Driving out in Las Vegas beyond "the strip", towards the old downtown I come upon these pieces of metal, out so long baking in the desert they curled at the edges, no?


No. They're for the back of Frank Gehry's The Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.
Walk around it and you see the two parts, as Gehry often designs. A calmer more traditional part, before the explosion. The calm before the storm. Or is it the left side and the right side of the brain?

The left side of the brain processes information in a linear manner. It takes pieces, lines them up, and arranges them in a logical order.

The right side of the brain processes more holistically, from the whole to the parts. The right-brain sees the big picture first and breaks it down into the details. It works in a more random way; and the right-brain is color sensitive.

To oversimplify: the left-brain is more reality-based; the right-brain processes using fantasy. I wonder which side dominates in Frank Gehry?

But back to the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. The left side (which is open and operating) of white boxes with smallish vertical windows, stacked like a wedding cake, feels appropriate here in the desert. Something like SANAA's New Museum in New York mixed with Tel Aviv Bauhaus, built on sand. The Gehry stack is pleasing and calming, yet the torquing of the boxes makes it come alive and affect your emotions-- causing pleasure.

But it's the "crazy, melted" back side of course, the part people think of as "Gehry-esque," that will get attention and photographs and that's okay because it might call attention to the cause of brain health. This building, though still in need of funding itself, may ultimately help the clinic to fund raise. Interesting that in Las Vegas - famous for neon signs - they can now also use Architecture to get attention.

The contrast of the two parts, one seemingly more organic; and the mangled metal, the baked-ness and the way the composition tells a story of a crash reminds me of an old Edward Weston photograph shot in a nearby desert.

I recently came across a quote in The Architect's Newspaper from super engineer/designer Guy Nordenson:

Frank Gehry's relationship to engineering and construction says: the cruder the better. You visit the Disney Concert Hall and, in the office of the musical director, there's this gigantic gusset plate that's part of one of the trusses in the system. It's exposed and fire-protected. One of the architects who worked on the project described it to me as a train crash in a room. It's monumentally messy.

Once you've made the joke about this brain health center: "has Frank Gehry lost his mind?" you see that parts of this - even unfinished - are quite lovely, especially in the desert sun.

Across the street stands this:
also beautifully catching the sun; and sending more of a message of rootedness, of place. Not the less site-specific, more cosmopolitan message Gehry is after.

The Gehry seems more real than most of what is built here and its interior will certainly be a genuine architectural experience. Still very much under construction - the interior space swirls up and around - as Gehry is so good at. Here it may recall a dust storm in the desert; under construction Xanadu meets Piranesi.

That last one, that column, is sure to grow into a "tree" (like this one - below - at Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.)

Time to leave Vegas. (It's always time to leave Vegas.) As the car pulls away I see in the Gehry the movement and the dance that he seeks to inject into each of his projects. Some have sailing references, some wash up like waves to the shore. This one here in the desert - especially after the bling and the flash of the casinos - shimmers and shines and as you drive toward it these simple white cubes vibrate like a mirage. Under the hot sun we have a mirage crashing into an oasis. I need a drink.

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