Frank Gehry’s Design Keeps Buildings Off Budget

March 22, 2009 · Filed Under Architecture Rumbling · 1 Comment
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Image Copyright: Fox Broadcasting Company

The title says ‘Frank Gehry’s Software Keeps Buildings on Budget’; somehow I think the title should be ‘Frank Gehry’s design keeps buildings off budget’. First he proposed a problem (off budget), and now he is selling a solution to his own problem? Am I missing something?

Mr. Gehry developed the software, now called Digital Project, to produce a sculpture of a diaphanous fish for a Barcelona exposition in 1992 and refined it to specify the titanium panels cloaking his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997. He based it on the three-dimensional software that aerospace companies use. “If they can build airplanes paperless, I think buildings can be built paperless,” Mr. Gehry said.

In 2002, he spun off the software business into a company called Gehry Technologies, which sells Digital Project to other developers and architects and trains project teams to use it.

Digital Project works by modeling, in three dimensions, every odd shape an architect envisions and then letting engineers and architects reconcile the shape with a building’s site, ductwork and other features. It shows how one change to a building’s ingredients changes all the others. Source: NYTimes