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Gwathmey Siegel's Instant Icons
| Article
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19516 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
1,918 Words |
| Author
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Shira Rosan
Shira Rosan is a practicing architect and architectural writer
currently living in New York. |
When New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum reopens this spring, it will have been seven years since the start of a major addition and renovation project, and eleven years since the architectural firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates first became involved in what turned out to be a much longer and more controversial process than anyone had imagined. The architects themselves were perhaps more surprised than anyone at the controversy engendered by their proposal to add to Frank Lloyd Wright's well-known structure, whose spiral form had long since become an icon of Modern architecture. Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, in its decades of practice, has become more accustomed to critical acclaim and the approval of its colleagues than to the public and often bitter denunciations of its efforts that the Guggenheim project produced.
Charles Gwathmey first came to the addition of the architectural world in 1996 with the designing of a house, and later a studio, for his parents in Amgansett, on Long Island in New York. These cedar-sided buildings, of primary, minimal volumetric forms, have been called "instant icons": works of art whose impact on the design-conscious American public can best be attested to by the rapidity with which they became the East Cost definition of beach house, and by the number of imitations they have spawned.
Robert Siegel joined Gwathmey's established New York City office in 1971, and the partnership continued to produce residences characterized by basic geometric volumes, taut surfaces, and a concern for clarity in the three-dimensional relationships of spaces. The firm became known for these residences, but it was clear from the beginning that there was more to Gwathmey Siegel than a desire to become residential architects to the stars.
"The residences are still important," Charles Gwathmey said in a recent interview, "because they're a laboratory." Residential architecture, he explained, is a microcosm problem that contains all the intricacies and complexities of other architectural problems but on a scale at which experimentation is possible. Residential architecture informs all the firm's work, allowing close examination of what Gwathmey has called "the obligations of architecture."
What are these obligations? First, Gwathmey believes, architecture must be "programmatically responsible." The owner's intentions cannot be taken casually; they must be given a high priority in any solution. The other main generator of form for Gwathmey Siegel is the context: the site itself and its surroundings. Gwathmey
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