At first glance, it is difficult to recognise the hand of Frank O. Gehry, the world-renowned Canadian architect and winner of the Pritzker Prize, in the complex that still houses Google's Venice Beach offices in Los Angeles. Unlike his best-known works, such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, or the Vitra Design Museum, this project is not characterised by distorted shapes. Instead, it is the large, oversized pair of binoculars serving as the entrance that immediately catches the eye, as if it were an object placed there almost by accident.
In fact, this interpretation is not far from what actually happened in 1984. During the design process for the complex, which was initially owned by the advertising agency Chiat/Day and then sold to Google in 2011, it seems that the architect was looking for a way to connect the two completely different volumes that he had designed. On the right is a tangle of copper-clad beams supporting a flat roof, while on the left is a white, curved facade that is unmistakably modernist.
When Gehry received a model of a binocular-shaped building designed by the artist duo Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen as part of an academic project in Venice, Italy, he placed it between the two buildings in his study model to show Jay Chiat how he intended to connect them. The solution had been found.
During the same period, it should be noted that Oldenburg and van Bruggen collaborated with the architect on another unrealised project: the Good Times Summer Camp in Malibu. This project played with architecture in an even more daring way, proposing the placement of a large milk jug next to an upside-down boat. These projects were the offspring of pop art and Californian postmodernism, the plastic character of which Gehry would retain when designing in Europe a few years later.
According to The Real Deal, the current Google headquarters in Venice Beach have been put up for sale, but the price is not yet known. We look forward to finding out what the future holds for this unusual complex.
Opening image: photo Walter Cicchetti