American Center

Related person

Frank Owen Gehry (was created by)

Date

1994 (creation)

Location

Europe->France->Île-de-France, Région->Paris

Description

Now the home of the Cinémathque Française, the largest archive of films, movie documents, and film-related objects in the world. The architecture of the building might be best understood against the backdrop of Gehry's struggles to build the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (roughly concurrent with the timeline of this project) and his eventual triumph at Bilbao. If Bilbao's is definitively exuberant, the American Center's geometry seems almost indeterminate--sometimes masterful, other times awkward and circumstantial. Part of this encompasses a struggle to square irregular geometry with ordinary office space (which made up a substantial portion of the program). This illustrates the intermediate step that this building represents (somewhere between Disney and Bilbao) in the development of a workable process to translate irregular designs into material existence.

---