Frank Gehry

All I can say about Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollock is WOW. Okay, I can say a bit more than that since I am pretty good about going on and on about something. I have always liked unusual architecture and used to watch shows about it on Home and Garden Television (HGTV). Frank Gehry has designed so many buildings that look like either were be terribly difficult and near impossible to make and keep standing. I loved them all. He is brilliant.

Frank Gehry established his practice in Los Angeles, California in 1962. The Gehry partnership, Gehry Partners, LLP, was formed in 2001 and currently supports a staff of over 120 people. Every project that his company works on is designed personally by Frank Gehry.

Frank Gehry loves to sketch and sketches out his plans for the architectural designs that he's making. He calls this "tentativeness, the messiness". Gehry’s sketches for each major project become buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone. Before his sketches are made into the finished building, he makes models from his sketches so that he can see how the building works and is going to be used. Gehry and his colleagues make sure that the plans are going to work by studying the model. His designs make it hard to distinguish between architecture and art. They look like unbelievably, large works of art. The strong appeal of his sculptural designs have led to his fame. He is one of the rare architects that have not only received critical acclaim, but popular fame. There has not been an architect since Frank Lloyd Wright that has become a household name like Frank Gehry has become.

Frank Gehry’s buildings are not made to just be another building. They are built from the inside out. Wooden block massing studies are constructed and reconstructed in step with Gehry’s own evolving sketches. Gestural models of cardboard, wood, and cloth act as intermediaries, keeping Gehry conscious of the three-dimensional implications. This makes him work in "two or three scales at once" and forces him to not think of the model as an “object of desire”, but to focus on how the building works. His buildings make people feel comfortable because when designing buildings he is concerned about how the people that are going to be occupying the building are going to use it and how he can make the building work best for them. This is probably one of the main reasons that he has become so well known.

Persepolis

Persepolis is a very good graphic novel that was made into a French movie in 2007. I never read the graphic novel, but I believe that the movie was very good and it was hard for me to stop watching it, so I ended up renting it from Netflix so that I could see how it ended. I had never thought about graphic novels before, because I tend to associate them with comic books and kid stuff. Not that I do not like comics. Garfield has always been my favorite and I still watch cartoons on television and I like to watch children's animated movies. I just did not realize that there were graphic novels with such serious subjects and that were not about super heroes or other science fiction topics that most more adult comics tend to be about.

Persepolis tells a story of a girl and her struggles and difficulties in life as she grows up into a young woman. Every girl goes through similar circumstances in life as they grow into adulthood. Life is not easy, but for some "not easy" is a definite understatement. This movie gave me a better understanding of what it might be like to grow up in a place like Iran. I know that my understanding of what someone like her might have gone through during pre- and post-revolutionary Iran is minimal, but it helped. When I was first watching this movie, I thought it happened a long time ago, I was very surprised that it took place just in the 1970s and 1980s. I felt bad to think of what she had to go through growing up and made me realize how very fortunate I was to have grown up in the United States of America and all the freedoms that go along with it.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese. He was born in the Bronx District in New York City in 1920. As a child, he drew a lot. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism. He was a freelance commercial artist/graphic designer until he opened up he own studio in 1950. Saul Bass was hired to design some posters and design title sequences for a few movies, but it wasn't until he was hired to design the poster and title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the "top banana" of film title design. His title sequences went from being graphics in motion to live action. He also liked dealing with ordinary things and making you look at them in a different way. He liked making the ordinary extraordinary. I like his style and I really enjoyed the way he dealt with the title sequence in West Side Story. I have always loved the dance sequences and of course the songs from this movie, but now I have a new appreciation for the title sequence at the end of the movie. I never really noticed or paid attention to the title sequence before, partly because I was pretty young when I watched the whole movie. I liked how the names were like they were part of the set instead of superimposed on the film, but were graffiti. Not only were his title sequences that were motion graphics interesting to watch, but his use of live action in the title sequences were equally as interesting to watch.

I was also surprised to find out all of the well known logos that he designed. It is hard for me to figure out how one person can hold that much talent in one human body. He died in 1996 and his New York Times obituary hailed him as "the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art."