Some buildings look great on paper but when you go out and visit them, the boundless posibilities that were conjured in ones mind, fail to materialise on viewing. Kind of like when you buy an as-seen-on-TV ab exerciser and realise that at the end of the day it's not as fun as the paid actors would have you believe, you don't end up with ripped abs after a day let alone a week of use (because you can't be stuffed exercising in the first place) and the cost of sending it back for a 100% (minus postage) money back satisfaction guarantee by post would be more than you paid buying the darn thing in the first place. Case in point the Peter B. Lewis Building at Princeton University. With Gehry, it's often a balance between brick and metal with metal usually winning out. But the balance was favouring the masonry side with this one. I'll just put this out there but brick just isn't all that photogenic. If anyone knows anyone who can make brick (particularly cream/light brown) look sexy (excluding Mindcraft [link]) let me know, so I can send them an email of congratulations. The layering of the roofs upon each other feels like seeing a large scale cross section of the metal tiles present in most of Gehry's later work, kind of like a having an architectural-honey-I-shrank-the-kids moment only without the excess of the late 80's and comic stylings of Rick Moranis [link].
The Peter B. Lewis building was designed by Frank Gehry [link] and completed in 2008.
