Roy: You’ve undertaken many projects as an architecture firm, for educational institutions
in particular and even one for a business school, the Weatherhead School of Management.
And I’m just wondering, with these projects you follow the same process there is a journey
and it eventually has a destination, but there must be a lot of bumps along the road, and
I’m just wondering what are the kind of bumps, the impediments, the problems that
you strike, that you can talk to us about and which might have lessons for our own project.
Craig: You know most of those breaking points happen around money, you know about project
budget. And over the years we have developed a tighter and tighter more disciplined process
because you know, we just know, going down the road, so we, and it’s a tricky balance
between putting out the object of desire, which makes people really get excited, and
you know, kind of brings people together around a design. So you know the excitement is really
important but then if you kind of overshoot the means of the project, you create the object
of desire that’s beyond the means then, you know, that process gets extremely difficult.
So we try and keep very close tabs on the areas of the building, the floor area which
drives the price, the way the building is put together, and the way the cladding and
the structure are, and we keep, and we use the computer a lot to keep track of quantities
and, so I think that, and then we, you know, most clients want everything they can get
and more and so it’s an issue of trying to give you everything you want but having
the ability to say this is beyond where we can go, so you know it’s a back and forth
that way, that you know, we all have to buy into it.
Roy: Another feature of the way that Frank Gehry works is that there are not, there is
not one entity but two. You have Gehry partners, the design firm, and you also have Gehry Technologies,
which is a joint venture with Dassault the French aerospace company. Now that’s very
intriguing and I’m just wondering what part Gehry Technologies plays in developing and delivering the design process.
Craig: I mean originally we started out, when
we first started doing 3D computer modelling, we got software from IBM, from IBM through
you know Dassault, and it was in-house and we were using aerospace software which was,
you know, very powerful but also in a lot of cases not very suited to doing architectural
projects. And so you know Frank’s idea was to take the, take that software and then make
it a better [morphesel?] tool for us, for you know for architects. And then of course
the idea was well if we can do that then it’s a product, and then, you know, it can become
a business. And so Gehry Partners shifted from kind of developing to being a customer.
All of a sudden we’re the customer and we, you know, started making demands on product
and want services, so it’s been a kind of interesting transition and the tool that’s
developed is really essential to the buildings that we make. We couldn’t do what we’re
doing without it and we have some contractors that have kind of grown up with the, and grown
with the software as we’ve made it. And there’s a company called Permasteelisa who
actually did a lot of the glazing on the Opera House long, long ago who have worked with
us using the software and then they take the models and they use the software as a design
tool, and a detailing tool, and then finally as a fabrication tool. So the computer models
that we use to develop the design get more and more detail and then Permasteelisa and
other sub-contractors can take that and actually fabricate parts from it and then also use
the 3D computer model to position the parts in the field on the building very accurately.
So the building that we did in Chelsea, in Manhattan, has about fourteen hundred individual
panels of glass on the façade and about twelve hundred of those panels are absolutely unique
parts which would be completely impossible to fabricate and to track to the position
on the field and put on the building. So, and you know each of those panels has a insulating
glass unit which actually has three layers of glass and the, from the computer model
the glass is cut in a trapezoidal shape and they’re laminated together, and they’re
put together into these units. And then the frames which are coming in at angles
are cut by computer-driven equipment so that the mitres all join together.
And then the big problem is, as they say, well ‘what if we break a piece of glass as we’re installing
it in the field? You know how long will it take us to get the replacement piece?’ And
because the computer model was there and they had, they could, they broke quite a few pieces
of glass installing them, we’re bringing new pieces of glass within three or four weeks
to the job site and putting them back in the building. So without that tool we wouldn’t be able to make the buildings
Roy: And so that’s the technology dimension
of the way that you work and then on the other side you have the element of creativity and
artistry and this is very interesting to us at UTS because of the desire on our part to
match creativity to technology in the work that we do in business education as well as
design and information technology and the humanities. How do you see the relationship
between architecture and art in your buildings? And are they the same thing?
That good architecture is in fact a work of art?
Craig: Very loaded question, we’ve gotten
into a lot of trouble with that issue in the past. I would say, well for one thing Frank
and I both love painting and love to look and paintings and it’s the, you know, painting
takes three dimensional, the three dimensional world and flattens it into two dimensions
and you know puts it on a surface. And what we do is kind of the reverse of that process,
we take a lot of things that are images of, you know, kind of perceptions of a world that
are, you know, seen and interpreted through art as a two dimensional medium and exploit
it back into three dimensions. And so we borrow pretty heavily from Renaissance painting,
and well from all different eras of painting, and the composition of buildings and the colour
and ideas - a lot of that flows out of art. So it’s for us it’s very related
those things are very related to each other. And so it’s yeah it’s kind of the same thing
but you know, some people say that buildings have plumbing so that separates them from
art, which is definitely the case. But, you know the reason I…
Roy: You could argue that Ferdinand Léger made plumbing an art form.
Craig: You could argue that. I mean the reason I’m an architect, the reason I’m interested
in that, is that the practical aspects of making buildings, the structure the plumbing
all those things, force a discipline in the process that to me is a real benefit
'cause it provides a momentum to move things along and, you know, in those moments when
inspiration is lacking there’s always, there’s plenty of other stuff to do that kind of keep
the process moving along and then you’ll move on to the next thing and then you’ll,
where I imagine a painter would get stuck and just like sit there and you know look
at the canvas and go ‘what do I do now’. We can just like work on the structure for
a while or do something like that.