Frank O. Gehry was originally from Toronto, Canada. He is now located in Santa Monica, California. He uses industrial materials for aesthetics. The idea that you can make a work of art out of anything interests him. He likes to use metal because it is inexpensive and when he first started designing he liked to be more hands on with the material, this was the most accessible to him. He also liked how the metal reflected light from the sky. He also likes to sculpt his architecture by hand, he does not prefer drawing he would rather make a model first. If you see his blue prints for buildings they are unstructured and scattered on the page.
He also likes to approach architecture as if it was science by having break throughs or exploring parts of designing that others have not. He thinks there are already a lot of people designing clean work; they lack the spontaneity that’s worth exploring and that’s what he tries to do as an architect.
The shapes that are involved in his design of the hotel, Marqués de Riscal are ovals, rectangles and squares. Most of the windows have extremely long rectangular shape to them and stretch through out the structure. The curved rectangular shapes make the hotel look as if it’s out of a movie or a cartoon. There are many flowy lose lines on the hotel which makes it hard to tell the direction of the building itself. The other lines he uses are curved lines that move into and over each other. There are also many diagonal lines through out the building. You can see these lines everywhere, whether you are walking underneath the beams that hold up the ribbon structure or the entrance to the hotel.
The hotel has a free flowing feel to it with the ribbon like top piece but it also has many aspects that are sharp and structured. The texture of the top metal part of the building looks very smooth while the bottom form that the metal sits on looks semi rough and adobe like. The three dimensional qualities of this building is the ribbon structure on the top and the square boxy structure underneath. The coloring of the building is light grey, light pink, and cool blue on the metal portion of the building. The interesting aspect of the hotel is that the color of the metal changes depending on what direction the light is shining on it. If the light is bright that day it will make the pink look orange. The bottom portion of the building is a sandy brown and dark wood brown. The building looks almost as if someone has coiled up a bunch of ribbon and taped it to the top of it. It is also an extremely modern building, it was built in 2006. You can observe this from the type of lines that are used and the texture of the design.
All of these characteristics that make up this hotel can be used to design fashion by incorporating the colors and looseness of the ribbon like design. When designing fashion all of the clothing would be very structured but lose fitting and incorporate many sharp tones such as a cool blue and light grey mixed together. The clothing would also incorporate a lot of smooth textures such as silk and polyester.
