"Is starting hard?" "You know it is." "I don't know what you do when you start, but I clean my desk, I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important." "Avoidance, delay, denial." "I'm always scared that I'm not going to know what to do." "It's a terrifying moment" "And then when I start, I'm always amazed." "So, that wasn't so bad." "#SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY#" "If you're a complete layman and not an architectural specialist, what's so hot about Frank Gehry?" "What's all the fuss about?" "#CHUCK ARNOLDI" " ARTIST# He's changed the look of a very, conservative field." "He mixes the freewheeling-ness of art with something that is really concrete #ED RUSCHA" " ARTIST# and un-forgiving which is the laws of physics." "And you put up a building, and man, that thing has got to stand." "And I believe that all of his buildings have been standing." "He's an architect who is also an artist." "He takes risks, and that's what artists do #MILDRER FRIEDMAN" " WRITER CURATOR# artists take risks, to do something new that no one has seen before." "I look on him as a 'hyphenate' as a writer – director." "#MICHAEL OVITZ" " ENTREPRENEUR, ART COLLECTOR#" "Someone who sits down, conceives of something, thinks it up, which is the blank peace of paper in front of him." "Then has the ability to execute it into a visual image." "He's the leading architect in the world today." "#PHILIP JOHNSON" " ARCHITECT# It's very easy to say." "If you say 'Wow' when you're in a place, there must be something happening." "The challenge is to get it in two dimensions on film." "Oh!" "Hopeless!" "You better give it up and become an architect." "You see how this unfolds and is welcoming, and is carrying you in?" "That facade is not frontal." "That curve leads right into it." "Well, let me just shoot that curve." "Frank's got his own original, and, sort of perverse way of doing things." "We've been friends for several years." "And we've spent a lot of time together bemoaning the difficulties of trying to find personal expressiveness within disciplines that make stringent commercial demands." "Several people approached him with the idea of making a documentary about him." "When he asked me if I'd do it, I thought he was crazy." "It's not just that I didn't know anything about making documentaries," "I didn't even know anything about architecture." "That's why you're perfect, he said." "#CRAIG WEBB" " DESING PARTNER#" "Pretty funny." "It's weird." "Well, let's look at it for a while, be irritated by it, and we'll figure out what to do." "What don't you like?" "I don't know yet." "It seems a little pompous, a little pretentious." "This is the part I don't know how to put in words" "Ah, but that's the most important part!" "If one of these guys came down, and this guy came down, and this one became part of that, then I would start to like it." "Now this guy starts to." "That's not a good one." "This side, I still don't like this side, Craig, I still don't like it." "I know why I don't like it, you know." "I'll tell you why I don't like it." "This has to get crankier see?" " Crankier?" "I know how to do it." "Just corrugate it." "Wanna try it?" "Oh God." "Heaven help us!" "You need one less corrugation." "Like that, flatter." " Two?" "Yeah, two is great." "See how it works?" " Yep." "That is so stupid looking it's great!" "It's so stupid looking?" " Isn't it?" "It's just." "Eee." "Yeaaah!" "I always liked making things with my hands." "I remember my grandmother used to get a sack of woodcuttings for the wood-stove." "She'd open the sack and throw the stuff out on the floor." "And sit down on the floor with me and start building things." "We made cities and freeways." "It was so much fun!" "When I was struggling 'whaddya want to be when you grow up?" "'" "Somehow I kept remembering sitting on the floor with the blocks." "I thought, 'maybe I could do something like that'." "Do you remember the first time you met Frank, Ed?" "In the early 60s." "he was completely aligned with artists and I found that interesting somebody who was always" "at art exhibits and parties with artists not too many architects mixed with artists." "My colleagues who were doing architecture, were making fun of what I was doing." "So I didn't have much of a support system," "I had a kinda blank stare." "And here were these funny artists that I just loved – their work." "Were treating me like I was part of the team." "the artists weren't wed to tradition." "They could do whatever they want and they'd respond on a gut level." "I don't think they're heavy intellectuals." "I'm not saying they were stupid." "But, they didn't come out of a school." "So they did what felt right." "What looked right, they manipulate things." "And push the limits without the feeling of tradition or history." "And I think Frank got to the feeling about architecture, y'know," "'Hey, you get an idea, why don't you try it!" "'." "Berta found the house." "It was comfy and had a little garden and we could afford it." "I realized I had to do something to it before we moved in." "I loved the idea of leaving the house intact." "I came up with the idea of building the new house around it" "The idea was this little bungalow would give" "Frank a kind of laboratory." "We were told there were ghosts." "I decided they were ghosts of cubism." "The windows, I wanted to make them look they were crawling out of this thing." "At night, because this glass is tipped it mirrors the light in." "So when you're sitting at this table you see the moon in the wrong place." "it reflects here." "and you think it's up there and you don't know where the hell you are." "Frank seems to live in the moment." "#DENNIS HOPPER" " ACTOR# #LIVES IN A HOUSE BUILT BY GERHY#" "I'd like to think that I do, but Frank really does creatively live in the moment." "He takes an idea that someone says, and finds out and what they think they want and then suddenly, he's creating it." "The kind of materials that he chooses to use." "I like to think of them as used as building factories, or building something that we don't think of as a house." "Let me tell you how he finished his house." "One day he went up to shave in the bathroom, and there was no light, so he picked up a hammer, and knocked a hole in the ceiling, into the California sun, and then he shaved by it." "At the same time as I did this house, I was building Santa Monica Place." "The night Santa Monica Place opened, we had a dinner here with the president of the Company, and he says to me, 'What the hell is this?" "I said, well I was experimenting," "He said 'do you like it?" "He said you must like it." "I said, 'I do.'" "He said, 'Well if you like this, you can't possibly like that', and he pointed, towards Santa Monica Place." "And I said, 'you're right, I don't'." "And he said 'So why did you do it'" "I said 'I had to make a living.'" "And he said, 'Stop it!" "' don't do that." "Now at that moment, forty-five people in my office were working on projects for him." "And he and I shook hands that night and decided to quit everything." "It was like jumping off a cliff." "And I was so happy from then on." "I mean, even with all the stress of it, it just made me very happy." "#SPILLER RESIDENCE-1979# #VENICE, CALIFORNIA#" "#NORTON RESIDENCE-1984# #VENICE, CALIFORNIA#" "#WINTON GUEST HOUSE-1987# #WAYZATA, MINNESOTA#" "#SIRMAI PETERSON RESIDENCE-1988# #THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA#" "Your decision to say no." "How did you go about that?" "How did you assume you would generate projects?" "You get work through other architects and designers, mostly people I'd worked with before, that liked my work, and would bring me into projects." "It was touch and go you remember I was always going bankrupt." "I know you were going to say that." "I still feel that even though it's not true." "Yeah I know, I know." "I can remember that." "I always thought I was pretending to be a director." " Really?" "Well, then at some point it just went away." "And I felt, ok I'm a director." "I guess I'm a director now." "People started coming around and saying things like, that I was talented." "That something was going on." "When I was a kid my father used to draw with me." "That was something I just loved doing." "What did you draw?" "The only thing I remember." "I was about 13." "I drew a picture of Theodore Herzl when I was in" "Hebrew school." "And I remember the Rabbi pinning it up on the board, telling my mother in Yiddish that" "I had 'Goldene Hänt', I had Golden Hands." "we used to go to a summer place in Northern Ontario." "And my mother had this lady analyze handwriting." "The lady analyzed my handwriting and said that someday I was going to be a famous architect." "I don't think that you and I have ever talked about how the architecture started." "I took a class in perspective, with Mr Workman, and I failed." "I got an F." "I couldn't stand it so I went back and took it again, and got an A." "Then I took a class at USC in ceramics." "The ceramic teacher said 'I have a hunch you should take an architecture class, 'I'm going to enroll you at night." "Every Monday night there's an architecture class.'" "Got an A in the class." "And they recommended I go into Second Year Architecture." "Then in the middle of Second Year my teacher said" "'Frank this isn't for you, you should get out of here." "It didn't mean shit to me." "I didn't." "Aw wait a minute, this guy says to you this is not for you and it didn't devastate you?" "It devastated me, but I didn't give up." "And that was just before the name change so." "Y'know you could rationalize it as anti Semitism." "When did you change the name?" "Ah, 1954 I think" "What made you change it?" " My wife, my ex wife." "When she wanted something she just got it." "So I was pussy-whipped more than..." "And it was hard." "For five years I would be introduced as Frank Gehry and I'd say 'My name was Goldberg'." "We're going to bring the walls in tighter and make them pourous." "That means these can't be solid glass." "We work back and forth between the planning and the models." "So you make a bunch of plans and then you try it on the model." "And then you come back and regroup." "So it's a give and take because if this doesn't work, that doesn't work." "This is the Museum of Tolerance building in Jerusalem." "This is the bookstore." "What's the material?" " I don't know yet." "Probably be metal." "This is the Grand Hall." "You can imagine the kind of, character of the light, coming through" "This is a smaller version?" "I always work on two or three scales at once." "Keeps me real." " By changing scale, why does that keep you real?" "Because in my head it keeps me thinking of the real building." "I don't get enamored with the object, these things." "I see, and you could." " Yeah, It could become jewellery." "This could become the object of desire." "We started with this." "And there's where the transition happened here this would be enormously expensive and looks chaotic" "Now, here it is here." "Wow!" "Everything begins with the models." "The problem is the world runs on paper." "So we've had to devise ways of automating drawings, so that we can continue to feed building departments and inspectors and agencies and contracts." "#JIM GLYMPH" " PARTNER, SOFTWARE SPECIALIST#" "And the legal system, that are all aligned against doing it this way." "What we have done is elaborate on ways of digitizing those models to bring them into the computer so that we can go from the three-dimensional model to two-dimensional drawings." "What it did was embolden Frank to go farther, he could actually be more sculptural with more confidence and with more accuracy." "What was critical was to bring the technology into Frank's process in a way that didn't change him, or his process." "In the old days when you try to document the building in two dimensions, #SVEN NEUMANN AND EDWIN CHAN# with a plan, with a section, with an elevation, your understanding and your way to be able" "to describe the building is very limited, and the contractor and the people who are building it have to, there's an element of interpretation there." "Whereas with this particular process the level of precision allows the designer more flexibility," "and freedom to explore the shapes and forms and the geometry of the building." "This model would get sent to the contractor." "And then they would take that information, #TIM PAULSON - 3D MODELING MANAGER# extract it into a computer file and send that directly to the manufacturer." "So theoretically there is no need for paper, unless they wan't it as a veryfication." "Frank still doesn't know how to use a computer, except to throw it at somebody." "But, he understood that this was an amazing #THOMAS KRENS" " DIRECTOR, GUGGENHEIM FUND# tool that was suited to his ability to pick up this cup, crumple it up, stick it on top of this building and say, 'That's an interesting shape, let's see" "if we can take that shape into some sort of design." "I love the shaping I can do when I'm sketching." "And it never occurred to me that I would do it in a building." "The first thing I built of like that is" "Vitrain in Germany." "I was in a band, touring Europe." "#BOB GELDOF" " MUSICIAN#" "I was into the fifth week and was in that, twilight state that occupies your days when on tour." "my head was banging against the condensated window of a mid December afternoon." "And I was just looking out at the fields of Germany." "And across a plain green field, suddenly this alarming structure reared up and jolted out of this state." "We got to Freiburg and I asked 'What was it I'd just seen,." "And they said, 'Oh that must have been Vitra'." "#VITRA FURNITURE MUSEUM - 1989# #WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY#" "I started playing with the spiral stair." "I loved the way that curve read against the rectilinear." "I tried to draw it with descriptive geometry." "But when the guy built it, there's a kink in it." "The drawing didn't represent what really happened." "I got frustrated and asked the guys in the office, isn't there a better way to describe these things, because I like to play with curved shapes." "If I could just describe them." "That's what led us to the computer." "To my knowledge it's the first building where that new freedom and new movement came." "#ROLF FEHLBAUM" " CHAIRMAN, VITRA# The snake, for instance, that staircase is a snake, and that was something very new for me." "Because I come from Switzerland." "A very static country, a very static architecture." "And I think that the attraction was that there was something strange, a bit messy, but in the end, these forces unleashed found a new order." "Architects have a lot to answer for, in as much as it is shite 99% of the time, and, depresses people on their way to work," "And I adhere to an English writer's dictum –" "Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn Waugh – who suggested that should you meet an architect at a party, the best thing one could do is hit them!" "I go along with this until I, encountered Frank's work." "I grew up in Canada." "I used to go to lectures on Friday nights at the University of Toronto." "I went to a lecture when I was 16." "It was actually November, 1946." "I went back afterwards to find out who the guy was that gave the lecture." "There was a white haired man got up and spoke about stuff he was doing." "that really appealed to me." "I'd never seen buildings like that." "I didn't go home and decide I wanted to be an architect, that was just in my memory banks." "After I became an architect I realized that must have been Alvar Aalto." "I would say that my work is closer to him than any of the other previous generations." "How many years have you been seeing Frank?" "Thirty-five years." "#MILTON WEXLER" " GEHRY'S THERAPIST#" "I met him as a patient." "Ed Moses, the painter, sent him over." "Milton took me in." "After the second thing he said" ""You're in limbo with your wife."" "He said I'll treat you if you." "make up your mind, for three or four months, you either commit to stay home, and make it work, or you leave right now." "So I left his place, and I left, Got my clothes and moved to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel." "I had two daughters and a wife." "He lacked confidence." "He was talking often about being bankrupt and he meant more than just monetary bankruptcy." "He meant bankrupt in his relationships, bankrupt in his ability to get his clients to accept what he was doing." "He was always fighting, as a Jew, #CHARLES JENCKS" " ARCHITECT#" "He had to show 'em that he was a toughie." "I was angry but I wouldn't express it," "So Milton got me into that group" "And for two years I went and never said a word." "One day they all pounced on me." "They said 'You've been sitting here for two years, judgmental as hell." "and I realized that they were right, because all of them were saying it, I couldn't dismiss it." "He looked up to me as some kind of mature, adult figure." "Whether true or not, that's how he saw it." "When he realized that our roles were changing, that he in a sense was becoming the teacher cos I didn't know very much about art or architecture." "I think it helped him to, take on the role of the adult." "And also instead of trying to seduce his clients," "I think he took on more adult roles in relation to his clients." "He began to teach them as he was trying to teach me." "To tell them what they needed to see, how they needed to see it." "I think in that sense, my naiveté was a very valuable asset in the therapy." "We go through early life, pre-occupied about ourselves." "The world revolves around our butts." "And as you mature, you expand into the rest of the world and you become part of a world culture and you, sort of, find out - the hard way even - that the world doesn't revolve around your butt, and that unless you play team." "A lot of people think that I made" "Frank a great architect, which is total nonsense." "Eh,I didn't make him famous, he made me famous – just the other way around!" "Matter of fact, after some of the publicity about Frank came out, a number of architects wanted to come in treatment with me." "I always said no." "I said no because I knew damn well I could not make them Frank Gehrys." "I can open up the floodgates, but if there's no flood back there." "This guy that I studied with, this great teacher that I had, used to say that talent was liquefied trouble." "Y'know there are certain people where the trouble doesn't seep out into another part of the brain where it can be transformed into something else." "All of it is frustration with something as it exists that you're trying to improve on." "You won't remember this but years ago when we first met, you talked to me about filmmaking." "I was struggling with" "a commercial world." "They weren't interested in what I was doing." "And I talked to you about it one night." "And you said that you faced the same commercial world, and that you made peace with it by finding this small percentage" "of space in that commercial world where you could make a difference." "Man, that was amazing to me, Sydney." "I have never forgotten that." "If you hear in my talks after that," "I always talk about it that way, I say, 'There's a sliver of space' I almost use your words!" "Basically, and it's still more important to me than architecture, is Frank's interest in hockey." "My sons are hockey players." "#MICHEAL EISNER" " FORMER CEO WALT DISNEY CO#" "I spent hours at hockey rinks from midnight to six o'clock in the morning." "There were not that many around LA." "And I would bump into this guy who was not 22 years old." "I just struck up this relationship with this person." "I was looking for the next generation of American architects, he was on the list of architects who were pushing the envelope." "We bought a hockey team." "We needed a practice rink." "He designed for us the hockey rink in downtown Anaheim." "It is a piece of sculpture sitting in this town." "#DISNEY ICE - 1995# #ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA#" "And I think that and Bilbao and a couple of other things are his best work." "The inside is reminiscent of those hockey rinks that Frank grew up with in Canada;" "all wood, all trusses, looks very traditional, looks like you could be nostalgic for being in Toronto in 1940-something." "It is a double rink." "The outside is two, like, well, I dunno, breasts?" "I dunno, they're like this, so it's a strange woman!" "You give Frank the, the functionality." "Make sure that in the hockey rink you have the workout room and the locker rooms, and all that stuff." "And you're on Frank that way." "And then he delivers the picture." "Do you ever think of architectural shapes unrelated to a job?" "No, well." "I mean if I'm sitting around the house and I put some music on, and the music" "will suggest some sort of movement, and" "I'll start thinking of shots." "I'm just wondering if there's any." " Yeah, there is." "When I saw that painting, this one" "So this is in the Sainsbury Wing, British Museum." "It's a Hieronymus Bosch." "If you look at it, this is a composition, and I start thinking of it them as a composition of buildings." "This is the floor plan of the Israeli project and creating a composition." "Mm, that's exactly" " Now it's not literal." "But I just find those kinds of inspirations, and they you just file them away somehow, you don't even know you're doing it." "It comes out, right?" " Yeah." "That's exactly what I'm talking about." "Where where it's disconnected from a specific job." "Once I saw this, that way." "I mean, I'd actually seen this painting before, and never connected with it like I did that day." "And I got to the painting and it dropped me." "y'know, like I felt the, the ground cut out from under my legs, it was so powerful." "And I saw it as architecture." "I think that's what gives me confidence." "Once you get it embedded, you do it, because you're confident that it's going to work." "And I think what some of my colleagues do." "they think of architecture in a hermetic way." "It's, it's X." "And it's not X plus, it's not X minus." "It's X. It's got restrictions, it's got rules." "If you do this with it." "It ain't architecture any more." "Everything's been done before, in some way or another." "The only thing that changes is the technology." "What bugs me are these goddamn rules that my profession has, as to what fits, and what doesn't." "There is a certain threatening aspect to taking the leap." "But once you try that." "Once you say, 'Ok I have a right', you can't stop." "#GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO - 1997# #BILBAO, SPAIN#" "I understand what you mean that everything has been done before, but I haven't seen a building like Bilbao." "It's gotten more sensual, and musical." "Where did all that come from?" "I think it just evolved." "I was looking for a way to express feeling in three-dimensional objects." "You know, if you go back in history, if you go into Chartres Cathedral, it drops you to your knees." "He just let go." "He began to develop all of the ideas that he'd been beginning to work with #MILDRED FRIEDMAN" " WRITER, CURATOR# and went the whole way there." "I don't think there's a building that comes anywhere near it in inventiveness in this period of our history." "I swear I don't know why, it moved me just as much at #PHILIP JOHNSON" " ARCHITECT# the end of two days as it did when I first walked in." "Well he sees that the whole reason for being an artist is that moment in somebody's eye when you've reached them." " That's it!" "The most impressive cathedral at the end of the 20th century is to #NORMAN ROSENTHAL# me, without question, the museum in Bilbao." "You see it and you gasp with astonishment!" "It's like a vision of a kind of paradise." "I don't even know him, I'm not an intimate of his at all." "It has reminiscences of things." "You walk down into the entrance and #JULIAN SCHNABEL" " ARTIST, FILMMAKER# you feel like you're in Luxor." "It has the scale of Egypt." "What's important is to be satisfied with what you and the light." "See, that's the one thing that Frank understands, is light." "See, it's the shape of light as it hits another shape." "oh boy oh boy." "And then, as you put it, it's peripheral." "Architecture is nothing but peripheral." "When Bilbao came up we moved on a lightening track." "The Guggenheim would select three architects:" "Frank Gehry," "Arata Isosaki and Coop Himmelblau." "Each firm would be given $10,000, one site visit and three weeks to come up with a concept." "I remember we rented a suite of rooms, in Frankfurt." "We flew up there on the 17th of July, assembled all the models, spent a day in deliberations and when we emerged, Frank was selected as the architect." "#JUAN IGNACIO VIDARTE" " DIRECTOR GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO#" "I think, eh, I don't know who said this, I think it was a British journalist, but I think he said that this looked like it was an object from outer space but which had landed here a century ago." "So it's foreign in the sense that it has nothing to do with any of the buildings which are around, but at the same time there is a a quality of it which makes it belong to its place." "You take this out of here and nobody would understand the city now." "We have 350,000 inhabitants in the downtown." "The first year we received 700,000 visitors." "And then a kind of community #NEREA ABASOLO" " JOURNALIST, BILBAO# self-esteem has increased so much." "We have moved from admiring the architect to be proud of being the clever ones who did this project and have chosen this architect, and we have this building which the whole world admires." "When I see a building like the building that Frank made," "I want to stick my stuff in there." "It makes me feel encouraged, it makes me feel like, Hey, there's somebody that's, like, setting up an arena where something incredible could occur." "He threw down the glove let's put something in here that can really take somebody into that transcendental state that you feel when you're making art." "We need some sort of naysayer in this whole discussion, and if that's me, that's fine." "#HAL FOSTER" " PROFESSOR OF ART, PRINCETON#" "But I am ambivalent about his work." "He has used the expanded field of art, the expanded field of sculpture." "As sculpture and art in general became bigger, broader, moved out into wider and wilder sites." "When it came time to make a museum, Gehry used that expanded scale as an opportunity to trump it, in effect, with a building that really functions as a spectacle." "So I'm not sure how well it serves art." "Either you believe in the white cube, or you are Frank and you say that artists want to be challenged." "I think museum people are very torn." "The great thing about Bilbao is that it does both things." "What Frank calls the 'stodgy galleries', the very very simple, sort of old fashioned rooms." "And then he did a lot of spaces that are really extraordinary." "For me, I like to have enough room." "I feel very comfortable in his spaces." "He understands scale." "And if it does compete with the art, maybe that art isn't good enough." "Everyone seemed to embrace this building and this architect as the great new form, the great new form-giver of our time." "And I just, I just don't, I just don't see it." "There are moments where I think where he has delivered the goods too quickly." "He has given his clients too much what they want." "Kind of a sublime space that overwhelms the viewer and a spectacular image that can circulate through the media and around the world as, as brand." "People have this idea, What is the architect's service," "The service was to be appropriate, ok?" "#HERBERT MUSCHAMP" " THE NEW YORK TIMES#" "That was the big word." "Which means 'blend in, nobody notices, camouflage'." "Y'know, put up a new 70-storey office building but make it look like the little art-deco thing right next door." "So, who gets anything out of that?" "You have to not only talk about the freedom but you also have to talk about the courage of an architect who had the conviction to say," "'Well that's not what architecture should be doing and that's not what cities should be doing'." "I never expected Bilbao to be the, kinda, hit it turned out to be." "In fact, when it opened I was very self-conscious about it, and thought, 'My God, what have I done?" "'" "Somebody asked me once about Frank's ego, and I said, you shouldn't be put off by the Columbo-like exterior the crumpled raincoat and, the self effacing manner," "I said, Frank's got the biggest ego in the business." "And the reason that I know this is that he also has a perception of the process that instead of reacting negatively to a criticism, he'll basically say the reverse of what you might expect somebody with a big ego to say, 'Let's just rip it apart and start again'." "Because he knows that when he does it a second time he does it from a higher plane of knowledge." "Now that's real ego." "I act like nothing's happening, y'know?" "I'm 'aw shucks." "Bubby.'" "Whereas inside I'm ambitious, I'm eager," "I'm, competitive as hell." "But I cover it up." "There is nobody that strives for excellence that isn't competitive in some way," "But even if you and I are in different business I probably compete with you." "I have this conflict about that, that, I want to be a nice guy, I don't wanna be in your face, and yet I am in your face, I am ambitious." "I think that's the same with the work, it's" "you know, when I got to Bilbao and saw it for the first time I got embarrassed." "I thought 'Oh my God, how did they let me do this?" "Well, you also have to consider his wife, Berta." "She's part of the whole equation too." "#ED RUSCHA" " ARTIST#" "Because, y'know, he had this, eh, anger on the one hand." "And then his family life was stabilized, and that's probably kept him afloat." "At first they had all kinds of rough-edged conflict." "For example, Berta wanted to be married." "Frank had been married and he didn't care about being married." "Then he decides, 'Ok, I'll get married." "He became this much softer, much more accepting, much more loving person." "Less defiant, less uncertain, less angry." "He seems so calm and together and sweet." "And yet his architecture shows something completely opposite." "There are sort of rules about architectural expression." "Screw that!" "I'm going to do what I do the best, and if it's no good, the marketplace will deny it." "#MILTON WEXLER" " THERAPIST# I think as he became more confident in his relationships, I think that he became more daring in the willingness to fantasize far-out stuff." "I'm watching everything, y'know." "I can get excited about some fashion thing, or some crystal chandelier." "I'm tempted to say it's Frank's right brain." "There's something, in that right brain, that allows him to take those free associations, and then make them practical realities." "If you asked me to simply describe Frank's work," "I'd call him a contemporary Cubist sculptor." "Frank uses shapes and forms unlike anyone has ever used them in the building of a structure." "Years ago a reporter asked me how I get my inspiration." "Just intuitively I pointed to the wastebasket beside me." "And I said, 'Look in there, y'see." "think about the caverns and the spaces and the textures in that waste basket'." "You know you can look anywhere and find inspiration." "It was by accident that I got into the fish image." "My colleagues were starting to replay Greek temples." "Y'know in the post-modern thing, I don't know, when was that. the 80s." "And eh." "That was hot, everybody was re-doing the past." "I said, y'know," "Greek temples are anthropomorphic." "And three hundred million years before man was fish." "If you wanna, if you gotta go back, if you're insecure about going forward," "dammit, go back three hundred million years." "Why are you stopping at the Greeks?" "So I started drawing fish in my sketchbook." "and then, I started to realize that there was something in it." "You know that story of his famous Formica furniture?" "Frank looked at this material, which is the most pristine material in the world, and it's so uptight, that he said to himself, 'It's not me, y'know, I can't do this." "And he just, eh, was rattling around, and broke it up into little pieces." "He took it and he threw it on the floor in fury." "And some of the pieces suddenly looked to him like fish scales," "He immediately thought 'AHA!" "'" "#GEHRY FISH LAMPS - 1980#" "A good friend of mine was designing this building." "He said why don't you put a little sculpture on the corner" "This hotel is a Ritz Carlton and the guy who owned Ritz Carlton at the time was in Tennessee, in Nashville." "He couldn't come to the meeting when we made the presentation, so he sent his guy." "And he kept getting down, crouching down and taking this picture." "A few days later the client called me up and said," "'We got problems." "I'm building a multi-million dollar hotel and I ain't going to have my patrons looking up the asshole of a fish!" "'" "#FISH - 1992# #BARCELONA, SPAIN#" "Do you recognize big changes in your work over the last 30 years?" "Well, my starting days as an architect I was involved with less expensive buildings." "I couldn't afford to pay for that beautiful detail." "In the early 60s, Venice was a place of cheap rents." "The artists would come in." "Larry Bell was one and Larry began putting up these interior walls, in his studio." "and leaving them bare, where all the scars show." "And showing the scars became a kinda thing that a lot the artists were doing out of practicality, and then finally out of a kind of style thing, that Frank also began waking up to." "I grew up a modernist." "#O'NEILL HAY BARN - 1968#" "'Decoration is a sin'." "That's the mantra of Modernism." "So if you can't use decoration, then how do you humanize a building, how do you humanize a thing?" "Materials could be expressive." "He was really making a statement that architecture was very much about the materials as well as about the design and the look of it." "It was all to do with making the most of little bits of throwaway things such as industrial material." "Picket fence, corrugated metal and chain link." "#DAVIS RESIDENCE - 1972# #MALIBU, CALIFORNIA#" "Jasper Johns was doing it." "Rauschenberg was doing it." "They would make beauty with junk." "#GEHRY RESIDENCE - 1978# #SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA#" "When he was doing that chain-link stuff, he went to Mickey Rudin's house." "And Rudin said to Frank, 'What are you doing with that ugly chain link, how stupid that is." "I mean, you'll just destroy the looks of the world." "You'll make the whole world uncomfortable with that damn chain-link of yours'." "Frank said, "Mickey, come on over to the window, will you?" "What do you see out there?" "#EDWIN CHAN# #DESING PARTNER#" "You know what's confusing to me is what you see from here?" "Perhaps what you do is there's still kind of a a grade situation." "So it's like a bridge?" " A little." "Well if you do that, y'know, you could almost do that and walk under it to the lakefront." "That would be the ideal." " Yeah I know." "I mean if we do this it takes it out of the realm that I was worried about." "Well I wasn't worried about that." "I know, you don't worry about the same things that I worry about!" "I wasn't worried about it, I'm more naïve!" "Edwin is more contentious with me than Craig is, have you noticed?" " Yes." "For me that's great, because it makes it all much more interesting." "He's been with me for fifteen years." "For the first five years he was here, he didn't talk." "Now, fifteen years later I can't stop him from talking." "I don't think I could do the buildings alone any more." "I've gotten so used to the team to play with." "He surrounds himself with good people." "What he likes to do is, he gets a vague idea, kinda very loosely." "#CHUCK ARNOLDI" " ARTIST#" "'Well, y'know, something kinda like, something kinda like this, kinda likeyou know, what I'm thinking is something kinda like." "I mean is something kinda like that." "this kinda thing is more what I got in mind, you'know what I mean?" "And the guys'll be standing around and they'll say, 'Yeah, I think I got it Frank', and they'll run off and they'll do some stuff and they'll come back and he goes." "'No no no, not quite like that, I thought I said a little bit more like this." "you know. gosh, you guys have just, y'know, I want you to really kinda more like that, you know what I mean?" "No but if you see the stair, like you see here, where it ends." "Where it's sticking out?" " Yeah, do that." "The communication is almost non-verbal." "A quick sketch, or a reference to a painting or a piece of sculpture and he'll say, 'Try this'." "I'd rather go to that middle color titanium." "That would be beautiful." "See that red titanium?" "But are you sure it's not going to be too red?" "The other day we were doing our offices." "He sent me a fax, where I was, and he said 'Would you mind if we flipped the plan?" "So that's typical Edwin." "You know, I would do that myself, if he wasn't there." "But he's there." "I think of it as an opportunistic thing." "Maybe one of the kids in the office, just the way he put the model together that day made me see something." "They see they're part of it." "So it engenders a great sense of teamwork, which gets you to the end." "Craig and I will go home tonight, individually. separately." "and we'll agonize about this." "And we'll come in tomorrow." "And we'll say." "and we usually come to the same conclusion when it's wrong, right?" "And what makes it wrong, is." "What's wrong is that it's too easy." "Wait, wait, wait!" " Or. or we think we're falling into some kind of cliché." "Or we already did it." " Ah, that's different." "That's different than 'too easy' What do you mean by 'too easy'?" "Too easy is." "I guess I gotta suffer a little before." "Ah, but that's neurotic!" "How do you tell the difference between an aesthetic discipline and neurosis?" "You know, you hire Frank because you just love him and you want him to do whatever he wants to do." "And people are real encouraging, 'Oh be far out'." "But he starts getting far out and they all fall in love." "'Oh I love that!" "'." "Yeah, but he doesn't." "He wants to change it." "Until it becomes a frustration game where, 'when are you going to finish thing?" "It looked good forty times and you're still going'" "What's exciting to me is the process." "And when people look at this stuff because it looks like it just happened." "They don't realize how much time and effort went into the incubation." "So I'm always compelled to explain all that." "do you get the impulse first and that's what makes you go after the job?" "No, I don't go after the job anyway." "I wait till the jobs hit me on the head." "I guess I don't like rejection." "So I just wait until they just come to me." "Because when you go after it and get rejected, I hate that." "And I accept the projects based on whether I like them the people." "Frank has figured out, which some architects don't quite figure out, is that the most important influence on the design is the client." "And if there is a terrific client to work with, you get a terrific building." "If there isn't, you don't." "I started talking about water." "#BARRY DILLER" " CEO, IAC INTERACTIVE GROUP# because he likes boats, and I like boats." "I said to him that my real dream, here, would be, that one day," "I would sail up the Hudson on my new boat, and as I got past" "Battery Park, and coming up the Hudson, there, next to the water, would be this building." "And the next thing, Frank did his little squiggles, and it's essentially that!" "And what it was that he created was sailcloth." "I mean, the idea of making a white building is, is a little insane!" "How do you make a white building that from the inside, actually, you can look out." "So then began this, this odyssey." "And also, it was, let's do the whole thing in glass." "Nothing else but read glass." "No steel, no aluminum, just glass." "any problem that comes up, he finds some solution to, there's some thing that you never figured out, that he goes away and comes back and solves it." "What's the process like?" "Did he ask you questions?" "Did you guys just free-associate together?" "Did you just talk?" " I don't." "It's not like, eh, y'know, would you like square or round windows?" "Or would you like eh, y'know, flocked wallpaper?" "I mean, no." "It's not a query." "He doesn't really ask you." "He smells, y'know?" "You talk, I mean, he sucks up whatever is going on in the room." "With Frank, the work of models, constantly screwing around with them, ripping something out." "You know?" "Or just molding it almost." "It's like clay work." "Eh, is such a profoundly creative process." "I mean, it's not like any building project" "I've ever understood." "Literally if you go back and you take the little squiggle, the whatever it's referred to in the pro jargon?" "Whatever that is?" "That's that!" "I think I have a talent not for recognizing artistic genius, but for recognizing talent." "#PETER LEWIS" " CHAIRMAN PROGRESSIVE CO#" "I loved what he was doing." "And, I kept getting, during the from the day we started, I kept getting richer," "and busier." "And he kept becoming more and more well known." "And then as the adventure of the design of the house proceeded, it was wonderful." "I mean, it was so exciting." "I'd go out there and he was able to do research, on material, and design things that he never woulda had the money to do." "And I said," "'Look, you just give me bills for whatever you do, just keep sending me bills, and if I have a problem I'll talk to you'." "And I never had a problem." "They turned out to be six million dollars." "Jesus!" " And, if I had to do it over again?" "I'd do it again." " Well, what happened?" "Why didn't it get built?" "Oh." "Well, we went on for about twelve years." "And I think what happened between the age of fifty and sixty," "I no longer wanted to live in a big house, or give big parties..." "My lifestyle changed." "What started out to be a dream would've been a disaster I was building a museum." "When we sat down for that last meeting and the number was eighty two million dollars!" "That was it!" "The trouble with having the glass here is that the top of it goes up into this gable, which is really awkward." "I liked this awkwardness here before." "This is a building we did, pro bono for the memory of a friend of ours." "That was the original design for Maggie's Place up there, that little model." "I had these nightmares, that Maggie was talking to me, and that that was too much architecture and she wanted me to tone it down." "And I threw out the thing and started over again." "Having worked with Maggie he understood the idea of the center, which is to be an informal space for cancer patients." "#MAGGIE'S PLACE - 2002# #DUNDEE, SCOTLAND#" "He took on this commission at his own cost, because he was a great friend of Maggie's, you know, eh, we're not paying him a penny." "And em, out of love for Maggie, I think he really is committed to a notion of an architecture that relates to healing." "Informality, non-institutionality and a certain amount of humor and places for reflection are very important." "It's a very nice place to get up and look out over the landscape." "That's terribly important for the cancer sufferers, to see their illness in a context which is bigger than themselves." "Why did you come to Los Angeles?" "My father got sick." "Y'know it was those days when they said, Go to the southern climate." "He was broke, he lost everything," "What kind of work did he try to do?" "He became a truck driver for Yankee Doodle Pop Company, and I got a job truck driving in the Valley, for a cousin." "This is where we lived, in here." "We just didn't have anything." "It was really rough." "You got a job as a truck driver how long did you do that?" "Two or three years." "I delivered a breakfast nook to Roy Rogers and Dale's house." "I came from Canada, I didn't know from movie stars, right?" "I couldn't believe it." "And they treated me like family, they invited me to Christmas dinner!" "How do you get out of driving a truck to something else?" "What I was interested in as a kid then." "my cousin used to take me up flying, and I loved it." "So I got a job washing airplanes." "Where did this come in terms of." " Before architecture, before architecture." "So I was freaked out in love with flying." "So I could've gone that way, y'know, if somebody had" "just taught me how to fly, I probably would've been happy." "It's funny how it feels almost fragile the way people discover things that are meaningful for their whole lives, y'know." "I feel the same way." "If I have a big envy in my life, it's about painters." "I wish I was a painter." "What I'm fascinated with is the moment of truth." "There's the canvas, you've got a brush and you got this goddamn palette of colors, and whaddya do?" "What's your first move?" "I love that dangerous place!" "Have you ever tried to paint?" " Never!" "I wouldn't dare." "because I wouldn't know what to do." "I know how to do a building." "Since a building ultimately is a surface, it's ultimately got something to do with painting." "But I've never been able to achieve what in my mind is a painterly surface." "Oh yeah?" "Y'know you look at the Charioteer, that sculpture in Delphi." "And it says 'Artist Unknown'." "And it's one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture, when I saw it I started crying, Sydney, because." "How powerful that is, that the guy doesn't have his name," "That's antithetical to democracy I think." "And I'm hoping that out of democracy comes an expression that is the consensus is democracy" "How does that express itself?" "It expresses itself chaotically." "And that chaos, we're starting to feel, is beautiful." "Frank believes in accidents, but I think it's important to say that some of his accidents are failures, and some of his work is extremely ugly." "People shy away from saying that because they are." "In a sense his reputation is so strong now." "Of the anti-Frank Gehry contingent, is there anybody that hits the spot?" "Well, when I see something negative, I usually try it on." "I try it on for size." "I wear it, I think, well maybe there's something here." "I must get something out of it," "But I don't digest it intellectually, I don't take it in as a." "'Oh I gotta do this, or I gotta do that'." "A reporter just did a thing saying that Toronto deserved to get a Museum of Modern Art, instead they're getting a second-rate Frank Gehry building." "Even Marty Filler, who I like, wrote about" "Chicago and said he thought it was 'Logo-tecture'." "So, that was his way of, of saying I'm repeating myself." "How does that affect you, when you read that?" "I just keep going." "I don't' pay attention." "I mean, what am I gonna do?" "#WHY ALL THE HOOPLA?" "HAL FOSTER#" "#HULKING MASS?" "# #GENIUS OR A MESS?" "#" "#PERVERSE# #SPECTACLE, OPPRESSIVE#" "#COMPLETE DISREGARD, MONSTRISITIES# #UGLY#" "I think of it as water going down a gutter, and suddenly this wonderful bubble has come up above all the other water." "And they can't wait to, like, pop the bubble and bring it down under the water and push it down into the bottom." "As a critic I think it's, it's." "incumbent upon me to, to make an emphatic stand." "To, kind of, hold a line of disagreement so that other people are not simply caught up in the culture of affirmation, the culture of embrace, that has surrounded Gehry." "This is the only history we're going to be living in, ok?" "This is the one, we can read about the ones that came before, this is the one that's happening now." "And fortunately there are a few people who understand how to respond to these challenges and Frank Gehry is one of them." "There is only so much that architecture can do." "But what he's serving is the 'so much', and trying to realize it." "If you had to criticize Frank, what would you criticize?" "I wouldn't." "I wouldn't criticize him." "Because I think it's like, eh, y'know, flies flying around on the neck of a lion." "It's like, y'know, watching a movie like Apocalypse Now, and saying that you think that Robert Duvall is over the top." "Because buildings take so long to realize, by the time I get to the finished building, I don't like it." "What takes over, what makes you forget all the little trivia, is then the way the light hits the material the reflections you didn't have in the models and drawings." "That's how it lives." "#WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL- 2003, L.A#" "The only thing an architect can do is be optimistic about how it interacts with the surrounding buildings." "It can be a passive player, it can be a stoic player, it can be a passionate player." "I don't like the Chandler." "But it's here, and it's part of the community." "So you have to respect that I think that's like being a good neighbor." "I tried to make a building that would preserve the iconic importance of the Chandler." "To defer to that I decided to break down the scale of the" "Disney Hall into smaller pieces, so it's not the same language." "It relates to the Chandler" "Now the shapes of the exterior of Disney Hall are based on sailing." "When you're wing-on-wing, with the wind behind you, it forms a beautiful space." "And if you look at the front of Disney Hall, it's wing-on-wing, it's the two sails, and you're at the helm." "This is the foyer, and here, when you look up, you'll be able to see the levels." "No matter how great the design is, if it doesn't sound great, it's going to be a failure." "Frank was very clear about this from the beginning." "#ESA-PEKKA SALONEN# #MUSIC DIRECTOR, LA PHILHARMONIC#" "He said, 'This is a hall for the orchestra, and this is a building for music." "And that has to be the first priority, and everything else is of lesser importance." "And I thought this was quite a statement from an architect." "It's very unusual that an artist such as Frank puts the ego bit to a, sort of, lower level of importance than the actual function of the building." "Ok, let's get the hell out of here then." "Holy shit!" "Where's the beer, where's the beer?" "Do you ever get depressed when it's finished?" "Like post-partum blues?" "A little bit." "Yeah, I do." "Well you know that better than I do!" "You can't let go." "When I let go is a year later after it's test of time, didn't leak. people like it." "Then I sort of let myself out a bit and enjoy it." "Do you ever wonder what part of you did that?" "Where did that come from?" " Yes, oh yeah, all the time." "I say, 'How the." "Where did that come from?" "Yeah, I do." "It's like a magic trick." "I call it a magic trick." "But you know when I was a kid taking that ceramics class at SC before I came an architect, Glenn Lukins." "I'd you'd put the glaze on and the stuff, you'd put it into the kiln, and it would come out looking so beautiful sometimes, and you'd say" "I'd say to Glenn, 'God that's beautiful, I didn't. how did that happen?" "And he said, 'Just claim credit for it from now on, because somehow you made it happen!" "'" "So you haven't seen any of this all together?" "When I came last it was a mess." "Looked very precarious, like it might not happen right." "#DG BANK - 2001# #BERLIN, GERMANY#" "You get scared and you wonder, 'God what are these people going to think?" "I wanna hide under the covers!" "I know the feeling very well." " I know you do!" "The structural engineer on this is a guy from Stuttgart, Jörg Schlaich." "He's my age, and I think he's probably the best living structural engineer in the world." "You know why this floor is like this?" "Because the offices down below, by code, have to have a certain amount of light, and the only way we could get it, and to have this balcony, was to make it a glass floor." "You know, I'm not going to get to live here, and stay here." "So I'm only going to see it today, and I leave." "And maybe I'll see it three or four more times in my life." "For me, it's like one of my children." "and I love it." "So what's next Frank?" "Is there anything you haven't done, that you want to do?" "I'm superstitious, so I never say that." "When you're a younger architect and starting out, you're seeking some kind of impossible perfection." "You could spend your life thinking about this ephemeral building that would be great to do y'know, it would be the." "the capstone of my career." "You realize, as you mature, that there's no 'there'." "You ain't gonna get there." "A great many people come to me hoping they can change themselves and, settle their anxieties, their problems in their marriage, or whatever." "They want to know how to handle life better." "When an artist comes to me, he wants to know how to change the world."