In Memoriam, Charles Gwathmey, perception from Europe
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Charles Gwathmey died on the third of August 2009, aged 71.
From the age of 11, he was passionate by drawing and his father initiated him "to experience art and architecture simultaneously". Together they visited cathedrals, chateaux and museums.
He studied architecture with Paul Rudolph, one of the more inspiring architects in America in the 1950s and 60s, who himself studied under Walter Gropius, with classmates I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson.
Half a century later he will be empowered with the responsibility to create an addition to the building designed by his teacher, the A+A building where are taught art and architecture at Yale University. Many expressed concern that this addition doesn't have enough contrast and character to complement Paul Rudolph's bare concrete vertical volumes. The addition has its own architectural logic, yet it borrows a certain rhythm, scale and dimensions to the original building. It's certainly difficult to appreciate this project for us from Europe, who haven't got the chance to approach the site and walk along the buildings.
Returning from France after his architecture master, where he took inspiration in Le Corbusier, Charles Gwathmey designed a house for his parents in 1965. Soon after the house was completed, he was then 27, he showed a set of photographs to Philip Johnson, then the architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who was supportive.
The house instantly attracted visitors.
He took part in the New York Five, included Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves who said “What united us was a need to convene with each other, to be self-critical, to talk about each other’s work”. As a result a pamphlet was published in 1973, reaching readers in America and Europe.
While Charles Gwathmey's first projects gained international exposure, the following ones only seem to interest a certain society in the American entertainment industry. This second period of domestic projects is a modernist interpretation of the classical Georgian mansion, using a large palette of materials.
Charles Gwathmey was known to listen to his clients and include their personal needs into his architectural vision. While the villas have an impressive size from the outside, they keep a domestic scale and warm atmosphere inside. This was achieved by linking or including the guest house and garages to the main body of the house, thin cuboids, structures stretching outside the habitat, giving importance to circulations such as internal ramps, vertical voids interconnecting different levels.
More recently, he was involved in a proposal for the memorial at Ground Zero, in the team with Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, and Richard Meier. It sounds their L shape twin building structuring the public space, based on a tartan pattern façade with large square voids regularly carved in it, didn't seduce, although the urban concept was one of the most relevant, creating a new public space and gateway for New York, linked with the sea.
This tartan pattern takes us back to his overhaul and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1992, a thin vertical slab situated just behind the museum, acting as a plain rectangular background. A tartan pattern is discreetly carved all over the gray limestone façade and materialised at some point by a few fenêtres-en-longueur. The spacing proportion between the small and large bands is based on Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral building.
Except the internal overhaul, this realisation didn't get good press at the time, but one can wonder which project would be judged appropriate if it was done today, maybe a not so different rectangular vegetal wall, mounted onto square frames, or a simple volume wearing an elaborated textured architectural skin, or a single screen-wall or box-like digital screens showing what is being exhibited inside the museum?
Thierry Bidet - Art & Architecture – 13/08/2009
.
Charles Gwathmey died on the third of August 2009, aged 71.
From the age of 11, he was passionate by drawing and his father initiated him "to experience art and architecture simultaneously". Together they visited cathedrals, chateaux and museums.
He studied architecture with Paul Rudolph, one of the more inspiring architects in America in the 1950s and 60s, who himself studied under Walter Gropius, with classmates I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson.
Half a century later he will be empowered with the responsibility to create an addition to the building designed by his teacher, the A+A building where are taught art and architecture at Yale University. Many expressed concern that this addition doesn't have enough contrast and character to complement Paul Rudolph's bare concrete vertical volumes. The addition has its own architectural logic, yet it borrows a certain rhythm, scale and dimensions to the original building. It's certainly difficult to appreciate this project for us from Europe, who haven't got the chance to approach the site and walk along the buildings.
Returning from France after his architecture master, where he took inspiration in Le Corbusier, Charles Gwathmey designed a house for his parents in 1965. Soon after the house was completed, he was then 27, he showed a set of photographs to Philip Johnson, then the architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art, who was supportive.
The house instantly attracted visitors.
He took part in the New York Five, included Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves who said “What united us was a need to convene with each other, to be self-critical, to talk about each other’s work”. As a result a pamphlet was published in 1973, reaching readers in America and Europe.
While Charles Gwathmey's first projects gained international exposure, the following ones only seem to interest a certain society in the American entertainment industry. This second period of domestic projects is a modernist interpretation of the classical Georgian mansion, using a large palette of materials.
Charles Gwathmey was known to listen to his clients and include their personal needs into his architectural vision. While the villas have an impressive size from the outside, they keep a domestic scale and warm atmosphere inside. This was achieved by linking or including the guest house and garages to the main body of the house, thin cuboids, structures stretching outside the habitat, giving importance to circulations such as internal ramps, vertical voids interconnecting different levels.
More recently, he was involved in a proposal for the memorial at Ground Zero, in the team with Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, and Richard Meier. It sounds their L shape twin building structuring the public space, based on a tartan pattern façade with large square voids regularly carved in it, didn't seduce, although the urban concept was one of the most relevant, creating a new public space and gateway for New York, linked with the sea.
This tartan pattern takes us back to his overhaul and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, completed in 1992, a thin vertical slab situated just behind the museum, acting as a plain rectangular background. A tartan pattern is discreetly carved all over the gray limestone façade and materialised at some point by a few fenêtres-en-longueur. The spacing proportion between the small and large bands is based on Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral building.
Except the internal overhaul, this realisation didn't get good press at the time, but one can wonder which project would be judged appropriate if it was done today, maybe a not so different rectangular vegetal wall, mounted onto square frames, or a simple volume wearing an elaborated textured architectural skin, or a single screen-wall or box-like digital screens showing what is being exhibited inside the museum?
Thierry Bidet - Art & Architecture – 13/08/2009
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