In the past, Frank Gehry has excelled at adapting his architectural language to other expressive needs: visual art in Bilbao, symphonic music in L.A., rock music in Seattle, science at MIT. In each case, you know you're looking at a Gehry, but you also know you're using a museum, or a concert hall, or an academic center. For his New York debut, he had a trickier task: finding the right form for a business as changeable and insubstantial as Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. You know . . . they're the ones who make websites that . . . well, you know.
In the last decade or so, big-money media, new and old, has brought the New York skyline a new cluster of stylish midtown behemoths - buildings named after Conde Nast , Reuters, Time Warner, the New York Times, Hearst and Bloomberg. Gehry's IAC is both more modest - in that it only rises eight stories and lurks over by the Chelsea piers - and showier, in that it's a Gehry, it's made from curved panes of glass, and it's the color of ermine. So how does Gehry translate Diller's vaporous business into architectural form? By making it look like a fully rigged schooner on a southwesterly course. Huh?
This seems like a desperation gimmick, using a hobby for inspiration rather than responding thoughtfully to the function of the building itself. The result is pleasant and cool, but it seems destined to drift into curiosity status before long.
I've got a more extended assessment here.
