Gottfried Knapp

Text in English and German. After his deconstructive beginnings in the eighties and nineties, Frank Gehry increasingly practised a very plastic form of architecture. His expressively sculptural cultural buildings, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, his project for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and above all the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (see Opus 32), have shaped the architectural awareness of our period and provided exemplary artistic alternatives to the architectural canon of Modernism. Within Gehry's rapidly growing volume of work the comparatively small energy forum for the Minden-Ravensburg Electricity Company (EMR) plays a particularly striking role insofar as the extraordinarily complex brief -- almost contradictory functions had to be blended in a very cramped space, compelled the architect to use highly differentiated forms and materials. In this way something like a primal model of sculptural building emerged, a massively fissured, subtly lit structure that explains itself inside with amazing naturalness, making visitors gasp with its changing spatial situations as an exhibition and events centre, exploding all conventions as an office building and translating the theme of energy into sensual forms by architectural means as the electricity company's technical distribution centre. The old dictum 'form follows function' acquires a new and radical quality in the architecture of the Energieforum. In addition to the presentation of the energy forum in Bad Oeynhausen this book contains an illustrated survey of all other buildings by Frank Gehry in Europe.

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