Vanity Fair magazine recently asked 90 of the world’s leading architects, teachers, and critics to identify the most important structure completed since the 1980s.
Anyone with good taste can pretty much attest to the fact that architecture in the 80’s was downright atrocious. It was a period characterized by power-structures that were cold and lacked personality and imagination.
So, in their voting, the experts looked at buildings that blazed new trails and that helped chart a more exciting course in world architecture.
When all the votes were counted, the overwhelming winner was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the masterpiece created by architect Frank Gehry who was born in Toronto and hails from Polish Jewish ancestry.
Of the building, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Paul Goldberger, author of Why Architecture Matters, said that it “…became an extraordinary phenomenon.”
In its summary, Vanity Fair called Gehry “the most important architect of our age,” who received additional votes for three other projects: the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles; Millennium Park, in Chicago; and his house in Santa Monica.
Other than creating the most important structures of our time, Frank Gehry, keeps himself occupied by designing jewelry, sports trophies and… Vodka bottles.
Some time ago he created a distinctively Gehrian bottle for the Wyborowa Single Estate.
The first bottles were presented as gifts to Academy Awards attendees, in a special wooden crates.
The company that hired him said that the “bottle design conveys a fusion of the Polish heritage and contemporary sophistication and mirrors the beauty and exquisite quality of Wyborowa Single Estate.”
Gehry explained to Newsweek that the twist design came from an office building that he designed in Germany.
“When you look through the bottle, it plays with the light and creates an illusory image,” he said.
Perhaps so, but we think that the “illusory image” might also have to do something with the bottles 80 proof contents.
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