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TIME EUROPE September 18, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 12 The Frank Gehry Experience Will a groovy new Seattle museum and buildings worldwide make him the wave of the future? By RICHARD LACAYO When his uproarious new building, the Experience Music Project, opened this June in Seattle, it was easy to forget that Frank Gehry, who is the world's most famous architect, was once just the world's most famous strange architect. That was in the 1980s, when to some people his angular rethinking looked all elbows. That was also when his mixture of high concept with cheap materials — chain link fencing, corrugated metal, pressed plywood — was getting his work labeled "populist," which generally means brainy but cheap. In 1981, when he was named Architect of the Year by his peers in California, he figured he should use the opportunity to accept his prize with a talk titled "I'm Not Weird." "I was always mentally ducking," he says now. "People would yell at me and say, 'You can't do that.'" Nobody says no to Gehry anymore, certainly not since the triumph three years ago of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. His hurtling design there was certified at once as "the most important building of our time" by Philip Johnson, the very gray eminence of American architects. It may also be the most purely delightful. With its improbable towers tilting against themselves and its titanium sheathing in full refulgent glow, it brings on a question that the world has not enjoyed asking itself since the first moon landings: If this is possible, what isn't? The new Guggenheim has also flooded tourists into Bilbao, provided backup curves in a Mariah Carey video and was featured in the most recent James Bond film. What this means is that Gehry has managed to be both intellectually respectable and popular, not just populist, a balancing act that makes his tilted towers look easy. Richard Meier is the great American architect whose stately modernist buildings, most of them in a white so ideal it could be used for the table settings at Plato's Symposium, are the very opposite of Gehry's Baroque tumblings. Yet even Meier is happy about the way Bilbao has made architecture "part of public discussion again. All of a sudden people will say, 'This is architecture. It is not just building.'" You could say that about the Experience Music Project, Gehry's first major public building to open in the U.S. since he did Bilbao. Located at the foot of that beloved American knickknack, the Seattle Space Needle, the EMP is an "interactive" rock museum costing $240 million (more than $100 million for Gehry's building, the rest for the museum installed within it). The money comes by way of Paul Allen, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, who has his own rock band, a lifelong thing for Seattle native Jimi Hendrix and enough cash to indulge his pleasures in a big way. There may be no bigger way to do that than to hand yourself over to Gehry, whose work is the pleasure principle engraved in stone, twisted glass, titanium and crimson stainless steel. Gehry tells a story about a German client who came to him after seeing an earlier Gehry building in Switzerland: "He said to me, 'That one was Wow! Now give us Wow! Wow! Wow!'" The question now is whether such excitement will last, inspiring a School of Gehry, with others adapting his aesthetic vision. The 20th century, which began in the coils of Art Nouveau, has had its share of architects who pursued a sculptural, curvilinear style: Gaudi, Wright, the late-period Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. They left admirers yet still got pushed to the sidelines. But the Bilbao Guggenheim has raised the prospect that Gehry's work is not merely interesting; it's the wave of the future, and not just because it was plotted out with the same up-to-the-minute computer programs used to design fighter jets. In the decades after World War II, the glass-and-steel boxes of modernism, with their vocabulary borrowed from factory sheds and their spirit from rational, square-shouldered corporations, seemed perfectly matched to the 20th century industrial economy. But as manufacturing gives way to the intangibles of e-business and the public square dissolves into the borderless Internet, Gehry's formulations speak to the ways in which people and ideas circulate today. And far better than the sharp-edged cartons of modernism, his funky materials and visual ruckus accord with the disorder of real life. "Democracy creates chaos," he says. "It creates collisions of thought, and it's exciting." All that made Gehry a good choice for EMP, even if he says he was never much of a rock fan ("In the 1960s, I was into jazz. I was already an old fart"). This building has some of the same features that make the Bilbao Guggenheim unforgettable, like the roller-coastering silhouette of its metal exterior and an interior atrium that lifts the eye up through magnificent flights of space overhead. Because it lacks Bilbao's high towers, it goes too soft in places, especially along the collapsed soufflé of its long, low-rise street side. But what it nicely announces is the roughshod essence of rock music. It's hard to put rock into stone. Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a serene geometric formation by I.M. Pei, who designed the glass-and-steel pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. Pei's black-tie modernism has its virtues, but it's an odd choice for a rock monument. Gehry's metal wiggles say, "Shake, rattle and roll." MORE >> PAGE 1 | 2 TIME Europe home More stories from TIME Europe and related links E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com |
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