Frank Gehry - arguably the most famous and prolific architects of the last fifty years, - is consistently criticized for solving every design problem with the same pile of crumpled metal sheets. For me, this hardly seems fair –  I would argue that most artists work within a relatively narrow band of exploration and interests.  In any case, Gehry’s new design for a 76-tower building in lower Manhattan is an eye – opener, a novel solution to a problem that has vexed him repeatedly in the past – the punched window. 

Unnecessary for closed box programs like museums and auditoriums, windows have always been difficult to integrate into Gehry’s typically flowing skins. At best, they have appeared as crude buttons, stapled like square sequins on an otherwise swirling fabric. At the Bleeker Tower, the windows finally undulate with the metal skin, blurring the distinctions between them to create an architecture that seems almost carved, sculpted from solid metal. In contrast to his swirling silver dust-storms for the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall, Gehry’s new tower seems load-bearing, a monument in the traditional sense of the word, heavy and permanent. Decidedly ornamental, Gehry’s new tower is a bold new direction is form-making, rejecting the functionalist glass box as a boring and thoroughly exhausted building type.  And that’s pretty exciting for an architect who’s supposedly out of ideas.

(Image artefactory/courtesy Forest City Ratner)