New Forms Taschen 179

varied as natural zinc, asphalt, plaster and concrete, often in unexpected combina-tions. Festival Disney retains something of the Californian charm of Frank O. Gehry's earlier projeas, such as his Edgemar Complex in Venice. Partial reuse of an existing struaure, and a palette of different, usually inexpensive materials, once again give a sculptural complexity to this work. In many ways, Gehry is the essential pioneer of the search for new architectural forms through an artistic approach. As with much contemporary art though, Gehry's essential source materiał is popular, even industrial culture, with the apparent banality of asphalt or chain-link fence taking on an esthetic dimension in his hands.

Born in 1929, Frank O. Gehry seems to feel that his time to build 'great' works has come. Unfortunately, his Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is at least tern-porarily halted. His Bilbao Museum in Spain is on the other hand advancing rapidly. Located in the center of the cultural district formed by the Museo de Bellas Artes. the University de Deusto, and the Opera House, on a 32,700 m² site formerly occu-pied by a factory and parking lot, the new Bilbao Museum is scheduled to open in the summer of 1997. Three firms participated in an invited competition, Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Coop Himmelblau, and the groundbreaking took place on October 22,1993. Designed in a cooperative arrangement with New York's Guggenheim, the museum will have 10,500 m² of galleries, 2,500 m² of public space, with a 50 m high atrium, an auditorium, a museum storę, a restaurant, and a cafć. Project cost for the 24,000 m² building is estimated at $100 million. A sculptural metallic roof form reminiscent of a "metallic flower," designed with the assistance of the CATIA three-dimensional aerospace Computer modeling program, unifies the project into a single architectural composition. Building materials are titanium, limestone, and

Pager 190/191 Frank O. Gehry Vitra Headquarters Basel. Switzerland. 1992-94 Located in Birsfelden, at the periphery of Basel, this 6,000 m^} building is intended as a first phase of a larger development for the same furniture manufacturer who commissioned Gehry to build the Vitra Design Museum and Manufacturing Facility in Weil am Rhein, just across the German border. Aside from the sculptural surfaccs of the entrance arca yisible here. the rest of the build-ing is relatively traditional.

igo Ouuook