Inside the Ugly: Gehry's IAC HQ Opens
Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters arouses either rapturous mooning or fierce antipathy. Like with pregnant chicks, one is either inappropriately attracted to its curvaceous body or horrified. But when the IAC finally opened on Monday, only one man's opinion counted, that of father, Barry Diller. As the LA Times reports, he did what all dads do: Bitch about stuff.
"Today I'm walking in for the first time," he said. "Of course, all I see is 'unfinished.' ...Around the corner, linen and flowers decorated a long table below a much larger video wall—120 feet wide—showing scenes of the High Line park being created atop 22 blocks of deserted elevated train tracks in Lower Manhattan..."Is this what you're going to see when the people come in?" Diller asked several technicians, gesturing at the park-to-be images on the wall. "Why have you chosen to have the frames so small? Make it big. OK? Soon after, by a bank of elevators, he had another question, about the up-and-down buttons: "Why do we only have these on one side?"
Later he upbraided the building for making him feel like shit and called the frosted-glass edifice a "thoughtless little pig." —Josh