Frank Gehry in Progress
Friday, 25th March 2011 by Matt Bucher
Out in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Street View car has captured a Frank Gehry building in the process of being built. It's the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health which opened in July 2009 so it's reasonable to assume these images date from 2008 or early 2009.
From the aerial view, you can get a glimpse of Gehry's signature "deconstructed" style.
When the $70M is lit up (this is Vegas, after all), the finished building looks like this:
Photograph by Matthew Carbone on behalf of the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.
By zooming in further, you can see how the panels that support the building's stainless-steel exterior are welded together. The thickness of the walls also acts as a sound barrier.
In Manhattan, it's possible catch of one of Gehry's largest projects under construction: 8 Spruce Street. The skyscraper is 76 stories high, the tallest residential tower in the Americas, and was completed in February 2011.
There are dozens of other Gehry buildings viewable on Google Street View, but I think my personal favourite is Dancing House in Prague.
I should have mentioned in this post that this building was pointed out to me by Tyler Runner.
WTF? Why would anyone want to build a building that looks like it’s been hit by both an earthquake and a tsunami?
Not to mention the final use of the building – a psychiatric clinic…One would enter doubting one’s sanity and probably find the interior was not exactly conformed to recovering it, quite apart from the shock on exiting it. The late Airey Neave, when a prisoner in Colditz, observed that the first sign of mental instability was an interest in psychiatry – this rather proves his point.