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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 Page 2 Gehry has made his career in a profession in which fame comes late. (Who's going to trust a kid with a $100 million construction budget?) At 71, he's entering the kind of late-life creative surge in which Matisse produced his colored paper cut-outs and Wright found his way to Falling Water and the Guggenheim in New York City. Last September, Gehry's new Vontz Center, a molecular-science lab in modules of ballooning brick, opened at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. Around the same time, one of his avalanching designs was selected for an addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, an otherwise imperturbable neoclassical structure. Work is under way on the $230 million Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which was delayed for years by concerns that the majestic billows of Gehry's design would cost too much to build. And construction will start soon on a computer-sciences building for M.I.T. in Cambridge, Mass., a project shaping up to be as beautiful as Bilbao but in utterly different ways. In April, Gehry also unveiled his model for yet another Guggenheim, this one in lower Manhattan, adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. Whether it gets built will depend on Guggenheim director Thomas Krens' ability to persuade enough people that New York City, which has a Guggenheim annex in SoHo, needs a third branch. Gehry's design will also have to overcome critics who say it will dominate the Manhattan skyline, which takes some doing, but a building by Gehry could do it. And then there's his new DG Bank headquarters, nearing completion in Berlin, which contains between the unexpectedly plain walls of its central courtyard a freestanding auditorium in the rough shape of a giant horse's head. "That's the most mystical thing I've ever done," says Gehry. "The best shape I've ever made." He designed it on a computer screen, which is rare for him. Though computers are essential to plot the specs for his complicated forms, in the design phase Gehry works like a sculptor, drawing and building three-dimensional models, one after another after another. The earliest ones might be so loose that he makes them with crumpled wrapping paper and soda bottles. It's not hard to think of that horse's head as a roaring id exploding within the confines of a placid exterior. That's how a lot of big bankers think of themselves anyway. But Gehry sees it as "a warm and enveloping place," something that would make you feel "like you were being cradled in a beautiful space." Maybe Gehry should have designed the Esalen Institute, given how much he talks about spaces that hug people. But sitting with him in the cafeteria he created for the headquarters of the Condé Nast publishing firm in midtown Manhattan, you could see what he means. The blue titanium walls bulge toward you like expectant mothers. The circular banquettes are surrounded by floor-to-ceiling sheets of plate glass, but each of them is uniquely curved and torqued so that together they form a voluptuous encirclement all around you. For some architects, it's enough to return you to your youth. Gehry brings you back to the womb. His own childhood was spent in Canada, first in Toronto, then in the small Ontario mining town of Timmins. For a while his father worked for a pinball and slot-machine supplier. In a later job he won awards for window display and made homespun artworks. When he died, Gehry's mother went to work for a Los Angeles department store and rose to be head of the drapery department, where she did domestic interiors. "So the creative genes were there," Gehry says. "But my father thought I was a dreamer, I wasn't gonna amount to anything. It was my mother who thought I was just reticent to do things. She would push me." In Los Angeles Gehry absorbed the catch-as-catch-can charm of the built environment of Southern California. After getting an architecture degree at the University of Southern California, he studied for a while at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Not long after, Gehry also changed his name from Goldberg. "In Canada when I was a kid, I remember going to restaurants with my father that had signs up saying no jews allowed. I used to get beaten up for killing Christ. My ex-wife said to me, 'You don't really wanna put your kids through this.' But I've always regretted changing it." In the 1950s, when Gehry returned to Southern California to start work as an architect, the prestige of classical modernism was as high as it would ever be. Even after he started his own firm in 1962, his private-home projects and small public buildings largely satisfied modernist expectations that any structure should be a spare, unified form clearly expressing its underlying function. All the while, Gehry was powerfully interested in painting and sculpture and the rising West Coast art scene. He counted as friends some of its emerging stars, including Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and Ed Ruscha. What he really wanted was the freedom they had to play with surrealism, assemblage and pop imagery. So Gehry begin to insinuate odd bits of business into his designs: exposed studs and other things that a "properly" finished house would conceal. "I was trying to humanize stuff," he says. "Clients would always ask for buildings that were warm, and I would take notes at our meetings and write, 'Warm again.'" Nice neat modernism was notoriously cool. Raw was his path to warm. Eventually he decided to look for freedom in his own backyard. Literally. In 1978 he renovated the small Santa Monica house where he still lives with his second wife Berta, turning a conventional pink Dutch colonial into an explosion of cinder blocks, corrugated steel and chain link. It instantly became one of those places that some say is an icon and others an eyesore. But its picture appeared everywhere, and it put him on the map of cutting-edge architects. Not long after, he decided to follow his bliss and do only the kind of work he wanted. He cut his office from 30 workers to three and started over. That was the road that led to Bilbao, Seattle and points farther out. Around age 60, when most men are easing into nine-hole golf, Gehry took up ice hockey. He did it because it was a game his grown sons liked, but also because he loves to skate. "I once asked my skating teacher, 'When am I gonna look cool?' He said, 'Never.'" Never? Somebody show that man a Gehry building. Frank Gehry is one of the coolest guys in the world. — With additional reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York 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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