Gehry’s FOGGY
Frank Gehry at the Helm
This is the third and final article in the series on Architects and wooden boats, courtesy of Charlie Salter.
This week we see Frank Gehry ‘s attempt to influence boat design with his architectural ideas but in the end perhaps what we end up with is merely decoration. Another victory for vernacular perhaps?
While the bent brick Business School at UTS in Sydney was under construction in 2015, its Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry was building a 74’ wooden daysailer at Brooklyn Boatyard in Maine.
Gehry was always an innovator, making furniture from packing cardboard in the early 1970’s’s then attaching industrial “bits-n-pieces” to his own Santa Monica bungalow renovation in 1978. The “Fred & Ginger” building in Prague (1994) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997) set new directions for snaky “deconstructed” shapes. To underwrite his designs , Gehry worked with aerospace and software companies such as Dassault Systemes to develop 3D technical drawing programs. This guaranteed warped and crushed paper shapes could be built and deliver basic architectural requirements like structural stability and weatherproof spaces. During the 1990’s similar 3D computer aided design programs were also becoming available to naval architects.
Gehry a keen sailor, collaborated with naval architect German Frers to make sure the yacht actually performed. Not even the great architect could translate crumpled paper into an efficient hull or sail shape, so Foggy is a fairly traditional reduction in service of sailing. The Gehry touch is delivered with a woven lattice bowsprit and wheel post and a very wavy interpretation of a traditional “bullseye” or deck prism light.
EDITOR // Charlie Salter
FOGGY is a boat with the power to polarise. What are thoughts? Let us know below.