A Messiness in Creating Masterworks

Is Frank Gehry the world’s greatest living architect? The current retrospective of his work, which opens today at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, makes a strong case that he is.

Covering the bulk of Gehry’s career from 1978 to the present, “Frank Gehry, Architect” includes drawings, models and photographs of more than 40 projects, including many that are yet to be built. They depict a career that--in both its creative output and its ability to capture the public imagination--has eclipsed that of every major American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. And like Wright before him, Gehry has attained a stature that allows him to pick and choose his projects. No other contemporary architect has churned out so many masterworks at such a rate.

But what makes the show so uplifting is its ability to capture the messiness of that creative endeavor. Gehry was not the first to challenge the values of mainstream Modernism, but he went the furthest in tearing down its high art pretensions. In the process, he laid the groundwork for a truly democratic architecture--one in which the individual imagination triumphs over dogmatic formulas. In our age of diminished expectations, that is nothing short of a miracle.

Of course, like many recent Guggenheim productions, this one comes with an ethical hitch. The museum is now in the midst of trying to raise $678 million to build a new museum complex at the edge of the East River in downtown Manhattan. Because the project is also designed by Gehry, the timing gives the show the whiff of self-promotion.

But fuzzy ethics aside, the show sparkles with intelligence--and that’s what matters most. Gehry sheathed the rotunda’s interior with enormous, vertical strips of aluminum mesh, giving Wright’s muscular rotunda a rough, sexy quality it never had. Think Madonna in Jean-Paul Gaultier, circa 1990.

As you climb the ramps, a large model of the proposed downtown Guggenheim design comes into view. Set in the High Gallery, the model’s billowing, ribbon-like forms are anchored to the site by enormous piers. A tower rises out of the center of the composition, both ends dissolving into shards of glass.

It is a powerful image, as if a fragment of the downtown skyline were drifting out over the river, lifted up on a pillow of clouds. But peer more closely, and the scale of the project becomes mind-boggling. Forty stories high, four blocks long, the design has the potential to redefine the city’s most iconic skyline.

The project sums up the challenges raised by Gehry’s increasing fame. As the scale of his celebrity grows, so does the scale of his commissions. How does Gehry grapple with that shift in scale without allowing the work to lose its human quality? How does he keep generating fresh ideas in the face of increased demands on his time? The rest of the show offers an answer to such questions.

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The journey begins in 1978, with the completion of Gehry’s design for his own Santa Monica residence. Depicted in a crude, Foamcore model, held together with pins and glue, the house is a humble Cape Cod bungalow wrapped in a second skin of plywood, corrugated metal and chain-link.

Similarly, a model of the 1978 Familian Residence, never built, depicts two rectangular forms crashing together, their surfaces carved open to let in light and air. Rougher forms, made of 2-by-4s and plywood, cut through the structure’s envelope, evoking the 1970s-era work of the artist Gordon Matta Clarke, who, using a chain saw, carved spaces out of abandoned buildings.

To those who remember it, these early models will evoke memories of the first major show of Gehry’s work, which opened at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center in 1986. At the time, the crudeness of Gehry’s work was stunning. Mainstream architecture tended toward the slick. Gehry’s models, covered with stray pencil marks and strips of glue, seemed to capture the process of creation. For young students like me, they were pointed attacks against both mainstream Modernism and suburban conformity. And they told us that architecture could be made out of the raw materials of everyday life.

As his career evolved, Gehry struggled to maintain that edge--that toughness--even as he began to explore more complex forms. Not all of his latter projects measured up. Take away the gigantic Claes Oldenburg binoculars that form the entry to the former Chiat Day building in Santa Monica, for instance, and the building is a relatively conventional office block.

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But one lesson of the show is that making great architecture requires a willingness to break down conventional formulas--even at the risk of total failure. On its own, for instance, the 1989 Vitra Design Museum--with its swooping exterior and cruciform skylight--is a slightly awkward composition. In the context of the exhibition, however, it becomes a turning point in Gehry’s work. The architect, here, is tinkering with a more fluid, sculptural language.

The breakthrough was a technological one. Even as Vitra was under construction, Gehry was acquiring the French-made software called CATIA that would allow him to explore those forms more fully. Models remained central to his design process, but now he could plot a model’s coordinates directly into the computer system. It was a remarkably liberating experience.

By the time we get to the small, seven-story office building Gehry designed in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1996, the transformation is complete. Dubbed “Ginger and Fred,” the building evokes a couple locked in an intimate embrace, one a flowing feminine form, the other a more stoic cylinder. But it is not an isolated work: The columns that support the structure’s base reflect the columns of a nearby building; a large mesh ball, balanced on top, echoes the gold finials that dot the Prague skyline. The impression is that the design has infected everything around it, and the whole city is about to break out in a wild, delirious dance.

It is that strange ability to express empathy for one’s surroundings, even as the forms become more radical, that make the Bilbao Guggenheim, in Spain, which opened a year later, such an unqualified masterpiece. Seen from the river, Bilbao’s shimmering, titanium-clad forms lock into a nearby industrial bridge. In front, those same forms gently part, making room for a grand stair that spills down into the main atrium lobby. Once inside, the atrium’s undulating white surfaces rise up to a small skylight, a remarkably womb-like--even sexual--space.

It may be the most seductive building on Earth.

At the Guggenheim, it is only a stop along the way. With each step, you glimpse the birth of new ideas. Further up the ramp, for instance, you reach the Lewis Residence (1989-95)--an extravagant, unbuilt project that ranks among Gehry’s most bizarre undertakings. A collage of cascading, crumpled forms, the house is dominated by a massive private gallery space in the shape of what Gehry’s staff affectionately calls the “horse head.”

When the form reappears later, however, its context has radically changed. Now lodged inside the atrium of Berlin’s DG Bank Building on Pariser Platz, the head is hemmed in on all sides by the symmetrical block-like form of the building’s exterior. The Brandenburg Gate is just to one side. The Reichstag looms in the distance. In that context, the undulating form provokes a series of possible metaphors--a trapped imagination, the struggle for spiritual freedom, the danger of social conformity. You choose.

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There are more great works here. Among the oddest is Los Angeles’ Disney Hall. First designed in 1987 and still under construction, the project bridges two major phases of Gehry’s career. An early model depicts a clunky stack of foyers. By the final design, completed more than a decade later, it is a composition of curvaceous stainless steel plates. Few projects serve as a better metaphor for the creative struggles Gehry has gone through.

The show ends, fittingly, with a room overflowing with models, drawings and computer images of MIT’s Ray and Maria Stata Center, now under construction. The project is more a town plan than a single structure, a village of tower-like objects arranged around a central plaza. A testament to the uncensored mind, it is loaded with creative friction.

So what the show tells us is this: Few architects have attained the raw technical skill that Gehry has over a 40-year career. Fewer still have created a body of work that so fully encapsulates the transition from one historical era to another--from the mechanized visions of the Machine Age to the flowing landscapes of the Information Age.

But the ultimate success of Gehry’s work is rooted in its ability to express deeply held beliefs about the human condition. Gehry rose out of a generation that witnessed both the Utopian dream in full swing and its ultimate, tragic collapse.

In that light, his work must be seen as more than a formal accomplishment. It’s beauty stems from the architect’s struggle to create a new world, more inclusive, rooted in the experiences of the average man--the rebel, the outcast, the weak. Other architects--Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman, to name two--have sought to create such a language. None, since Wright, has achieved it with such artistic power.