Toledos Gehry-Designed Building an Important Landmark

inToledo  |  08/01/2007

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Designed by Frank Gehry, the Guggenhiem in Bilbao, Spain radically redefines the word, “building.” Gehry has designed dozens of landmark buildings around the world, including the Vitra Design Museum, Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California and the University of Toledo Center for the Visual Arts. He combined sensuous curving forms with complex “deconstructive” massing, achieving significant new results.

Toledo’s own Frank Gehry building is a landmark in architectural design. Completed in 1993, the four-story Center for the Visual Arts is the home of the University of Toledo’s Department of Art. The building displays many signature Frank Gehry features, including metal cladding, few right angles and a “stacking” effect ((I don’t understand what this means)), all of which reflect Gehry’s whimsy and imagination. The interior spaces feature exposed structural beams, columns and steel decking painted white. The baseboards, paired with white walls are warmly executed in vertical-grain Douglas fir. Built in furniture of the same fir adds ((this is an interesting feature, and we should learn more about it.))

A curtain wall, large windows and skylights provide the interior with intensely dramatic lighting while also creating surprising and exciting views across exterior spaces to other portions of the building. No two spaces are alike, each having a unique combination of elevation, lighting and a view of the outdoors.

Gehry has continually shattered conventional notions of what architecture might be, creating what have been acclaimed as “powerful essays in primal geometric form.” Future generations will regard the Center for the Visual Arts with as much respect as we currently give to Frank Lloyd Wright.