Gabion: Retained Writing on Architecture
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Frank Gehry's first British building is complete. It's not what you'd expect.

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A curious house, a house with few right angles or straight walls, a house where legions of Scottish joiners have sweated to make that big complex roof where no two pieces are the same. As a result, it's a bit rough-and ready, made more so by some hamfisted building details - awkward vents, pipes, that kind of thing. But then, Gehry's buildings, for all their shine and camera-friendliness, are always pretty rough-and-ready inside. He is not the architect for the exquisite detail, the perfect joint, the look-no-hands approach. Gehry buildings are tough, sometimes clumsy, always optimistic. This one, for instance, has no gutters. Gutters would be near-impossible on such a roof and would anyway wreck its appearance. So Gehry just allows the ample Scottish rainwater to cascade off the roof valleys onto soakaways in the ground. His clients are a bit nervous about that but speculate that, on a typical Dundee winter's day, it will be, um, spectacular.

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