Fish

[pegkerr]

Thinking about the book. It's time to start writing again, so I'm going to try to give it some attention every day. I have been thinking about the fish. I had always planned to set a scene, somehow, in the Frank Gehry Glass Fish pavilion (enlarged picture here). What I learned, doing a little sleuthing, is that Gehry is actually obsessed with fish.

Partly as a joke, an answer to his post-modernist colleagues whose recycling of old forms extended back to Greek temples, Gehry decided to challenge them to go even further back, to fish. He made a series of giant fish, in glass and other material, and realized the fish were more than a joke.

"After making them, I started to take them seriously," he said.

They became the symbol for his enterprise, his desire to create architecture that embodies a sense of movement and life. Gehry was also thinking of traditional Chinese landscape painting, how the suggestion of a dragon's tail animates a mountain.

See also the picture here. Still trying to figure out what the fish are doing in the book, and what happens at the Glass Fish pavilion. What do they say to Solveig at the Aquatennial boat race? What do they have to tell her that leads to the turning of the tables that defeats Rolf? What are the connections that Gehry sees between fish and architecture?

I've been asking it over and over again in complete exasperation and still don't have an answer: what are the fish up to???

Must do some more folklore research re: fish. Here and here is some thematic stuff for me to ponder.