EMP is the first major public building of Gehry’s to open since the Bilbao museum nearly three years ago. Gehry has said that the pressure to top Bilbao didn’t really affect EMP–he’d started designing it long before the Guggenheim even opened. And despite that six-week funk, he says he’s very happy with how the $100 million-plus building turned out–he’s even described it as “huggable.” Huggable? “It’s a primitive thing,” he says, pointing to the curve of his arm. “Like your mother cradled you as a baby. That’s what the curves are, the movement of the forms.” So where do all those huggable, curvy forms come from in the first place? “People think I just do a souffle,” he says, a bit testily. His lack of pretention and his ’60s-California way of talking tend to belie the erudite library of sources burned into his brainpan. One of his sculptural shapes was originally inspired by a form he saw on the 15th-century sarcophagus of Philip the Bold in Dijon, carved by Claus Sluter. What makes such swoopy shapes buildable is a computer program, used in the Bilbao project, that precisely plots the specifications for contractors. “At EMP,” says Gehry, “there were amazing breakthroughs in the technical/construction side.”
That technology has made clients confident that his designs can be built without huge cost premiums. Gehry’s long-dormant scheme for the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is now under construction. He’s just finished the design phase for an enormous building for MIT. But maybe the most watched post-Bilbao project is a speculative, stunning design that was unveiled this spring for a Guggenheim Museum on the East River in lower Manhattan. The plan has drawn out detractors as well, who think he’s overreached with the enormous scale of the project and with its maverick design. But a scheme by a West Coast renegade seems just the ticket for a museum like EMP. While critics may not grant it the reverence they did Bilbao, rock fans are sure to embrace it–after all, it’s huggable.
