When you see the words ‘clinic’ and ‘Las Vegas’ appearing the same sentence you’d be forgiven for thinking another gambling addiction clinic has opened for business.
Instead, we have the marvellously eccentric new Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health by design’s ’starchitect’, Frank Gehry. Love it or hate it [we love it] the new clinic will certainly stop people in the street, if only to help them make sure that the building isn’t melting.
It’s already dividing critics between those who believe it’s a fantastically innovative and jaw-dropping piece of design to those who believe it’s hopelessly derivative of earlier work and those who believe Gehry = Garish.
See what the LA Times reviewer said after the jump.
“The two sides of the Ruvo Center stand in clear opposition to each other. It’s tempting to assume that they represent the classic left-brain, right-brain dichotomy: the office wing is rational and contained, the auditorium free-flowing and fantastical. One side is a written score, the other an improvisation.
This gap also seems to suggest the divided loyalties of architects, who have to pay equal attention in their work to practicality and creativity, order and desire. Gehry, in particular, makes use of an approach to design that shifts between the analytical and the fully intuitive.
But the more time you spend walking from one side of the building to the other, the more it becomes clear that its symbolic aims are deeper and richer than that. The sensibilities of each section seem to have seeped into or infected the other.”
OK, he likes it.
What’s your take? More shots below.
[LA Times]
Tags: architecture, design, gehry, vegas