FRANK GEHRY PAUSES, scratches his head. “It’s whatever you want it to be. I agree with anything. When I talk to my ice hockey friends I say the curves come out of carving the ice. Musician friends say the shapes are musical, and I say yes, I guess they are. If you think they are, they are.”
He’s talking about his new building, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, due to open in October. Only Gehry doesn’t much like talking about his work, at least not in a Daniel Libeskind/Rem Koolhaas, highfalutin way. He’d rather talk about anything — Iraq, letting rip in Korean karaoke bars (“With a few drinks I can do Scooby Dooby Doo”) — and let his work speak for itself. Gehry squirms under analysis, and buries his talent and erudition beneath crumpled clothes and a soft, self-deprecating voice. It’s very LA. At his vast studio — an overgrown back-lot garage full of preppy clones in polo shirts — he arrives by shuffling in sideways, eyes down, as if delivering pizza. You can hardly believe such vibrant, muscular, flashy architecture could come from one so diffident.
Gehry’s more of a doer, a casual, hands-on kind of guy. He famously eschews computers for model making, and the loose “LA school” of architecture he accidentally founded, the one now conquering the universe with its ad-hoc collaging and theatrical curves, was always more about having a good time, “riffing” with your buddies with a soldering iron and some scraps of metal, than intellectualising, like the East Coast lot, about deconstructing the Post-Structuralist world, or whatever.
“There’s a bit of the ‘aw shucks’ in me, yeah. It’s a defensive thing. I’m serious about what I do. I just don’t take myself that seriously.”
But the world now takes Gehry very seriously indeed. It was his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao that magicked him, in his dotage, into Officially The World’s Most Famous Architect, with famous friends such as Dennis Hopper, and a superstar’s swarming entourage. Very LA. He hasn’t quite recovered. “I’m 74, you see, so it came late. I don’t believe it. I try to ignore it.”
But everyone wants a piece of Gehry now. Seattle got him next (the Experience Music Project, a re-welded Fender Stratocaster as a Jimi Hendrix museum). Lisbon, Ontario, Panama, Chicago, Jerusalem, Venice, Dundee, maybe Brighton are all next up for one of the quiet man’s sensational, swooping, rock-baroque cathedrals of culture-consumerism. Everywhere wants the “Bilbao effect”: bringing places back to life through the glorious power of architecture.
But LA got him first. The Canadian’s adopted home town is dotted with his early experiments. And, were it not for earthquakes, race riots and global recession, the city’s new Walt Disney Concert Hall would have been finished years before Bilbao. This was the building that was meant to make Gehry a star.
For LA, too, wants a new life courtesy of Gehry. It’s not industrially declined like Bilbao. It’s just having a midlife crisis. For 50 years it’s been the world’s archetypical sprawling, privatised, centreless city of gated suburbs, fast food, fast, flashy architecture, malls and freeways — a city in which you need never sully your toes by touching a sidewalk. But now that Beijing, Shenzhen and the North Circular are out-LA-ing LA, LA has decided to become Paris. It’s been quietly turning its downtown into a proper city centre, like it used to be 80 years ago, before the car screwed it up. It’s introduced old-fashioned public space without security guards, lofts, pedestrian (gasp) boulevards, and posh, properly public buildings such as Rafael Moneo’s masterly Roman Catholic cathedral, and, the linchpin, the Disney Concert Hall.
Gehry’s press blurb says the hall’s spaces will become the “living room for the city”. In person he’s more reticent. “LA’s civic life only exists in rhetoric. But maybe one building can contribute. I tried.”
Downtown’s civic revival is mostly about selling real estate while keeping the natives happy. But there’s genuine sincerity, too. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the LA Philharmonic’s musical director, says that after the Rodney King riots, “some people thought it was morally wrong to build an exclusive classical-music concert hall in downtown LA when society was about to fall apart”. Eleven years later, “it will be a building that belongs to everybody,” he says. “It’s theirs. It’s open. They can come in and discover it.” The hall will be the city’s symbolic “unifying force”, quite a job in a place where, until now, the only civic activity binding the disparate populations was cruising the freeways in your SUV.
In olden days, civic architecture was whatever the city told you it was, usually puffed up columns and porticoes. That won’t wash in multicultural, mosaic cities today. We need something more inclusive, whose symbolism won’t offend any minority in the new civic body. That’s where laid-back Gehry’s good-time architecture comes in. The Disney Hall, he says, is a child of the Philharmonie concert hall in Berlin, where Hans Scharoun built a “magical” civic space where you can’t help but meet people and be civilised. You can call Gehry’s version flashy, empty gesturing, but, inside, even spoilsports can’t help but have a good time. It’s magnificent.
Gehry sweeps you straight off the sidewalk, revolutionary in LA, with a flash of silvery skin and the promise of music and a good time inside. There you lose yourself in a vortex — tighter, slicker, more controlled and LA than Bilbao’s looser, mañana version — with swirls, bulges and swoops in steel, white render, Travertine marble, glass and Douglas fir (no expense spared for LA’s new citizens). You catch glimpses of sky through the chasms, dive into impromptu pools of calm space before escalators throw you into the eye of the storm — the calm, uncharacteristically symmetrical main auditorium, designed to build an “intimate community between the orchestra and the people”, says Gehry, in whose “democratic” seats “no one feels like a second-class citizen”.
To Gehry, the hall writhes like a barrelful of carp, “expressing movement with inert materials”, rippling with aquatic light reflected from the Californian sun. Or maybe it’s a giant bunch of steel flowers in a limestone vase, designed in honour of Lillian Disney, Walt’s widow and the hall’s founder. Lillian, LA and Gehry love a bit of kitsch. For Salonen, it’s “that great cliché, Goethe’s statement that architecture is frozen music. This building is the macro instrument.”
And for LA’s civic leaders, as for Bilbao’s, Gehry has built a new civic logo, the perfect replacement for the Hollywood sign. You’ve got to be bold to make it in LA, where every building comes wrapped in Versace. And the Disney Hall is certainly bold. They’re already double-taking on the freeway. And its profile makes a great badge for the tour guides. It’s the perfect civic building to relaunch the ultimate city of spectacle in its midlife crisis: the building as party. The question is, will everyone come?
