When Frank Gehry's latest tower rose out of lower Manhattan in all its rippled steel glory in early 2011, architecture critics basically died, they were so happy. In a review titled "A Downtown Skyscraper For A Digital Age," New York Times critic Nicholas Ourossoff saw in 8 Spruce Street, or "New York by Gehry," as the building was later slickly rechristened, nothing less than the end of an era, the "turning point from the modern to the digital age."
What so appealed to Ourossoff, and to Paul Goldberger, who wrote an even swoonier piece over at the New Yorker, was Gehry's ability to create a beautiful piece of architecture at the going rate of a mediocre one. The hero in this was a digital tool developed exclusively for Gehry, which designed the building's 10,500 steel panels so precisely, it enabled him to produce "the swirling, folding wall for close to the price...of a plain, flat stainless-steel facade," Goldberger reported. This despite the fact that the cards stacked against "New York" were many: not only is it the city's tallest residential building, it is perhaps the oddest in concept, made to house a public school in its base.
Which brings us to a pitch years in the making. In an interview published on Wired today, Gehry revealed plans to aggressively market GTeam, his magical, no-longer-exclusive software sidekick, by partnering with the cloud storage service, Box.
The tool has been publicly available for less than a year (although Gehry's company, Gehry Technologies has been refining it for decades), and Wired reports that so far Gehry's "friends Zaha Hadid and David Childs" have signed on. Tapping into the cloud, of course, makes the potential audience infinitely larger than just Gehry's buddies.
GTeam, which has been called the "Google Docs of design," can be used to create and store plans and designs. Based on "New York," however, its capabilities are clearly scalable. We're hoping Gehry's latest push means beautifully designed buildings will become more appealing to developers, and not that robots are taking over the world.