It was the house that roared, a modest project (the renovation cost about $40,000) that brought Gehry instant notoriety. His neighbors went bananas, but critics loved the place for its raucous forms and the everydayness of materials like chain link and plywood, The house had a crazy, in-your-face toughness and the buoyant originality of a great work of art.
But Gehry was still considered a regionalist, which was a polite but snotty way of saying that nobody thought his work would travel. How wrong they were.
Today Gehry is making a bigger splash than any other architect in America. “He takes chances; he works close to the edge; he pushes boundaries beyond previous limits,” wrote critic Ada Louise Huxtable in the citation awarding him the prestigious Pritzker Prize two years ago. “Gehry’s work goes to the heart of the art of our time.” Philip Johnson, the godfather of the East Coast architecture scene, calls Gehry “the strongest single influence in American design.” Gehry’s free-spirited approach and expressive use of shapes and materials has inspired a whole generation of younger architects. In Los Angeles, Gehry, the renegade homeboy, finally won a major competition when he was picked two years ago to design the city’s new $100 million concert hall, underwritten by Walt Disney’s widow. That building is in the final design phase, but meanwhile the maverick architect is going global, translating his unique brand of California funk into offbeat buildings for international clients.
In the last decade, bigger budgets, a sensitivity to different locations and his growing artistic assurance have given Gehry’s projects new weight and worldliness. But something of the quirky spirit of his house infects everything he does, whether he’s building the small Vitra Design Museum near Basel, Switzerland, with its snowy melange of surprising curves and angles, or designing the $40 million American Center in Paris, with its swooping zinc canopy–so that you’ll enter the building, as Gehry puts it, by going “under a ballerina’s skirt.” In Barcelona, as part of Vila Olimpica, a waterfront development that includes a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill skyscraper, Gehry has designed a retail center. Perched in its midst is a gigantic, eye-popping golden fish–at certain angles, it looks like a conquistador’s helmet–that will sit 90 feet high surveying the harbor.
Why is Gehry suddenly so hot? Partly because his idiosyncratic architecture is right at home in the back-to-basics ’90s: it’s human-scaled, unpretentious, often inexpensive (and sometimes downright cheap). Gehry’s lively sculptural designs are a big relief after the glitzy and ponderous postmodern excesses of the last decade; their appeal to the average guy is unmistakable. Take the little Vitra museum–a museum of chairs, for heaven’s sake–plunked down in the boondocks of the German countryside near the Swiss border. It’s not exactly a recipe for big box office, but a year after Gehry’s extravagantly inventive building opened, the place had been overwhelmed by 50,000 visitors. Or look at the Yale Psychiatric Institute in New Haven, Conn., a mental hospital built like a little village, with clusters of odd shapes and angles, lots of glass and filled with light. It’s a building so humane and noninstitutional that the institute’s chief administrator, Paul Haeberle, believes the design has helped shorten the average length of stay.
“Modesty in architecture is something I always felt was important,” says Gehry. “Modesty in terms of the feeling, not in terms of the exuberance or the forms, but modesty in terms of accessibility. Like using plywood. It isn’t off-putting–it doesn’t feel like you’re going to see the Shah of Iran, you’re going to see Joe Blow. Well, maybe not Joe Blow.” Today Gehry designs few houses, and they’re not cheap. But he thinks the wealthy clients who come to him believe that “a marble palace would be so disjunctive with what’s going on in the world that it would be embarrassing.”
“He has these quintessentially American characteristics–straightforwardness, an egalitarian attitude,” says Swiss furniture magnate Rolf Fehlbaum, who commissioned the Vitra museum. Gehry’s energetic way of juxtaposing crazy shapes and odd materials has a raw, can-do sensibility that’s vastly appealing to foreign clients; his buildings look improvisational, the architectural equivalent of jazz. But for all the wit and fun, there is a dark side: in questioning the notion of architectural monumentality and permanence, Gehry’s work reflects the uncertainty of our time. “In his working drawings the buildings appear to hold still only long enough to be built,” says critic Kurt Forster.
This architecture of controlled chaos springs right out of the smog-choked sprawl of Los Angeles. “I tried to see L.A. for what it was,” says Gehry. “If you look out the window, you could see everything as a mess–or you could begin to compose things, find relationships between shapes.” Gehry has been unfettered by notions of propriety that might constrain the East Coast design establishment–he’s always said he’s more inspired by artists such as Donald Judd and Jasper Johns than by the sacred cows of architecture.
In his sunny studio, where 32 architects work under him, Gehry, 62, sits at his thick plywood desk talking on the phone. Dressed in a crisp, button-down shirt, gray slacks, loafers and no socks (this is L.A.), he’s talking to the head of Euro Disneyland, the Disney theme park that will open next year near Paris. The Walt Disney Co., a major patron of such postmodern gurus as Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stern, commissioned Gehry to design an entertainment center of shops, restaurants, nightclubs, a disco and a rodeo for the European park. Gehry, who possesses both a self-deprecating sense of humor and a notorious temper, is laughing at himself now, explaining into the phone how he went nuts when a local French building inspector declared that the copper-colored roof he’d designed would be all wrong against the gray Paris sky. “You shouldn’t let me near those bureaucrats!” he jokes.
At his office, Gehry is as restless as a caged cat. He likes to noodle over several problems at once. Between phone calls, he’ll stew over a big model of an art museum he’s designing for the University of Minnesota. “It looks like a train station,” he sighs. (Eventually, he will tear it all up and go back to square one to find a whole new concept.) Then he’ll roam the studio, stopping to tinker with various projects. He scrutinizes the model of an art-studies building that will go up behind the Toledo Museum of Art; he’s attached an energetic jumble of Gehry-esque forms to the back of the elegant, neoclassical museum. “There’s something wrong here,” he mutters. “Maybe too many angles.” He substitutes a curved block for a sharply angled one, then stands back and nods approval.
Gehry works by intuition, drawing on zillions of sources and ideas in the world around him. “I’m like a vacuum cleaner,” he says. “I look at everything and I have a good memory for space and form. I fantasize in 3-D.” Each project starts with a sketch. He draws all the time, on napkins in restaurants, stationery in hotels; once he came back from a doctor’s appointment with a sketch on paper sheeting ripped off the examining table. The sketch–a frenzied web of pencil–was translated into a crude model. Most architects refine their designs by working on two-dimensional floor plans but Gehry works in 3-D (box). Early on, he’ll have a hollow model built to show the plan of each floor, where the stairs and elevators need to be, how the building will function. Then Gehry sees where he can carve and create sculptured forms. He’ll order up model after model for a project, constantly toying with the shapes.
The design process can take a year or more, but he’s such a perfectionist that he secretly keeps on designing his buildings after they are built. For more instant gratification, Gehry turns to smaller projects–designing, say, a glass goblet for Swid Powell’s limited-edition line of architect-designed pieces (a half dozen of these clunky Gehry glasses sell for $5,000) or lamps in the shape of fish. In the 1970s, Gehry designed some wonderfully funny–and surprisingly durable–cardboard furniture that was sold through department stores; now he’s designed a line of chairs and tables for Knoll. The graceful chairs are made of bentwood slats woven like baskets. Knoll will introduce them worldwide next year. “Gehry is the only architect you can market in the U.S., Europe and Japan at the same time,” says Knoll’s Andrew Cogan.
Gehry was born in Toronto. (Originally named Goldberg, he and other family members changed their name in the mid-1950s.) The family moved to California when Gehry was 17 for the sake of his father’s health. “I would never have survived Canada,” says Gehry. “In California, it was crazy but it was freer.” A summer-school teacher at the University of Southern California steered him toward the architecture department. “A lot of the architects who were teaching in the late ’40s and ‘5Os had been to Japan and freaked out,” says Gehry, and the language of Japanese building infiltrated their modernist work–the craftsmanlike use of wood, the asymmetrical plan. In 1962, Gehry opened his own firm in Los Angeles. He designed some wonderful houses but the bread and butter of his business was designing projects for developers: stores, showrooms, malls.
But Gehry grew tired of his schizophrenic practice–doing small arty projects and working for big developers. He talked to Milton Wexler, a well-known shrink to the stars who’d been his psychotherapist since the breakup of his first marriage in the mid-’60s. “Wexler hammered at me to be one thing or the other,” Gehry says. “He’d say, ‘Look, you’re an artist. Just do the jobs you can do. Don’t try to be Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’.”
“I told him to go for broke,” recalls Wexler with a smile. “He’s always afraid of bankruptcy anyway, so why not?” Wexler, who’s had many artists as patients, thinks the key to Gehry’s work is that “he has all the traits that a child has–loneliness, impulsiveness, playfulness, fighting the world.”
So about the time he was finishing his biggest shopping center, Santa Monica Place, he built his infamous house. His second wife, Berta, had found the shingled bungalow; therapy had unlocked some truths and a lot of them were unleashed on that house. “In my life, I was always the quiet, nice guy, the pussycat, the ‘Aw, shucks,’ guy. The reality is I’m an angry s.o.b., pushy, ambitious like everyone else,” he says with a big grin.
Gehry’s new esthetic was totally southern California. Typical was a wacky house he designed on the ocean in Venice that had a crow’s nest perched off the front: the tiny room with big flaps shading the windows was a sendup of the lifeguard stations that dot the beach. But lots of people were scared off. Artist Michael Heizer remarked to Gehry, “It’s too bad you can’t build out of materials that will last 2,000 years when people might start to appreciate your work.”
As Gehry’s work grew more assured, it grew less raw; he often used more elegant materials but didn’t sacrifice the inventiveness of the forms. The California Aerospace Museum showed how rich and energetic his sculptural shapes could be, even when building on a shoestring. In the wonderful Winton guest house, built on an estate in Minnesota, Gehry put various abstract sculptural shapes in a tight cluster “like a still life, a Morandi,” as he put it. Each of the forms was cloaked in a different color and texture–lead-coated copper and reddish brown Fin Ply, a Finnish plywood. Other buildings of his looked like little townscapes. In two Los Angeles projects–his campus for the Loyola Law School, with its glass campanile next to the chapel, and his spectacular Schnabel House, with its copper-covered dome and lead-coated tower–there’s a dollop of Hollywood. It’s not the literal, nostalgic quoting from the past that postmodern architects use, but something more subtly romantic that gives the buildings an evocative and exotic whiff.
Gehry, who’s always defied categorization, bucked the postmodern trend throughout the ’80s. When Prince Charles, an outspoken critic of modernism and a promoter of historicism in design, addressed the American Institute of Architects in Washington last year, Gehry boycotted the event, even though he was slated to win an award that evening. And he disdains one of the prince’s favorite projects, Seaside, the new town in Florida with the ambience of a Victorian village. “I see Seaside as an elitist fantasy,” says Gehry. “I think it’s like saying to your kids, ‘Look, we don’t have any new ideas, so we’re going to take ideas from the past.’ And someday, their kids are going to say to them, ‘The 21st century doesn’t work like that. Why did you lie to me? Why did you tell me it was all a pretty and sweet haven?’ "
Gehry believes architecture ought to reflect “the multiple images of the democratic city,” where collisions and clashes are inevitable, a visual cacophony Gehry sees every day as he zips around L.A. in his red Nissan sports car. But unlike the nihilistic chaos of the currently fashionable deconstructivist architecture, Gehry’s buildings are upbeat and humanistic–especially the interiors, which can be positively cozy. Though Gehry uses industrial materials such as galvanized steel siding and pipe rails, his work isn’t high tech; inside his houses he favors lots of light and the warmth of unpainted wood. “I like to nest, like anybody else,” he says.
The wit in Gehry’s buildings is sometimes as pointed as pop art. The fish motif appears again and again. (When he was a child, the story goes, his grandmother would bring a live carp home from the market and Gehry would play with it in the bathtub until she was ready to kill it to make gefilte fish.) A real F-104 Starfighter cantilevers off the front of his Aerospace Museum, and in Venice, Gehry asked Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to create giant binoculars to grace the facade of the new headquarters of the offbeat ad agency Chiat/Day/Mojo.
Gehry’s what-the-hell originality has made him a hero to students and helped kick the door open for a younger generation of adventurous Los Angeles architects. Though Gehry imitations now sprout all over L.A., his more distinguished young colleagues say his artistic independence has been an inspiration, not his “look.” “Gehry showed that you can break all the rules,” says architect Frank Israel. “He’s an incredible catalyst and provocateur. He never stops teaching young people, or learning himself.”
Not that every Gehry building is a roaring success. Sometimes there are problems. Gehry’s own house used to leak. The Schnabel House has so much glass exposure that Gehry designed special screens that can be lowered to block the sun. At Loyola, the copper-colored Fin Ply is peeling and will be replaced with real copper.
But no matter what the practical obstacles, Gehry likes to push his ideas to the limit. In a house for a client in Cleveland, Gehry is designing a series of discrete sculptural forms, made of stone, that will be connected by underground tunnels. In a reversal of the roles on the Winton guest house, which Gehry built next to an existing Philip Johnson house, the 84-year-old Johnson (Gehry calls him “Uncle Philip”) is giving a cameo performance by designing a little guest house for the place.
There are Gehry skeptics. Brendan Gill, writing in The New Yorker, referred to some of his work as “boyish prankishness.” Critic Kenneth Frampton is speaking of Gehry when he despairs that architects today are pressured to be highly visible. “The idea of being quietly creative is not of our epoch,” he says. And even some of Gehry’s fans wonder whether he can successfully transform his maverick ideas into the bigger, more traditional commissions he’s now getting. Is the aging wunderkind going straight? they ask. His latest design tack is to build his sumptuous sculptural forms out of a uniform material, with results that are less jarring than joining, say, stucco and chain link. Gehry insists he’s still an architect who’s “off-Broadway, " but how do you instill the zaniness of the Chiat/Day/Mojo binoculars into a serious monolithic building like the Disney Concert Hall?
And the American Center in Paris will translate the trademark Gehry quirks into elegant limestone, though not everyone finds the design wonderful. “Jack Lang believes Gehry found the urban atmosphere of Paris to be a constraint rather than an occasion for celebration,” says Patrice Mottini, a close adviser to the French minister of culture. “Frank Gehry is a warm person who likes to drink with his friends; he is an architect of happiness. We don’t see enough happiness in this project.”
The perfect measure of how far Gehry has come is his own house, a house he would never build today, but one that he is confronting again in a remodeling project. Gehry is trying to adapt the house to the changing needs of his wife and two growing sons, 14 and 11 years old (he also has two grown daughters from his first marriage). “I keep bumping into my old self,” he says. “Every time I try to do something to it, I’m screwed. I’ve thought of tearing it down.” If he tried, design groupies would throw themselves in front of the bulldozer.
“I’m entitled to get more conservative in my old age,” he quips. But arguably what he’s becoming is more inventive, by constantly adapting what he does to increasingly ambitious projects. People who’d like Gehry to always build out of plywood and corrugated metal are asking him to stagnate, he says. No one can yet judge how his two biggest projects will turn out–the American Center is slated to open in 1993, and the Disney Concert Hall won’t be finished until 1996 at the earliest. Meanwhile, he is always looking for an expressive new strategy, a way to keep his art fresh. Gehry is not an architect to stand still long enough for anyone to stick a label on.
