EMECO TUYOMYO BENCH DESIGN BY FRANK GEHRY
EMECO TUYOMYO
BENCH DESIGN BY FRANK GEHRY 2009
Emeco with
Gehry: A Collaboration in Support of Hereditary Disease Research
“Tuyomyo”
Yours and Mine: One-of-a-Kind
Hanover,
Pennsylvania, USA- Emeco, the premier manufacturer of aluminum chairs, and
renowned architect Frank Gehry have collaborated once again, this time in the
development a one-of-a-kind large scale bench. Named Tuyomyo (Spanish for
“Yours and Mine”), this is the second time Emeco and Gehry have cooperated on a
project, the first being the creation of the all-aluminum Superlight chair
launched at the Salone in 2004 and recently accepted into the Museum of Modern
Art’s permanent design collection. The new bench will be auctioned in May,
proceeds of which will fund the Leslie Gehry Brenner Award of the Hereditary
Disease Foundation (HDF). Frank Gehry’s mandate was simple, “The form has to be
free and light. It must be structural, and at the same time poetic. And a
little dangerous.”
Using 80%
recycled aluminum components and aircraft manufacturing technology, as well as
hand craftsmanship - this exclusive Tuyomyo bench further reinforces Gehry’s
intuitive design vision and Emeco’s expertise in crafting aluminum. Gehry
developed ideas for the bench during the time he worked on the Superlight chair
for Emeco in 2004. What started as a sketching of ideas has become a conceptual
project for the company and one that will raise funds and awareness for HDF.
Frank and
Berta Gehry were founding trustees of the Hereditary Disease Foundation in
1968. They are deeply passionate about and committed to its mission – to cure
brain diseases. Proceeds from the sale of Tuyomyo will benefit a research fund
established in 2008 in honor of Frank’s late daughter - The Leslie Gehry
Brenner Award for Innovation in Science.
“We didn’t
start with the intention of making a product – we wanted to explore the
possibility of using huge pieces of aluminum to make a large scale project.
Once we really got into it, we found we were onto something amazing and Frank
suggested we use it to support his Foundation,” said Gregg Buchbinder, Emeco’s
Chairman. “Combining CNC equipment with traditional hand craft, we were able to
make a three meter long wing of polished aluminum. The trouble was making the
wing strong enough to cantilever over the truss and remain stable. That’s when
we found an aircraft part manufacturer with huge solution tempering furnaces
that made it super strong. But it took many trials and failures to get it
right. Each time the result was unpredictable – like Raku ceramic firing – the
aluminum took its own, unique organic form. When we saw the final bench though,
we knew we had fulfilled Frank’s directive and we thought maybe we could use
even these ideas for a future product”
The project
for the new Emeco bench fulfilled Gehry’s desire to design something unique
that will benefit the Leslie Gehry Brenner Award of the Hereditary Disease
Foundation (HDF), a cause that he is deeply passionate about. HDF aims to cure
genetic illness by supporting basic biomedical research and uses Huntington’s
Disease as its model. Buchbinder used the opportunity to find a way to
manipulate and temper large pieces of aluminum for use in future product
designs. The result is sculptural bench, a wholly new form – and an attempt to
use design for the common good.
The special
Tuyomyo Bench has gone through many changes during various stages of
development since the team began working on the project last summer. The final
all-aluminum bench features a three meter hand polished “wing” of offset
trapezoids supported by a brushed “truss”. It weighs only 55.3 Kg .
http://www.emeco.net/about-emeco/2009-q2
You may visit
Frank Gehry’s latest project of Louis Vouitton Fondation and design
Vitra Wiggle Chair from my blog archive to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/08/louis-vuitton-fondation-design-by-frank.html
GEHRY PARTNERS
Gehry Partners, LLP is a full service firm with broad
international experience in academic, commercial, museum, performance, and
residential projects.
Frank Gehry established his practice in Los Angeles, California
in 1962. The Gehry partnership, Gehry Partners, LLP, was formed in 2001. Gehry
Partners employs a large number of senior architects who have extensive
experience in the technical development of building systems and construction
documents, and who are highly qualified in the management of complex projects.
Every project undertaken by Gehry Partners is designed
personally and directly by Frank Gehry. All of the resources of the firm and
the extensive experience of the firm’s partners are available to assist in the
design effort and to carry this effort forward through technical development
and construction administration. The firm relies on the use of Digital Project,
a sophisticated 3D computer modeling program originally created for use by the
aerospace industry, to thoroughly document designs and to rationalize the
bidding, fabrication, and construction processes.
The partners in Gehry Partners, LLP are: Frank Gehry, Brian
Aamoth, John Bowers, Anand Devarajan, Jennifer Ehrman, Berta Gehry, Meaghan
Lloyd, David Nam, Tensho Takemori, Laurence Tighe & Craig Webb.
http://www.foga.com/
FRANK O. GEHRY
Frank Gehry considers the recently commissioned Walt Disney
Concert Hall in Los Angeles to be his first major project in his hometown. No
stranger to music, he has a long association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra, having worked to improve the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl. He
also designed the Concord Amphitheatre in northern California, and yet another
much earlier in his career in Columbia, Maryland, the Merriweather Post
Pavilion of Music.
The Museum of Contemporary Art selected him to convert an old
warehouse into its Temporary Contemporary (1983) exhibition space while the
permanent museum was being built. It has received high praise, and remains in
use today. On a much smaller scale, but equally as effective, Gehry remodeled
what was once an ice warehouse in Santa Monica, adding some other buildings to
the site, into a combination art museum / retail and office complex.
The belief that "architecture is art" has been a part
of Frank Gehry's being for as long as he can remember. In fact, when asked if
he had any mentors or idols in the history of architecture, his reply was to
pick up a Brancusi photograph on his desk, saying, "Actually, I tend to
think more in terms of artists like this. He has had more influence
on my work than most architects. In fact, someone suggested that my skyscraper
that won a New York competition looked like a Brancusi sculpture. I could name
Alvar Aalto from the architecture world as someone for whom I have great
respect, and of course, Philip Johnson."
Born in Canada in 1929, Gehry is today a naturalized U.S.
citizen. In 1954, he graduated from the University of Southern California and
began working full time with Victor Gruen Associates, where he had been
apprenticing part-time while still in school. After a year in the army, he was
admitted to Harvard Graduate School of Design to study urban planning. When he
returned to Los Angeles, he briefly worked for Pereira and Luckman, and then
rejoined Gruen where he stayed until 1960.
In 1961, Gehry and family, which by now included two daughters,
moved to Paris where he worked in the office of Andre Remondet. His French
education in Canada was an enormous help. During that year of living in Europe,
he studied works by LeCorbusier, Balthasar Neumann, and was attracted to the
French Roman churches. In 1962, he returned to Los Angeles and set up his own
firm.
A project in 1979 illustrates his use of chain-link fencing in
the construction of the Cabrillo Marine Museum, a 20,000 square foot compound
of buildings that he "laced together" with chain-link fencing. These
"shadow structures" as Gehry calls them, bind together the parts of
the museum.
Santa Monica Place, begun in 1973, has one outside wall that is
nearly 300 feet long, six stories tall and hung with a curtain of chain link; a
second layer over it in a different color spells out the name of the mall.
For a time, Gehry's work used "unfinished" qualities
as a part of the design. As Paul Goldberger, New York
Times Architecture Critic described it, "Mr. Gehry's architecture is
known for its reliance on harsh, unfinished materials and its juxtaposition of
simple, almost primal, geometric forms...(His) work is vastly more intelligent
and controlled than it sounds to the uninitiated; he is an architect of immense
gifts who dances on the line separating architecture from art but who manages
never to let himself fall."
A guesthouse he designed in 1983 for a home in Wayzata,
Minnesota that had been designed by Philip Johnson in 1952 proved a challenge
that critics agree Gehry met and conquered. The guesthouse is actually a
grouping of one-room buildings that appear as a collection of sculptural pieces.
In 1988, he did a monument to mark the centennial of the Sheet
Metal Workers' International Association. It was built by 600 volunteers from
the union in the cavernous central hall of the National Building Museum
(formerly known as the Pension Building) in Washington, D.C. The 65-foot high
construction was galvanized stainless steel, anodized aluminum, brass and
copper.
There is an interesting note regarding a statement Gehry
prepared for the 1980 edition of Contemporary Architects ,
Gehry states, "I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial
container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness
of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his
baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he
can't do that, I've failed."
