But for some architects, the computer is letting them push their ideas way out there. For Frank Gehry, the maverick Californian, digital technology is the savior of his large ambitions. Gehry’s designs juxtapose oddball angled and curved shapes. His earlier small-scale works were manageable to build. But as he’s landed such huge commissions as the tin built Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, or a museum in Bilbao, Spain, tougher questions loomed: how could his idiosyncratic forms be translated into stone, glass and steel? The computer, using the CATIA program borrowed from the aerospace industry, allows Gehry to think big. He still starts a project by sketching and manipulating crude models. But then his design is put into the computer. The precise electronic replication of his arrhythmic surfaces means contractors can estimate the cost–and can see how to build his elaborate designs. “I was doing this stuff anyway,” says Gehry “but I feel more confident that we can build it. it demystifies it.”
For Peter Eisenman, a New York architect who loves to play with theory, the computer has become his muse. He actually lets it come up with the ultimate design. Using Form Z Macintosh software, he feeds the machine a recipe–a basic shape, like a cube, and data about the project and its site. Then he introduces a physics formula that “warps” the form. The theme for a proposed arts center at Emory University in Atlanta is sound waves. “We asked the computer for something that combines the topography, the campus and the mathematics of music,” he says. “We put all these things together, like an omelet-and these forms came out of the computer. The structural drawings are aynazing.'”
For both Eisenman and Gehry, the computer is a real collaborator. Eisenman can heap a complex bunch of ideas into it. Gehry can make his exuberant designs buildable. The computer can’t cook up the ideas, but it can take something as abstract as a creative vision and make it as real as stone.
