Mock Dwell Magazine Spread

FRANK GEHRY BUILDING ART

By Susan Stanberg, David Sokol Chloe Hodge & Raul Barreneche

Above | Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, workshop in Düsseldorf, Germany 1997 Left | Frank Gehry , 2013

26 | FRANK GEHRY

Frank Gehry has been called the most important architect of our age,

Gehry's audacious, glowing buildings capture movement, energy and

and it’s hard to disagree. His creations, such as the Guggenheim

light. He's taken hits from other architects and critics over the years

Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los

who have said that the buildings don't work inside, or that they're too

Angeles, created a new architectural language. With sculptural swoops

hard to construct — but stubbornly and passionately he has held onto

and sweeps and unusual materials, Gehry has changed the course of

one goal: to create buildings that inspire emotion. “If you look at a

architecture. He has spent his career happily playing the role of

great work of art in bronze from 600 B.C. and it makes you cry, some

scrappy outsider, and even if it’s all happening against his wishes, the

artist way back when was able to transmit emotion through time and

Canadian-born Gehry is now unquestionably the world’s most famous

space over years to today," Gehry says, and he believes architecture

and respected architect.

can do that, too.

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BREAKING THE MODERNIST MOLD

I'm only an architect, no matter what anybody says, a humble architect.

-Frank Gehry

Over the years many adjectives

His early projects were fairly

have been used to describe Frank

typical of the times and followed

Gehry's creations; things like

the modernist style; stressing

edgy, forward-looking, astonish-

clean, geometric lines, with no

ing, and weird. Anything but

clutter

ordinary, Gehry challenged the

Simplicity was key; functionality

mainstream in the 1970s and

was the focus.

and

no

decoration.

1980s when he used everyday materials such as cardboard to

Frank the artist, however, was

make furniture, and chain-link

itching to experiment. He was

fencing to construct buildings.

very much caught up in the West

Collectors sought his whimsical

Coast art movement and count-

lamps

and chairs, and Gehry-

ed many emerging artists as his

designed office buildings and

friends, including Ed Moses and

homes were scattered in cities all

Billy Al Bengston. By the mid-

over the world, but the maverick

1960s, Gehry started to, as

arch- itect did not achieve real

Richard Lacayo of Time put it,

fame until the late 1990s.

"insinuate odd bits of business into his designs."

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, unveiled by Gehry

Gehry began using materials

in 1997, made him a celebrity at

such as unpainted plywood,

the age of sixty-eight. Since then,

rough concrete, and corrugated

countless urban commissions

metal, all of which are usually

have come Gehry's way, and he is

hidden after a house is properly

considered to be one of the most

finished. As Gehry told Lacayo, “I

important & innovative architects

was trying to humaize stuff.”

of the 21st century.

Right |Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, 1997 Previous Page | Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, California, 1978 Next Page | Maggie’s Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, Scotland, 2003

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FRANK THE ARTIST Art and beauty were in Gehry's DNA from the beginning. As a little boy he watched live carp swimming in his grandmother's bathtub on their way to becoming gefilte fish. He loved the shapes and movements they made. Later, fish became a motif in the buildings he designed.

After he moved to Los Angeles at 18, his closest friends were artists, not architects. "Their commitment to ordinary materials, to fresh ways to solve problems, making beauty out of the ordinary, affected him very, very profoundly," says biographer Paul Goldberger.

Left | Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, U of Technology Sydney, Australia, 2014

Take chain link fencing- the basic barrier at construction sites and tennis courts. Gehry used it early on, in houses and commercial projects, and was ridiculed for it.

"I found the material that everybody hated," he says. It was a material "that was used ubiquitously by all cultures throughout the world, and that disconnection between those two ideas interested me, so I started looking at how I could make chain link — because I hate it, too why not try to make it beautiful?�

Left & Above | Serpentine Gallery Pavillion London, England, 2008

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The architect’s structures are intended to be experiential spaces, targeted towards providing a mass audience with an entirely enveloping experience.

Gehry explains this directly during

his

interview

with

Sydney Pollack for Sketches of Frank Gehry, questioning, “How do you make architecture human?” “How do you find a second wind after industrial collapse?”

These

questions

surrounding a broader urban vision have run through and set the course of Frank Gehry’s work over several decades.

Right | Der Neuer Zollhof Düsseldorf, Germany, 1999 Left | Maggie’s Ninewells Hospital Dundee, Scotland, 2003

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

HUMBLED

BY FAME

GEHRY’S ARCHITECURAL LANGUAGE

Frank Gehry has been engulfed Over the years, Gehry's materials got more sophisticated. The Louis

by world-wide fame and admira-

and wood. Before that, he made a sensuous Disney Concert Hall out of

Frank was trying to conceive in his head shapes and forms and curves that were not particularly realizable by engineers

supple stainless steel, and glowing silver titanium swirls in the curves of

-Paul Goldberger

Gehry’s inability to take unmiti-

Vuitton Foundation in Paris is constructed with billowing, soaring glass

the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

tion. Goldberger publishes a revealing quote that shows gated joy at his accomplishment.

His aesthetic has remained almost entirely unchanged in the subse-

He says, "I wish I could live in the

"I was trying to express emotion," he explains. "The curves were from the

quent 20 years, and to a remarkable extent, Gehry seems to have found

place people are making for me.

fish were a sense of movement with inert materials, which the Greeks

a language of his own, which he can finally and fully articulate. Gehry’s

I want to be popular, but I don't

did, the Indian cultures did it. We are living in a culture where movement

architecture springs from the high traditions of the 20th century, yet he

trust it."

is pervasive. Everything is moving, so we hook on to that and use it as

has recast the elite impersonality of modernism into a joyous and

part of our language, our architectural language, there's some

accessible expressionism.

resonance for it.”

Gehry feels his work is never perfect, never finished. He states,

He is the defining architect of the software age, yet he deeply mistrusts

“It can never be perfect. By de-

Movement, emotion, unusual materials, going against current thinking.

the cold touch of computer design. However, software from the

finition, it can’t because we are

These lifelong Gehry themes got transformed when digital technology

aerospace industry let Gehry move his dreams into realities, and is now

defective creatures.”

came along. Goldberger says the digital age let Gehry catch up with his

the defining architect of the software age. Gehry and his staff could

artist friends, through architecture. Like no other living architect, Frank

engineer what sometimes started as squiggles on paper and convert

Gehry embodies the idea of the contemporary masterpiece.

them into structures that would stand up. They made thrilling buildings unlike any that had ever been seen before.

36 | FRANK GEHRY

Left | Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Bilbao, Spain 1997 Next Page | Walt Disney Concert Hall Los Angeles, California, 2003

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