphorescent glow at night. These visual properties are central to the building’s architectural claims.
Equally important, however, is that STUDIOS, headquartered in San Francisco and veterans of Silicon Valley, are experts in the reinvention of the office. From their early, jaunty-yet-relaxed campus for Silicon Graphics (now the Googleplex) in Mountain View, California, to the New York interiors of Bloomberg L.P. Headquarters, they have developed a systems approach that combines informality with efficiency. Though office culture was evidently not an overriding concern for Gehry, judging from the results it was most definitely of concern to his client. IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller presides over a conglomerate comprising over sixty Internet-related entities, each with its own identity and mission, gathered together here for the first time in one building. And so, inboard from the cove light we find a new-economy office landscape dedicated to intra-office social life (snack bars on every office floor, cafeteria above, etc.). The plans demonstrate the difficulty of squeezing this system of social systems — quasi-modular, loose, but still systematic — into Gehry’s undulating shell and core. STUDIOS accomplishes this with a certain finesse, though the two architectures grate against one another at their many points of contact.