“There are a lot of interesting and true facts that don’t belong in a biography because they don’t advance the story.”
Paul Goldberger said this at Brazos Bookstore when he was explaining what he learned in writing Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, $35). This is a long book, as clean of superfluities as any biography I’ve read, and the full story of a complex man who is still, at the age of 86, building art. As Goldberger’s title implies, the art of Gehry’s building creates buildings that are art and, of course, architecture too. And to make this argument, Building Art contains the facts that are necessary and many that are more than merely interesting.
For instance: Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, into a working-class Jewish family. He changed his name for a couple of reasons, but he changed it to “gehry” because, set in lowercase letters, the “g” and “y” sink symmetrically below the horizontal like pylons and the “h” rises in the middle like a steeple. It looks architectural.
Gehry Residence. Photo: rotor on flickr.
And: early in his career, he developed a taste for chain-link fencing: “the very ordinariness of the material, its plainness and lack of pretension . . . gave him pleasure” and represented, he said, “the antithesis of [Mies’s] Farnsworth House, in which every detail is perfect." This squares with his sense of himself as a low-key, ordinary guy, modest and always eager to be liked. It does not quite square with the ambition that led to the Pritzker Prize in 1989 and the billowing titanium sail-shapes of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao that Philip Johnson called “the greatest building of our time” and that gave Gehry his worldwide fame.
When Gehry moved to southern California in the mid-1960s, he hung around the Ferus Gallery that Walter Hopps had founded and found more stimulating example in the work of artists like Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, Ed Keinholz, Robert Irwin, and John Altoon than he did in the work of other architects. Gehry wanted to work as intuitively as the painters did, he said, when they confronted “a white canvas.”
I was terribly enamored with the directness of it and the Mount Everest-ness of it. ... That whole process seemed so much more likely to produce beautiful work than the architectural process did. I knew pragmatic things had to be taken care of, and I could do that, but it wasn’t enough.
Later on, the critics and clients who found Gehry guilty of being an “artist” himself meant that they thought he was impractical, extravagant, and somehow “illegitimate.” The sculptor Richard Serra was so offended when Gehry’s work became too “sculptural” that he ended their friendship. And has continued making sculptures as big as buildings nonetheless.
It would be interesting to know what Serra thought of Gehry’s famously funky house in Santa Monica. He and his wife Berta bought it in the late ‘70s, when their oldest boy was a toddler, for $160,000 --- “a slightly run-down Dutch colonial house” that Berta thought “Frank can do things to.” And he did. Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic of The New York Times, wrote that, with its slanting lines, protruding corners, and crooked windows, the house “employed an original vocabulary of crude industrial materials ... arranged into a composition of lopsided cubes, exposed-stud walls, and other unruly shapes.” Charles Moore liked it too. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that delight is especially strong in this house, “ despite “its astonishing differences. “ More astonishing, perhaps, is that Gehry and Berta never moved, even after all his success made grander things possible.
Guggenheim Bilbao. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Anomalies like this point to the difficulty of finally classifying Gehry, who liked being an outsider anyway, rather than a “modernist “or “postmodernist.” Goldberger says: “it was as if modernists wanted to design new things that had almost no resemblance to what had come before, while postmodernists sought to design new buildings that bore far too much similarity to the architecture of the past” (222), and Gehry didn’t think he was doing either. Goldberger tries to settle the issue by saying Gehry is a “confirmed modernist with a postmodernist’s sensibility,” which says very little. Much better later on he makes an extended comparison of Gehry to the composer Igor Stravinsky, who held that important art has to respond to both the art of the past and the facts of the world, that 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." The constraints of reality, in Gehry’s case, eventually included his relationships to his employees, the egos of clients, and his own restlessness and anxieties.
Gehry had a lot of trusted help throughout his career, associates who would usually manage the business of the firm while he managed the design. Some of these relationships have been long-lasting, but few have been permanent, and most have ended with some unhappiness. In the instance of the company formed to make Gehry Easy Edges furniture, his cardboard chairs, he just walked away, and his partners lost money. And this is not the only time he simply walked away.
He did it from his toughest client, the Los Angeles Music Center, with its concert hall committee and its architectural committee, which commissioned Gehry to do the Walt Disney Concert Hall. He had just won the Pritzker Prize, but they were “scared to death of him,” despite the fact that he was the only one of the star architects who responded to every element in the building’s program, answered all the client’s questions, and made the necessary changes. (One of his senior associates once said Gehry understood that “his buildings had to work better because they looked so weird.”) Nonetheless, the board insisted another firm be hired to “translate” Gehry’s plans and supervise the construction. These supervisors couldn’t even read the plans, the collaboration was a “disaster,” and Gehry walked away to Europe and several new projects.
Walt Disney Concert Hall. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Then, when Diane Disney Miller, Walt’s daughter, guaranteed that the family would cover all the costs of building the concert hall, Gehry returned. In the meantime, he had built the Guggenheim Museum in Spain. Frank Lloyd Wright had built the first landmark Guggenheim in New York City; Gehry built the second in an unremarkable port city in the Basque region and put Bilbao on the map. The museum’s director, Thomas Krens, and the head of the Basque regional government were eager to cooperate because they knew that a Gehry building could be so much more than a merely functional structure. It could also change the rules as it changed its whole environment. Goldberger writes:
It was, of course, an architectural tour de force. But more important, it revealed yet again the extent to which Frank, for all . . . his determination to do something that had never been done before, and his commitment to the most advanced technology, was also trying to break free of one of modernism’s most cherished practices and create his own form of ornament. The sails were a symbol of the new, but they were also a way of creating decoration, of giving the building an element that existed solely for visual pleasure.
The pleasure that the building gives, Goldberger says, goes against “the puritanical strain that had always run through modernist architecture, ” and it is the kind of pleasure we usually attribute to art.
The Disney Concert Hall was finished in 2003, when Gehry was 74 years old, but even with both the Guggenheim and the Disney to guarantee his legacy, he has kept working. The hidden atrium of the DZ Bank in Berlin and the Fondation Louis Vuitton are both important additions to his oeuvre, and 8 Spruce Street finally gives him a big building in New York City. However, at least as important to his legacy as these buildings are is the example Gehry sets in his use of advanced digital technology as a design tool, in order to make the building process not only more efficient and more creative, but also to keep it, he says, from becoming unaffordable. This technology creates another wrinkle to the charge he thinks of himself as an artist, by raising the question: can software draw?
Another aspect of this legacy is the problem of how to archive all the documents that have been generated in his career of over fifty years—the correspondence and the preliminary sketches, of course, but also the notes and invitations, the phone records he has kept, the testimonies and the sniping. As I read about the drawings that had to be kept together in order to represent the ways his thinking developed, I wondered what kind of biography could be “written” using only visual materials. Goldberger’s prose always feels clear, firm, precise, about so many things that are nonetheless easier to see than to visualize. In the penultimate paragraph, he reports on the way Gehry once talked about a finished building, his process, and --- always the jackpot question for every artist --- “where his ideas came from.” Gehry said there was never anything he could predict and nothing he could reduce to a formula or theory. “On a building, I don’t know where I am going when I start, “ he said. “If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there, that’s for sure.” And he is still on the move.
