Het Huis Stoclet in Brussel - Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten Aalst

emains asphalt, acknowledging that history, while an interior wall is composed from the
exterior wall of clapboards of the original living room next door, which can be glimpsed
through an intact picture window. Sitting "inside" the new house yet "outside" the old
one, you're inside and outside at the same time. Formally, the indivisibility of
inside/outside space recalls the seamless flow of a classic Donald Judd box, in which the
conventional distinction between a sculpture's inside and its outside is erased. Bucking
the history of Western sculpture, a Judd box is not a discrete mass occupying space and
with a hidden interior realm. Neither is Gehry's house.
Unlike a Judd box, though, domestic space is not just formal. Domestic space is
emotionally charged, incorporating a complex psychological dimension that changes over
time. Even for a visitor to Gehry's house the experience of being simultaneously inside
and outside is psychologically disconcerting; the renovated bungalow gives surprising
physical form to an instantly recognizable quality of domestic estrangement and
alienation. The past century's architecture has been mostly conceived in formal and social
terms, but central to Gehry's achievement has been this uncanny articulation of
psychological space.
The key is in his drawings. A Gehry building begins with a sketch, and Gehry's sketches
are distinctive. They're characterized by a sense of off-hand improvisation, of intuitive
spontaneity. The fine line is invariably fluid, impulsive. The drawings convey no
architectural mass or weight, only loose directions and shifting spatial relationships. The
Guggenheim Bilbao is a remarkable turning point in Gehry's work öand in the history of
architecture÷because it manages to maintain in built form the impromptu sketchiness of
his drawings. It's a sketch in real space, a sketch you can walk into. Drawing is the
medium most capable of closely recording the evolution of artistic thought÷from brain to
hand to pencil to paper and back to brain. Walking through Gehry's sketchy building is
like navigating a projection of psychological space that is continuously unfolding. The
result: Every visitor is always located at its exact center, and the center moves with you.
That's generosity. All the rapturous ink that has been spilled in the wake of Bilbao turns
out to have been something other than what it initially seemed. Not just critical love
letters, they're heartfelt thank you notes.
Preliminary sketches for the Panama Puente de Vida Museo | © Frank O. Gehry