GEHRY-EYED

When Frank O. Gehry wasn’t chosen to design the new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles, I was very happy.

After seeing Gehry’s latest building creation, the “Czech wreck” in Prague (“Fred and Ginger and Frank,” by Dean E. Murphy, July 14), I’m now ecstatic.

JOHN BRODHEAD

La Canada

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I teach cultural, urban and architectural history at UCLA and am writing to protest the misleading tone of Murphy’s article.

He correctly praises Prague as one of the world’s great urban treasures and convincingly expresses the fear that the old city’s architectural texture could be damaged by uncontrolled development. But he errs when he suggests that Gehry’s structure is guilty of this, since, despite its avant-garde and unmistakably Gehry attributes, it blends beautifully into a city that has managed for centuries a controlled, but constant, reinvention of its image.

In designing his now-nicknamed “dancing” or “Fred and Ginger” building, Gehry was mindful not only of Prague’s larger urban imperatives but of the need for deference to neighborhood concerns as well. One of the reasons for the crimped, yet flaring, profile of the “Ginger” part of the structure was to keep from cutting off a cherished view of Prague Castle from a neighboring apartment house.

Murphy also errs when he emphasizes the views of conservative Prague preservationists, since the larger consensus of the architecturally conscious public is that the building “fits” wonderfully and is, at the same time, an exciting beacon of things to come.

What I regret most about Murphy’s article is that it gives an unfair picture of Prague’s sophistication, which welcomes architectural diversity at a continuing high level. In Europe and Asia, Gehry’s work is being built. Only in L.A. does his potential masterwork, Disney Hall, languish amid depressing public indifference.

THOMAS S. HINES

Los Angeles

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When I saw the picture of Frank O. Gehry’s building (if you can call it a building) in Prague, I found it so terribly ugly I felt tears in my eyes.

It makes me so sad for poor Prague, poor Dagmar Sedlakova and poor Fred and Ginger.

Maybe I should feel sad for Frank O. Gehry.

DEANE KLAHS

La Crescenta

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Frank Gehry’s work may be many things, but whimsical it is not (at least, not since he finished the Chiat/Day building in Venice). His style seems to have veered, with the Nationale-Nederlanden in Prague and the hopefully-never-to-be-constructed Disney Concert Hall, toward the Post-Traumatic architecture that somehow survived the latest earthquake, tornado or hurricane.

What Gehry seems to have mastered, though, is the ability to convince dozens of gullible emperors that they are, indeed, fully clothed.

PETER ALTSCHULER

Santa Monica