An American Original

The first building by Frank Gehry that I ever saw was at the Louisiana World’s Fair in New Orleans nearly 20 years ago. Wedged among all the fair pavilions, parodies of historical buildings in tawdry painted stucco, was a steel-framed auditorium; large (it seated 5,000) but modest, its outer skin was all corrugated steel deck and wire net. Its exhilarating effect was due to the cunning interplay of tilted planes, some translucent, others opaque. Poetry had been squeezed from unpromising, unyielding materials and heightened by the way the arena opened to the river. When I met Gehry some months later and congratulated him on it, he rather played it down. It was not false modesty, either. He just did not think the building distinctive enough to carry a signature. Yet its mastery seemed manifest and showed up the supposed irony of the Postmodernism around it for flatulent filibusters, distractions from the real business of building.

In “Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works,” a new monograph by two historians-critics (the Swiss Kurt Forster and the Italian Francesco Dal Co), that auditorium has been given so little space that I could not quite recapture my admiration for it by looking at the summary illustrations. On the other hand, some of the smaller buildings, like Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica and the house he built for the Newton family not far away in Venice (one of his own favorites), receive enough coverage to give some indication of that excitement.

Although the New Orleans auditorium was my first view of a Gehry building, I had, of course, heard of him often before, seen publications of his work and listened to many arguments in support of and against him; his buildings provoke dissent and censure as well as admiration and the imitation which almost inevitably follows it. Current praise has focused on his particular mastery of the plastic, non- orthogonal form. Expressionist architects in the 1920s had tried such free forms, yet the right angle has always dominated architecture. Almost all the famous and memorable non-rectangular buildings from the past incorporate some form of a grid deflected into a curve, like the circular temples of Greece and Rome, the baptisteries of medieval Italy or the apses of the great cathedrals. This is not only because designers have found it difficult to conceive and describe their projects in any other terms but also because their builders would not have had the skills to work without such organizational help. Gehry has often done buildings dominated by the grid, but he has also exploited his particular genius at articulating complex form. His houses sometimes become miniature villages made up of interconnected pavilions, linked by bridges and infills whose geometry either defies or augments that of the underlying structure.

Such an elaborate architectural vision requires a design procedure as complex as the resulting form. Because the Walt Disney concert hall in Los Angeles, for instance, was a decade in the making, Gehry could exhibit some 60 variants of the project at the Venice Biennale in 1996. Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, though more decisively commissioned and built, went through many metamorphoses before it became the most discussed and described building ever. Forster and Dal Co give the museum about 20 pages, in what amounts to one of the best accounts of that complex building. What is even more fascinating is the inclusion of a projection drawing for part of the shell structure which allows a glimpse into the technical difficulties involved in translating the fluid shapes of the project into a rigid construction.

Over the last decade, Gehry has pushed matters further. The articulation of his buildings as interconnected pavilions is emphasized today by twisting adjoining members in ways which would not have been possible before computer-aided design allowed him to draw and to specify their exact configuration for a builder. The computer has allowed him not only to manipulate shapes but also to circumscribe them exactly. There is no inherent virtue in merely reaching out for the limits of technical ingenuity: What justifies Gehry’s exploration is the way he has put computer technology in the service of metaphor and, therefore, of narration. More recently, he has attacked the grid itself--twisting and breaking it to his own expressive ends.

It is not always easy to trace the sources of the sometimes idiosyncratic metaphors whose interweaving is the generator of the stories he tells. About a decade or more ago, for instance, Gehry became obsessed with the image of the fish. In accounting for this, Forster, somewhat skeptically, reports the anecdote Gehry himself told: As a child he was fascinated by the live carp his grandmother would buy on a Thursday, let swim in the bath for a day and kill on the Friday for the evening’s gefilte fish. I can confirm the story from my own childhood experience in Poland--watching the Thursday live carp, twisting sharply and nervously in the hostile bathtub, to be beheaded the next day and cut into twitching portions. Alas, I did not have Gehry’s genius for harnessing that experience to the making of built forms.

Of course the fascination is not just with how that very live thing is transmuted into an elaborate confection but with how the scaly form, the horny scales overlapping in a kind of elastic armor, encloses the skeleton, all backbone and ribs. The entire body undulates, as it never quite does in mammals or birds--and the same effect is even more overpowering in snakes, Gehry’s other animal obsession. The scaly surface and the sinuous skeleton have become part of Gehry’s formal vocabulary. There is also his obsession with primitive building which surfaces when he invokes log construction, usually simulated in metal sheet, as in the Chiat/Day offices in Venice or in the warehouse in Newbury Street in Boston; while in Rebecca’s Restaurant--also in Venice--there is even a row of log struts, simulating tree columns (among which, and lit by the glow off the onyx walls, I had my archetypal Los Angeles experience--a minor earthquake). At another level, there is an intense interest in how the building is made, so that Gehry sometimes strips the facing from the framed wall to reveal the construction under glass or plastic or even projects part of the structure into a transparent envelope to redefine and erode the boundaries between inside and outside, between the touchable and the visible.

These and other metaphors may be put in the service of a story in unexpected, even paradoxical ways, particularly for Los Angeles. The most explicit evidence of Gehry’s concern with civic space is the Law School of Loyola Marymount University. It is a paradox, too, because the civic “statement” is asserted in a group of relatively small, and relatively cheap, buildings that have been going up by stages within one city block for more than a decade. Like so much of his work, they feature frame construction, wood in the smaller, steel in the larger buildings, and are clothed in concrete and stucco. The formal space is delimited by a parking garage on one side and a yellow stucco student commons building on the other and is broken open, split in the middle, to accommodate a duplex greenhouse (with exposed framing) and a primary staircase down to the paved area. In itself all this is not exceptional--yet within this “public” courtyard Gehry has configured the smaller buildings into a true urban forum: a moot court for the students really does represent a place for the dispensing of justice; and the classrooms assume an analogous dignity. The small, lightly built chapel becomes a tent-tabernacle, while the other buildings, screened with concrete column shafts, speak of the majesty and immutability of the law. I wonder if the columns should have been inscribed--but perhaps not, they are eloquent enough as they are. What I do find somewhat disturbing is the inclusion of the Oldenburg-van Bruggen “Falling Ladder” sculpture, a multiple which seems to introduce a nihilist element into the composition and to serve some other discourse than Gehry’s.

But this leads me to another issue: Gehry is one of the very few architects of his generation who has deliberately chosen to collaborate with artists--not just for the occasional prestige job (which is common enough) but as a matter of method. From the early unbuilt project for the Jung Institute in Los Angeles (on which California painter Sam Francis acted for the client) to the later collaborations with Oldenburg-van Bruggen, or with Richard Serra, artists have actually been involved in his projects. Like all truly original creative minds, Gehry is prepared to take such risks, knowing that some collaborations, inevitably, will not be wholly successful.

This and other issues have been discussed in what is already a vast Gehry bibliography (listed at the back of the book, which is itself a most important addition to it.) In fact, Gehry has built so much, and what he has built is so complex and often so perplexing that it cannot be conveniently compressed be- tween two covers. As a result, many of the buildings in this book appear as mere captions or captions accompanying a single snapshot. It is, of course, difficult enough to read any building merely with the help of plans and photographs alone. A photograph is nearly always meaningless by itself, except as a jog to the memory, so this book is best-suited for those who know the work already. It is more an oeuvre catalogue--like that of a painter’s--than a working record that students could use (even if they could afford it).

Some of the projects illustrated toward the end of the book--such as the office building in the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (where a grid encloses one of Gehry’s quite new zoomorphs, or lifelike forms) or the Conde-Nast cafeteria (in which Gehry uses titanium and glass, both molded into complex shapes together with wood)--can, in any case, hardly be appreciated from the photographs of the scale model, however good. Even more tantalizing is the wholly fluid Telluride residence or the remodeled No. 1, Times Square in New York, where the entire 20-story building is to be enclosed in metal net. All my carping means is that I really want more, not a different approach.

The consolation is that there will always (I suspect) be a ready public for many more Frank Gehry books--because getting around him, if you are a working architect, is nearly impossible. As Forster puts it: He is among his contemporaries as a huge boulder is in a cultivated landscape. Never since Le Corbusier has an architect had such an impact on the way architecture is made--and many more consequences will surely follow. Whether you reject his way of designing buildings and squeeze round the boulder--or try to climb it--assent to it, accept it as something on which you can base your own individual work: You cannot ignore it.