Last October, Frank Gehry and his family arrived in Spain, where he was scheduled to receive the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, presented by King Felipe VI in Oviedo. When the Gehrys arrived the day before the presentation from Paris (where his Fondation Louis Vuitton museum was unveiled with both the pomp befitting a major French cultural institution and the glamour of a splashy fashion debut), the 85-year-old Gehry—arguably the most famous living architect in the world—was exhausted, and thought he had a few hours to nap before his first obligation. He undressed and climbed into bed. Twenty minutes later, he was awakened by a telephone call telling him he was expected at a press conference. He had no choice but to get dressed again and show up, nap or no nap.
The first reporter asked him what his response was to charges that his buildings were more in the line of dazzling spectacles than functional architecture. For once, Gehry was too tired to be polite. He extended his middle finger. There was an awkward silence, and then another reporter asked whether “emblematic” buildings would continue to be a feature of cities. Gehry replied with only slightly more patience than he had shown to the previous questioner. “In the world we live in, 98 percent of the buildings built are pure shit,” he said. “There’s no sense of design, or respect for humanity or for anything. Once in a while, however, a group of people do something special. Very few, but for God’s sake, just leave us alone. We are dedicated to our work . . . I work with clients who respect the art of architecture. Therefore, please don’t ask questions as stupid as that one.”
Related: Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton
Photographers caught Gehry’s raised finger in photos, and soon, they spread across the Internet. So did his words. He apologized for his rudeness, claiming fatigue, but he saw no reason to disavow his statement. After all, Gehry believed most buildings were terrible, and most people were in denial of the mediocrity around them.
It was a trivial incident, more than anything else a reminder that Gehry’s celebrity had reached a point where his every gesture would be noticed, and sometimes blown out of proportion. Lost in the discussion were the questions that he was trying, through his exhaustion, to communicate: How much should architecture be considered a humane pursuit, an artistic enterprise, a cultural event, as opposed to a practical work of construction? And even when architecture is pursued with the highest aims, how much impact can it have?
Those are the things that have always mattered to Gehry. The way he sees it, architecture has a responsibility to keep you out of the rain, but it serves little purpose if that is all it does. But if it can keep you out of the rain and inspire emotion at the same time, then it will amount to something. If more people looked at buildings that way, they would be less tolerant of what was around them, and more willing to demand something better.
Gehry has never been good at separating his architecture from people’s emotional responses to it, and much of his own emotional connection to his work has derived from his desire to have it please others. Sometimes that was what seemed to matter to Gehry most of all. Philip Johnson—one of Gehry’s earliest supporters, whose partner, David Whitney, became a great friend of Gehry’s, regularly providing the architect with the marijuana that helped him unwind—saw this when he was talking about Gehry to Sydney Pollack, who directed the 2006 film Sketches of Frank Gehry, and said, “In fact, he enjoys more the fact that you enjoy it and I enjoy it, than he does enjoying it himself.”
Gehry’s creative ambition is rooted in far more than his need for approval, but neither is he capable of indifference to how others perceive his work. He is no Howard Roark, the egomaniacal architect hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; he cares passionately about what people think, and even though he has been considered controversial, he was always more eager to satisfy than he was to scandalize. For Frank Gehry, the shock of the new has never been enough. He has always wanted the surprise to contain pleasure and fulfillment.
And yet Gehry’s outsize reputation has all but assured that the infelicitous but pungent term “starchitect” be frequently used alongside his name. It is a word that glibly conflates the flashiness of celebrity and the more serious pursuit of design, and it is not surprising that Gehry hates it. He may be the quintessential “starchitect” in the public’s mind, but to him that term misunderstands his work entirely, implying that his architecture involves nothing more than eye-catching, flashy shapes.
But for all his professed discomfort with the label, he has no dislike of fame itself, and some of his actions have seemed designed to enhance, not to minimize, his celebrity. He allowed himself to be satirized on an episode of The Simpsons and he accepted an invitation from Tiffany & Co. to design jewelry and other objects for its stores and catalogues. He designed a vodka bottle, and watches, and furniture inspired by his favorite sport, hockey. (He had played hockey himself from his boyhood in Ontario until he was into his 70s.) After six decades of living in Los Angeles, Gehry knew more than the average architect’s share of entertainment people, and he allowed Pollack and a cameraman to follow him around for months to create Sketches of Frank Gehry. When he interrupted an interview in the lobby of the George V in Paris last year, after he saw the musician Pharrell Williams walking by with his entourage, it seemed at first like another instance of the attraction to the famous that Gehry’s friends have teased him about for decades. “Hey, Pharrell!” Gehry said, jumping up to greet Williams. “Frank Gehry.” Williams, who had been given a private tour of the Fondation Louis Vuitton the day before, acted as if Gehry, not he, was the major celebrity. “Your building was incredible,” he told Gehry. “Going through it, it felt like walking through your mind.”
Archetypical “starchitect” though he may be, Gehry is skilled at not appearing to act the part of star. When the Architects’ Journal, a British publication, arranged for a video interview with him in 2014 on the occasion of the unveiling of Gehry’s plans for the first permanent project he had ever done in London—a residential and retail complex at Battersea Power Station—the interviewer asked why he had not designed anything there before. Gehry’s reply was typically nonchalant and self-effacing. Nobody asked me, he said. His reply appeared to disappoint the interviewer, who seemed to be hoping that Gehry would use the occasion to rant about the challenging process of getting large buildings approved in London. In the video, he came across as more avuncular than ambitious, as if he was the struggling head of a small studio, not the celebrated architect atop one of the best-known firms in the world.
It was a vintage Gehry performance: the architect as anti-star. In fact, while he would often complain about not having enough work, he was busy with numerous projects of varying sizes at the time of that interview, and he has often turned down work from clients whose projects he found insufficiently stimulating. He is proud of his flexibility, but he is willing to demonstrate it only to those who make it clear beforehand that they like his work and want a Frank Gehry. There has never been any sense in coming to him if you wanted a sleek, white building in the manner of Richard Meier, or a glass tower in the manner of Norman Foster, or a traditional building like those produced by Robert A.M. Stern. He counts on clients to self-select, but he can’t always be sure, and he feels most comfortable with clients who are comfortable with him, and are willing to let him explore.
Related: Architecture in the Age of Gehry
Gehry’s lifelong hope was always that he could create architecture that would be at once avant-garde and popular, assertively modernist and yet embraced by the public. His attitude, even as a young architect coming out of U.S.C. in 1954, was very much his own, and it had little in common with the culture he had known in the 1950s and 1960s, when modernism held sway and often sought to establish itself as a thing apart from the mainstream. One brush with being absorbed into a noted modernist firm came, thankfully, to naught. Gehry admired Richard Neutra’s commitment to public housing somewhat more than he liked his spare, International Style aesthetic, but he went to see the celebrated architect for an interview at his office in Silver Lake after he graduated from U.S.C., bringing along the drawings he created for a housing project in Mexico. Neutra, impressed, said Gehry, then 25, could have a job and start the following Monday. “And he got up to leave and I said, ‘Well, who do I talk to about how I get paid?’” Gehry recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh, no, when you come Monday, you’ll meet with so-and-so and he’ll tell you how much you will pay us for working here.’” It had not occurred to Gehry that an architect as eminent and socially responsible as Neutra would run his practice like an apprenticeship academy. He was so insulted by the idea of such an arrangement that he left the office immediately and never returned.
Unlike rigid modernists such as Neutra, Gehry has always seen himself as a missionary for emotional engagement. “I was looking for a way to express feeling in three-dimensional objects,” he told Pollack about his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the 1997 project that made Frank Gehry a household name. But he could have been referring to all of his work, from the early houses—his rough-hewn, “cheapskate” architecture, using chain-link fencing and everyday materials—to the celebrated concert halls, museums, and public buildings. Everything he designed was directed toward the goal of encouraging the same kind of emotional engagement with architecture that people expect to have with art.
In the mid-1960s, Gehry played a unique role in the L.A. art scene that centered around the Ferus Gallery and included such artists as Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Moses. While he quickly became one of what the artist Tony Berlant would call “the band of brothers,” Gehry was always a bit different: there was nothing about Gehry that was blasé or cool. He was eager to learn. At the beginning, it was enough to make Bengston, one of the de facto leaders of the group, ask Moses, “Who is this little putz you keep bringing around?”
“I said, ‘This is Frank Gehry—he’s a friend of mine, an architect who is very interested in painting,’” Moses said. “It was very unusual for an architect—most of them never got out of their own territory.”
“He was like, ‘Gee whiz,’” said Ruscha, who described Gehry as “the least bombastic person I’ve ever known.” To the artists, he seemed to be always around, listening with a careful ear, looking at everything everyone else was doing. “Frank had an insatiable appetite,” Moses said. Gehry was comfortable with the artists in a way that he would never be with most architects. “There was a powerful, powerful energy I was getting from this scene that I wasn’t getting from the architecture world,” Gehry has said. “What attracted me to them is that they worked intuitively. They would do what they wanted and take the consequences”—something that most architects, in Frank’s experience, were less and less willing to do. “Their work was more direct and in such contrast to what I was doing in architecture, which was so rigid,” Gehry said. “You have to deal with safety issues—fireproofing, sprinklers, handrails for stairways, things like that. You go through training that teaches you to do things in a very careful way, following codes and budgets. But those constraints didn’t speak to aesthetics.”
Gehry appropriates the techniques of art, but that no more makes him an artist instead of an architect than the ability to make meaningful spaces within a work of sculpture makes Richard Serra an architect instead of an artist. Gehry uses art to architectural ends: to solve the fundamental architectural problems of creating objects that function well for a particular purpose, are well constructed, and have a meaningful relationship to the world around them. His journey has always been guided by intuition, not by information and neither, despite the critical role digital software plays in his work, has it been driven by technology. Technology for him has always been a means, not an end; a way of getting ideas out of his head and into the built world. The starting point is always inside his head, in an imagination that is always seeking to push on—to find some new way of making space, some new way of making shapes.
Related: Silicon Valley's Changing Architectural Choices
In the spring of 1957, after a stint at Harvard, Gehry and his family decided to pack up their white Volkswagen and head back to Los Angeles. The trip was long but uneventful. The only important bit of architectural touring Frank tried to do was to visit Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s compound in Scottsdale, Arizona. When they arrived at Taliesin, Gehry remembered, there was a flag flying over the property, the indication that the imperious Wright, who that spring turned 90, was in residence. Visitors were still welcome, however, under the usual protocol: Wright’s enterprise charged one dollar per person for every tour of his studio and residence complex. When Gehry discovered that the ticket sellers at Taliesin expected him to pay the full charge for his two small children as well as for himself and his wife, he refused and walked away. “I found that offensive,” he said. “Here’s me with two little daughters, and they wanted four dollars. I said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and left. I didn’t like Wright’s politics anyway.”
Gehry’s obsession with making the new has often been misunderstood as suggesting indifference, even hostility, toward what has come before—including his architectural predecessors, as his attempted Taliesin visit might suggest. In fact, the opposite is true: his architecture is based on a deep knowledge, even love, of the architecture of the past, and he has not so much broken with the past as found a new and different way of expressing continuity with it. Not for nothing is Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music one of his favorite books, since Stravinsky makes clear how much his work—like Gehry’s, often taken as representing a rejection of all that preceded it—owes to the past, and how little he saw his music as revolutionary. “I hold that it was wrong to have considered me a revolutionary,” Stravinsky wrote. “To speak of revolution is to speak of a temporary chaos. Now art is the contrary of chaos . . . I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.”
Great art, Stravinsky was saying, is not arbitrary; it emerges out of knowledge and discipline, and of new—daring—ways to work within the constraints of reality to make new kinds of order. Gehry, often misunderstood as creating capricious form to incite chaos—as some opponents to his Eisenhower Memorial, whose design was finally approved last July after years of controversy, accused him of doing—has never had much patience for architecture that emerges out of personal impulses rather than the constraints of a program and a site. What he has always sought is not freedom from constraints but new ways to respond to them. Like the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who said, “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but keep the tradition,” Gehry wants his work to invigorate tradition, not destroy it. To be new, he has always felt, is not to deny the old, any more than to be timeless is to deny the new. The greatest of all art is both anchored in its time and able to transcend it.
Gehry’s work is traditional in another way, in that he uses physical form to create meaningful sensation, which once was taken for granted as the only way to create any kind of architectural experience, but in the age of digital technology and virtual space no longer is. To the extent that he relies on the crafting of real physical materials to make real physical spaces, and not on the use of digital technology to evoke the images of physical things to make virtual space, Gehry is, in fact, a rather old-fashioned architect. Another aspect of his old-fashionedness is his very un-starchitect fondness for the constant give-and-take between architect and client. “I would bring ideas, Frank would bring ideas, and he would do sketches,” one client has said. “I often think that Frank is like a conductor or a composer, and there are many other people involved, but without Frank, you wouldn’t have the symphony.”
From the beginning, Los Angeles, with its rough landscape of expedience, its landscape of cars and warehouses and factories and signs and bungalows, attracted Gehry’s attention and inspired him to create new spaces and new shapes, teasing out of the seeming chaos of the city new forms that possess the undeniable power of the profound. The charge that Gehry doesn’t care about his buildings’ surroundings is nonsense, but what those spaces and shapes mean is not for him to say. If architecture, like music, offers some inherent formal cues—certain kinds of spaces are, by nature, exclamatory and exuberant, while others are more somber and brooding, just as certain tempos and keys are in music—these cues do not define the meaning of the work, or determine how we will react to it. As with the greatest music (or literature or painting), Gehry’s architecture can inspire a myriad of associations and feelings, and the greatest gift it confers is not in the specifics of what it evokes, but the depth, sureness, and subtlety of how it affects us.
In fact, for all the strength of Gehry’s form-making, he never forces us to see the world as he does. His buildings transcend his own story, just as the work of any great artist transcends his or her story. The greatest artistic works emerge from their creators’ lives, but they go beyond them, possessing an inherent power that leads us to turn inward. Gehry’s architecture invites interpretations that are as revelatory of our own lives and experiences as they are of Frank Gehry’s.
Once, after one of his buildings was finished, Gehry was asked to talk about his design process, and where his ideas came from. He told lots of anecdotes, but he said that in the end, it all came down to the way in which clients, constraints, his knowledge, and his intuition all came together. And it was not something he could predict; all he knew was that it could not be reduced to a formula, and he had never believed that his work could be described in terms of a precise theory. To choose to create was, to him, to accept the notion that you did not know where the process would take you. Far from being troubled by this, he always felt liberated by it.
“On a building, I don’t know where I’m going when I start,” he said. “If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there, that’s for sure.”
Adapted from Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, by Paul Goldberger, to be published this month by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC; © 2015 by the author.
