Watch
a stunning documentary film about Gehry's landmark Guggenheim Bilbao, shot
by Ultan Gulifoyle, the producer of Sketches of Frank Gehry
What’s the most difficult and stressful task that a human being can perform?
Brain surgery on the President of the United States maybe, or reentering the
Earth’s atmosphere in a malfunctioning Space Shuttle?
Or perhaps it would it be the task of designing a Frank Gehry building: a
several-hundred-million-dollar landmark that appears to be engaged in an
inadvisable late-night dare with gravity; a building that, when you get down
to it, has no real business being a building at all. Something like the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which resembles a giant extraterrestrial insect
perched for a while on the bank of the Nervion River, ready to flutter back
into deep space at any moment.
It’s hard not to feel daunted by the prospect of interacting with the brain
responsible for Bilbao’s how-in-the-name-of-God-did-they-build-that curves,
not to mention the wildly implausible lines of the Walt Disney Concert Hall
in Los Angeles. Gehry’s reputation doesn’t help: he is described to me by
one of his close friends as “quiet and difficult”.
But then, what do you expect? Gehry is no mere architect; he is a
“starchitect”, and the object of adulation by culture junkies across the
world – including, it turns out, the veteran Out of Africa film-maker Sydney
Pollack, who has just released an 84-minute documentary entitled Sketches of
Frank Gehry (see panel, right). The film is the closest that anyone is ever
likely to get to the genre of architecture-porn. There they are, Gehry’s
curvy super-models, spread-eagled and pouting in various exotic locations
across the globe.
I meet Gehry at his surprisingly sane-looking office in Marina del Ray, Los
Angeles, where 180 of his understudies design everything from entire New
York zip codes to vodka bottles, via home lighting and Tiffany jewellery.
Gehry, the Willy Wonka of this particular chocolate factory, greets me
shiftily in a black T-shirt and blue jeans.
It’s the kind of get-up that Chris Martin of Coldplay might wear – only Gehry
is 78 and bespectacled, with hair the colour of his beloved stainless steel.
I ask him if he enjoyed Sketches. “Sydney seemed to think that I asked him
to do it, but I didn’t,” he responds, clearly hyper-aware that Sketches
might come off as a self-commis-sioned ego project. “I tell him: ‘I would
just never do that; it’s not my way.’ I’m not self-promoting. I’m ambitious,
but I’m not self-promoting.”
By now we are standing in Gehry’s conference room, a loft-like area with white
walls made whiter by two hidden skylights. There is a great mass of sculpted
cardboard on the floor. I ask Gehry what it is. “Product development,” he
says, cryptically. Asked to elaborate, the architect explains: “We develop,
y’know, product. That’s what we do here.” Then he leaves the room for 15
minutes to take a phone call. I remind myself: “quiet and difficult”.
Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada, as Ephraim Owen Goldberg, but changed his
name to Frank Gehry shortly after being told by an architecture professor
that he was no good. Gehry says in Sketches that “you could rationalise [the
teacher’s comment] as antiSemitism”. Nevertheless, he blames the name-change
entirely on his first wife, Anita Synder. “I was pussy-whipped,” he
concludes, rather incongruously.
The marriage produced two daughters but ended before Gehry caught the world’s
attention with the remodelling of his home in San-ta Monica: imagine a plain
clapboard bungalow encased in corrugated iron and wood-framed glass, then
placed in front of a circus mirror and rebuilt according to the reflected
dimensions. Gehry lives there with his second wife, Berta.
When Gehry finally returns to the conference room (“I forgot we were doing
this”), I point to a wooden carp in the corner of the room – a birthday gift
from Larry Guggenheim, taken from Andy Warhol’s collection. I tell him it
reminds me of the story about how Gehry’s mother would bring home carp for
the family to eat, and how Gehry would play with the doomed creature in the
bath-tub, thus allegedly creating his interest in fish shapes. “Oh, that’s
an old story,” Gehry erupts. “Everyone wants to use that f***ing story.”
At this point a pattern is beginning to emerge with Gehry’s curmudgeonliness:
he says something outrageously foul-tempered, then gives a sheepish grin –
as if you’re both the target of the bile and yet somehow complicit in its
deployment. He attempts to give me “the real reason why I got into fish”,
but gets bored. “I was interested in creating a sense of movement with
architecture,” he begins, “and I was looking at the . . . [heavy sigh] you
don’t want to go into all that, do ya?” Here’s the shortened version:
architecture looks to the past. Gehry knew he had to do the same, but wanted
to be different. So he looked to the prehistoric past, before man, when fish
were the big deal.
Fortunately, the subject of Guggenheim’s birthday gift isn’t a complete
deadend as it soon brings us to one of the architect’s latest projects: a
300,000 sq ft, culturally sensitive (ie, no nudes), Guggenheim museum on an
island off the coast of Abu Dhabi.
Gehry seems wary. “Any requests I’ve gotten from that region, I’ve turned
down,” he says. “I’m just too old to get involved there. It’s a new culture.
I was requested many times to go to Qatar to talk about doing the largest
aquarium in the world. When I got there, they said they didn’t know what I
was talking about and that they weren't that interested in building any
aquarium. That was insulting. So that sort of jaded me and when Tom Krens
(the Guggenheim director) came up with Abu Dhabi, I turned it down. I still
feel it’s complicated. We’ve done lots of models and there are still lots of
misunderstandings.”
Critics of Gehry say he keeps rehashing his best ideas, to the point of
self-parody. Others, such as the artist Richard Serra, accuse him of
plagiarising and cannibalising higher art forms, such as sculpture. At the
age of 78, Gehry still seems impatient to prove everyone wrong – and becomes
supercharged with enthusiasm when finally coaxed into talking about his
work.
“It’s like a tepee,” he says of one of the current plans for Abu Dhabi.
“Tepees have a hole in the top, so the hot air goes up. We showed it as
canvas – that’s the cheap way to do it. We did a study on how this works:
all the sun angles, moon angles, temperatures, climates . . .”
The studies are important, as the downside of Gehry’s way-out designs can be
sometimes bizarre side-effects: pedestrians were burnt by the sun’s
reflection in the steel panels of Disney Hall, for example. “The first year
that the buildings are built I go through hell because I see all the things
I should have done differently,” Gehry concedes. “It takes a couple of years
to get over that, then you see the building as other people see it, which is
as just a building.”
As an Angeleno, Gehry gets to use only two of his buildings regularly – his
home and Disney Hall – although he occasionally flies around the world to
“visit his children”. He didn’t come to LA by choice (his family moved
here), but now seems grateful to have ended up amid the strip malls and
Savon Drugs stores: “It was a free-for-all in LA [in the 1960s and 1970s].
It was under the radar. I mean, we used to complain that architectural
people didn’t pay much attention to us, but in hindsight it was a blessing,
because we were allowed to develop.”
Nevertheless, Gehry would clearly like to be treated with more reverence by
his adopted city. “We have a new city planning director [Gail Goldberg],” he
says. “I invited her out here to talk, but she doesn’t seem to be . . . It
doesn’t seem like they’re tapping into the talent, y’know? Whereas in London
Richard [Rogers] and Norman [Foster] are lords, God bless ’em. They are part
of the power structure; they have some say; they are being listened to.”
As for the future, Gehry has won critical praise for Inter-Active Corp’s
ghostly HQ in Manhattan and is working on two massive urban renewal
projects: Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Grand Avenue in LA. He is building
a £290 million seafront development in Hove, East Sussex.
As for the perhaps ill-advised Gehry brand extensions into watches and vodka
bottles, he says there will be no more, apart from his work with Tiffany. He
is also still dabbling in home furniture. “Have you seen my lights?” Gehry
asks me at one point, jumping out of his chair and literally running over to
a large, misshapen lump of cardboard on the floor. “I’ll show you my
lights!” he exclaims, now throwing the gently throbbing object from one hand
to the other.
Finally he plops it on the floor and shrugs, still grinning, as if to say –
can you f***ing believe I designed that, eh? But the euphoria of creation is
fleeting. Moments later I’m asking him about an energy-saving lighting
feature in the Disney Hall and he turns grim and silent. And then, in that
cantankerous yet strangely apologetic tone, he explains: “It’s all bulls**t.”
Gehry/Pollack events
Sketches of Frank Gehry goes on general release on June 29.
A Sketches of Frank Gehry Gala takes place on June 14 at the Chelsea Cinema,
206 Kings Road, London SW6, at 6.30pm; tickets, £12.50 (0870 8506926; curzoncinemas.com).
After the film Pollack and Gehry will be in conversation with the Times
architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff. The two men are again talking on stage on
June 15 at the Royal Institute of British Architects, 66 Portland Place, W1,
at 7pm; £10 (020-7307 3699; www.architecture.com/programmes).
Pollack will give a Times masterclass on June 17 at the Mayfair Cinema, 38
Curzon Street, W1, from 11am-noon, £10. Book at www.offersinthetimes.com/
masterclass. The events run by The Times are part of Architecture Week,
running from June 15-24 (architectureweek.org.uk).
