Gehry’s work has been shallow and glitzy for a very long time, but clearly a lot of people do enjoy culture-lite.

The problem with buildings is that they hang around. Unlike junk art, they are hard to hide when they become embarrasing. While we can ignore Jeff Koons, or Andre Rieu, we have to deal with the fall out from an inadequate building for a very long time.

Frank’s work is likely to be very dated very quickly, (remember Michael Graves?) and of course, most of it has suffered from serious functional issues and significant cost overruns. UTS may yet live to regret their foolish decision to commission Frank to design their new Business School.

While ever clients demand a recognisable design brand, instead of a commitment to a design process, we will have starchitetcts producing buildings which are only vaguely functional and barely acknowledge their site or social context, just as we will have more Louis Vuitton luggage and more Alessi kettles.

That this is not a good model for the design of buildings (or suitcases) should be self evident, but unless clients develop the self-confidence to differentiate good design from flim-flam, Andre Rieu, Jeff Koons, Frank Gehry, Louis Vuitton and their profits are all safe for now.

Let me bore further by reposting this:

(blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2012/03/21/is-architecture-mostly-about-marketing/#comment-4934)
michael r james Posted March 22, 2012 at 1:28 pm
.
Indeed there is much wrong with this whole starchitect phenomenon. I am very much in two minds about Gehry and his buildings.
.
Yes, the Bilbao Guggenheim is spectacular eye candy (though no way do I accept it as better than the SOH as some try to suggest) but as for its actual function: meh. Inside it has a sterile gargantuanism and as curators and art critics have pointed out, it cannot be used for anything other than equally gigantic artworks–which means a lot of very dubious stuff (eg Serra’s gigantic wavy rusting steel plates; left me unmoved; the only other thing I remember is Jeff Koon’s giant flower dog which was in an outside courtyard).
.
The other thing I don’t quite appreciate about Gehry is that he doesn’t really design “his” buildings. He does a bunch of squiggles on paper. If he gets a commission he then gets a team of experts to turn into something that can be built. While all modern architects have to work with large teams it is not the way of the architects I really admire, not just Utzon (is there anything Gehry has actually done himself, even conceptually, that compares with either Utzon’s original vision or his solution of the shells, even if Arup want to grab a lot of the credit?) but especially Foster. But also, to take another controversial architect whose facades are famous for their quirkiness, Gaudi; however his buildings are truly marvellous, inside and out, and very carefully designed and crafted–neither is true of Gehry buildings no matter how many computer hours are expended in working out to build such impractical shapes.
.
And I agree about the cost issue: it is merely for two things, fancy cosmetics when viewed from certain angles, and the recursive nonsense of having a building designed by a starchitect. And there are other costs too. MIT are currently suing Gehry over their Stata building (a mere $300M, no doubt partly funded by a rich benefactor who was wooed partly by promising a starchitect building) because of structural problems. An example: “Mr. Gehry had rejected (the) formal request to revise the design for the center’s 350-seat outdoor amphitheater, whose poor drainage has been a large part of the problem. The suit says that within months of the center’s opening, it essentially started coming apart, with “considerable masonry cracking” in the amphitheater’s seating areas.”
.
The Disney auditorium in LA which is a clone of Bilbao, has had to put drapery over some of those titanium walls because they were so reflective at certain times of day that the buildings around it ended up suing Disney over it (they were being blinded).
And now it is not just Gehry but the whole army of imitators in his footsteps. For all the wrong reasons as Alan says. Merely the desire to be “different” (though copying a style is hardly that) and essentially ignoring the most important thing in a building, its function, or at least always compromising function over a dubious form.

She adds “(his) buildings seem to shout ‘look at moi’ which is OK when original, but after the 53rd, lose their lustre. His Guggenheim in Bilbao is a stunning iconic building, which may be diminished with all the subsequent variations on a theme.”

One then thinks of a building designed the opposite way, gorgeous outside, inside “unfit for purpose”. This is, of course, the Sydney Opera House. Whatever the outside looked like, it should never have been built – it contravened the requirements of the competition and was too small.

And on the same site, Fort Macquarie Tram Depot – outside vaguely in line with the surrounds (defending the First Landing Place in Sydney Cove, together with Pinchgut) and inside totally fit for purpose.

Now which of the three was a ‘good building’? (Define this how you will!).