Slouching Toward Bilbao

For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. Projects and prizes, books and exhibitions flow toward him (including a retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, opening Oct. 29), and he is often called, without a blush of embarrassment, a genius.

Why all the hoopla? Is this designer of metallic museums and curvy concert halls, luxury houses and flashy corporate headquarters truly Our Greatest Living Artist? The notion is telling, for it points to the new centrality of architecture in cultural discourse. This centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, which were focused on architecture, but it is clinched by the contemporary inflation of design and display in all sorts of spheres: art, fashion, business and so on. Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle culture today, you have to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Bilbao, and here an architect like Gehry, supported by clients like the Guggenheim and the DG Bank, has an obvious advantage over artists in other media. Such clients are eager for brand equity in the global marketplace--in part the Guggenheim has become brand equity, which it sells in turn to corporations and governments--and these conditions favor the architect who can deliver a building that will also circulate as a logo in the media. (Bilbao uses its Gehry museum literally as a logo: It is the first sign for the city you see on the road, and it has put Bilbao on the world tourist map.) But why is Gehry picked out in particular?

His beginnings were humble enough, and he has retained a rumpled sort of everyman persona. Born in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947, where, after stints at Harvard, in Paris and with various firms, he opened his own office in 1962. Influenced primarily by Richard Neutra, the Austrian emigre who also practiced in the area, Gehry gradually turned a modernist idiom into a funky sort of L.A. vernacular. He did so mostly in domestic architecture through an innovative use of cheap materials associated with commercial building, including exposed plywood, corrugated metal siding, chain-link fencing and asphalt. As is often the case with architects, his first landmark was the renovation of his own home in Santa Monica (1977-78), which has functioned as a laboratory- cum -showroom ever since (he redesigned it again in 1991-92). Gehry took a modest bungalow on a corner lot, wrapped it in layers of corrugated metal and chain-link and poked glass structures through its exterior in a way that skewed its given geometries. The result was a simple house extruded into surprising shapes and surfaces, spaces and views. It is justly admired but also strategically used, for it is the primal scene of his practice: “The House that Built Gehry” (as Beatriz Colomina writes in her essay in “Frank Gehry: Architect”).

Gehry extended the lessons of this house to others in the area, most not built, in which modernist geometries are also disrupted: the plan rotated off axis, the skin pierced by wood bridges, chain-link pavilions and the like. The unfinished look of this early style seemed right for L.A.: provisional in a way that was appropriate to its restless transformations but also gritty in a way that resisted the glossier side of Tinsel Town. For a time Gehry almost devised a “critical regionalism” of the sort long advocated by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, for even as he used new materials, he rejected the formal purities of modern architecture, burst open its abstract boxes and plunged the rearranged fragments into the everyday ground of Southern California life. But this L.A. vernacular needed the foil of a reified International Style to make its points and, with the prominence of postmodern architecture in the 1980s, full of classical symbols and Pop images, his style began to lose its edge.

Gehry made a subtle compromise with the new postmodern order: Though he never fell into the historical pastiche of a Robert Stern or a Charles Moore, he did become more imagistic in his design. One can trace a passage from his early grunge work, through an elliptical Pop style, to his lavish “gestural aesthetic” of the present. For throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Gehry went upscale in materials and techniques, clients and projects: from the improvised chain-link of Santa Monica to the recherche titanium cladding of Bilbao, from unbuilt houses for local artist-friends to mega-institutions for multinational elites.

This kind of repositioning, in which reception feeds back into production, is neither immediate nor final, but its trajectory is clear enough. Take the cardboard furniture that Gehry designs from cutout sheets stacked, laminated and shaped into chairs and divans. When it appeared in the early 1970s, it was edgy, materially and formally inventive and potentially low-cost. But as it became more studied as design, the populism of the cardboard began to look faux or worse, a kind of homeless chic, attractive only to people far removed from any actual use of the stuff. His Pop tendencies also became more pronounced as the 1980s progressed. Already in his Indiana Avenue Studios (1979-81 in Venice, Calif.), Gehry made imagistic use of both materials and elements: He defined the first studio, in blue stucco, by a big bay window; the second, in unpainted plywood, by a huge chimney; and the third, in green asphalt, by giant steps cut into the roof. This typological signaling can be effective in architecture, and Gehry often makes it witty, but it can also be manipulative in its Pop imagery and inflated scale.

In the mid-to late-1980s, Gehry moved back and forth between a material-formal inventiveness and a Pop-imagistic obviousness and often resorted to a collage of forms and images as a compromise. On the one hand there are projects such as the Winton Guest House (1983-87 in Minnesota), in which separate rooms are cast in bold shapes, sheathed in striking materials and set in a dynamic “pinwheel plan” that Gehry has often used since. In such domestic projects, he composes the house as a kind of intimate town, and when he turns to commercial projects, such as the Edgemar Development (1984-88 in Santa Monica), he reverses the process and treats the urban complex as a sort of extended house. This is imaginative, and it can be contextual as well (though like much architecture his rarely engages the ground effectively). On the other hand, there are projects that simply go Pop, such as his Chiat Day Building (1985-91 in Venice), where, under the influence of Claes Oldenburg, Gehry designed a monumental pair of binoculars as the entrance to this large advertising agency. This object may suit the client, but it manipulates the rest of us and reduces architecture to a 3-D billboard. Thereafter, the Pop dimension has remained strong in his work, even when disguised as a symbolic use of otherwise abstract materials, colors and forms, and it was no surprise when Gehry began to design for the Walt Disney Corp. in the late 1980s.

What is at stake here is the difference between a vernacular use of chain-link in a house or of cardboard in a chair and a Pop use of giant binoculars as an entrance or of a fighter jet attached to a facade (as in his Aerospace Hall, 1982-84 in L.A.). Equally at stake is the difference between a material rethinking of form and space, which may or may not be sculptural (here Gehry is influenced by Richard Serra), and a symbolic use of a ready-made image or commodity object (here again he is influenced by Oldenburg). The first option can bring elite design in touch with common culture and renew stale architectural forms with fresh social expressions. The second tends to ingratiate architecture, on the model of the advertisement, to a public projected as a mass consumer. It is this dialectic that Gehry surfed into the early 1990s, and it propelled his jump from L.A. architect to international designer. His finessing of architectural labels also allowed this leap: Although he first extended modern structures and then dallied with postmodern symbols, Gehry is not saddled with the stigmas of either tag. In effect, he trumped the signature styles of both movements in a crafty way that might be best understood by reference to “Learning From Las Vegas” (1972), the principal manifesto of postmodern architecture.

In this essay, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour distinguished a modern type of design, in which “space, structure and program” are subsumed in “an overall symbolic form”--which they called “the duck”--from a postmodern type of design, in which “space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them”--which they called “the decorated shed.” “The duck is the special building that is a symbol,” Venturi et al. write; “the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols.” And in an argument that supported the ornamental basis of postmodern architecture, they insisted that, however appropriate the formal duck was to the object world of the machine age, the decorated shed was only fitting for the speedy surfaces of the car-and-television age. As Gehry has privileged neither structure nor ornament, he seemed to transcend this opposition, but it is more accurate to say that he collapsed it and often combined the formal duck with the decorated shed. One upshot is that his architecture is not really “sculptural” (as is so often claimed), for it breaks down into distinct fronts and backs more often than it reads in the round. Another upshot is that his interiors are difficult to decipher from his exteriors and vice versa, whether one reads them structurally, as with the modern duck, or ornamentally, as with the postmodern shed. This disconnection between inside and outside can be beguiling, as it is in his Vitra International Headquarters (1988-94 in Switzerland) or his EMR Communications and Technology Center (1991-95 in Germany), “decorated ducks” expanded in scale. As Gehry slouched toward Bilbao, so did the liabilities of this combination, for it risked the most problematic aspects of modern and postmodern architectures: the willful monumentality of the first and the faux populism of the second.

Gehry combined formal duck and decorated shed almost literally in his huge Fish Sculpture designed for the Olympic Village in Barcelona in 1992, a work at once eccentric and central to his career (he has adopted the fish as his private totem). If the Santa Monica house was the primal scene of his early career, this gold-ribbed leviathan is the primal scene of his later career, for it marks his first use of a technology that has guided his practice (and many others) ever since: computer-aided design and manufacture (also known as CAD and CAM), in particular a program called CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application). Developed first in automobile and aerospace industries, such programs are also used in film animation, and the Fish Sculpture does resemble a futuristic fossil version of the dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” (maybe it can be a prototype when Disney animates “Moby-Dick”). A trellis hung over arched ribs, the Fish is equal parts duck and shed; a combination of Serra and Oldenburg, it is both all structure and all surface, with no functional interior. And yet his CATIA-designed buildings also privilege shape and skin, the overall exterior configuration, above everything else. In large part this is because CATIA permits the easy modeling of non-repetitive surfaces and supports, of different exterior panels and interior armatures, and this permission has induced Gehry to play with wacky topologies that overwhelm straight geometries, hence all the non-Euclidean curves, swirls and blobs that became his signature gestures in the 1990s. These effects are most evident in the Guggenheim Bilbao (1991-97), “the first major project in which the full potential of the [CATIA] program was realized.” (CAD and CAM are said to be cost-effective, but they are not necessarily so, and their use is as much rhetorical as actual. For example, the thin titanium panels in Bilbao were partly cut on site and manually bent into place.) Imagistically a cross between an ocean liner run aground and a spaceship landed in the Basque Country (call it “the Titanium”), this Bilbao museum is deemed the masterpiece of his “sculptural” style, and it is the model of his subsequent mega-projects, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., the Experience Music Project in Seattle (1995-2000) and the proposed Guggenheim near Wall Street in New York City (a project that may be on hold with the Sept. 11 destruction of the World Trade Center).

Here we might return to the claim that Gehry is our great artist, or at least our great sculptor. But first we need some version of modern sculpture to go by, and a good one (certainly a laconic one) comes from Carl Andre, a Minimalist sculptor of the kind said to have influenced Gehry. “I want to give you the three phases of art as I know it,” Andre remarked in a 1970 radio interview, with the Statue of Liberty as his test case. “There was a time when people were interested in the bronze sheath of the Statue of Liberty, modeled in [Bartholdi’s] studio. And then there came a time when artists ... were interested in Eiffel’s iron interior structure, supporting the statue. Now artists are interested in Bedloe’s island [the site of the statue].” Andre sketches here a particular passage in modern sculpture--from the academic modeling of the human figure often supported by a hidden armature (most statues are like the Statue of Liberty in this regard), to the modernist exposure of the “interior structure” of the object (think of the open framework of Constructivist sculpture of the 1920s), to the contemporary interest in a given place--the expanded field of sculpture that extends from earthworks in the 1960s and ‘70s to site-specific projects of various sorts today.

How does Gehry the architect-sculptor fit in this history? In effect, he effects a time loop. Like many other new museums, his colossal spaces are designed to accommodate the expanded field of postwar art--of Andre, Serra, Oldenburg and assorted descendents. But actually these museums trump this art: They use its great scale, which was first posed to challenge the modern museum, as a pretext to inflate the contemporary museum into a gigantic spectacle-space that can swallow any art, let alone any viewer, whole. In short, museums like Bilbao use the breaking-out of postwar art as a license to corral it again and to overwhelm the viewer as they do so. At the same time, considered as sculpture, the recent Gehry buildings appear regressive, for they reverse the history of the medium sketched above. For all the apparent futurism of the CATIA designs, these structures are akin to the Statue of Liberty, with a separate skin hung over a hidden armature and with exterior surfaces that rarely match up with interior spaces. (This comparison might not be fair to the Statue of Liberty, for it involves an innovative interplay between structure and skin, whereas Gehry allows his skin to dominate his structure.) Again, Gehry is frequently associated with Serra, but Serra exposes the construction of his sculptures for all to see, and Gehry is often tectonically obscure. Some of his projects resemble the baubles set on corporate plazas in the 1960s and ‘70s blown up to architectural scale, and some look as though they could be broken into with a can-opener.

With the putative passing of the industrial age, modern architecture was declared outmoded, and now the Pop aesthetic of postmodern architecture looks dated as well. The search for the architecture of the computer age is on but, ironically, it has led Gehry and followers to academic sculpture as a model, at least in part. (Imagine a new ending to the original “Planet of the Apes” in which, instead of the Statue of Liberty uncovered as a ruin in the sand, the Guggenheim Bilbao pokes through, or the Fish Sculpture in Barcelona.) The disconnection between skin and structure represented by this academic model is most radical in the Experience Music Project, commissioned by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen out of his love for Jimi Hendrix (a fellow Seattle-ite): Its six exterior blobs clad in different color metals have little apparent relation to its many interior display stations dedicated to popular music. Just as Gehry moved to make Bilbao legible through an allusion to a splintered ship, here he compensates for a lack of readability with an allusion to a smashed guitar (a broken “fret” lies over two of the blobs). But neither image works, even as a Pop gesture, for you have to be well above both to read them as images at all, or you have to see them in media reproduction--which, again, is a primary “site” of such architecture.

Mine is not a plea for a return to a modernist transparency of structure (that was mostly a myth anyway, even with purist architects like Mies van der Rohe). I am simply opposed to a computer-driven version of a Potemkin architecture of conjured surfaces. For the disconnection between skin and structure in Gehry can have two problematic effects. First, it can lead to spaces that are not surprising (as in the early houses) so much as mystifying (as in Bilbao or Seattle), a strained disorientation that is frequently mistaken for an Architectural Sublime. (Sometimes it is as if Gehry and followers have taken the famous critique of delirious space in postmodern architecture, first presented by critic Fredric Jameson in the early 1980s, as a guideline for practice, as if they designed in keeping with “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”) Second, this disconnection can abet a further disconnection between building and site. The Bilbao museum is said to “adapt to its setting with billowing forms that face the [Nervion River] and evoke marine imagery.” Likewise the metallic curves and swirls of the proposed Guggenheim near Wall Street are said to mediate, like so many waves and clouds, between the East River in front (the museum is to span three piers) and the downtown skyscrapers in back (it includes its own tower). But the claim that Gehry is sensitive to context does not hold up: The Wall Street Guggenheim would be even more anti-contextual than the Bilbao, which has come home to roost, swollen to twice the size and propped up on super-pylons like a giant metal dodo. (Its fate might now be worse than the dodo’s: extinct before born.)

An obvious point of comparison for the Gehry Guggenheims is the Frank Lloyd Wright Guggenheim (1959). It too is often seen as a sculptural object, but the Wright has a formal logic, the whitish spiral, as well as a programmatic conceit, the museum as continuous ramp, that the Gehrys do not possess. Moreover, the Wright uses its difference from its context smartly, as it breaks with the line of Fifth Avenue and bows into the greenery of Central Park. In a word, its form is expressive because it appears motivated in different ways. Can the same be said of the “gestural aesthetic” of Gehry? The gestures of his early houses were often idiosyncratic, but they were also grounded in two ways: in an L.A. vernacular of common materials and against an International Style of purist forms. As these gestures began to lose the specificity of the former and the foil of the latter, they became not only more extravagant (almost neo-Expressionist or neo-Surrealist) but also more detached as signs of “artistic expression” that could be dropped, indifferently, almost anywhere, in L.A., Bilbao, Seattle, Berlin, New York.

So why this curve, swirl or blob here and not that one? Formal articulation requires a resistant material, structure or context; without such constraint, architecture quickly becomes arbitrary or self-indulgent. (Here again, part of the problem might be the technical facility of CATIA, which is said to translate “the gestural quality from model to built work” all but directly.) The great irony is that Gehry fans tend to confuse this arbitrariness with freedom, this self-indulgence with expression. The New York Times greeted his recent retrospective with the banner, “Gehry’s Vision of Renovating Democracy.”

What is this vision of freedom and expression? Is it perverse of me to find it perverse, even oppressive? In the sense of Gehry as Our Great Living Artist, it is oppressive because, as Freud argued long ago, the artist is the only social figure allowed to be freely expressive in the first place, the only one exempted from many of the instinctual renunciations that the rest of us undergo as a matter of course. Hence his free expression implies our unfree inhibition, which is also to say that his freedom is mostly a franchise in which he represents freedom more than enacts it. Today this exceptional license is extended to Gehry as much as to any artist and certainly with greater consequences. In another sense this vision of expression and freedom is oppressive because Gehry does indeed design out of “the cultural logic” of advanced capitalism, in terms of its language of risk-taking and spectacle effects. Long ago, in “The Social Bases of Art” (1936), Meyer Schapiro argued that the Impressionist painter was the first artist to address the new modern world of speed and surface. “For this individual,” Schapiro wrote, “the world is a spectacle, a source of novel pleasant sensations, or a field in which he may realize his ‘individuality,’ through art, through sexual intrigue, and through the most varied, but non-productive, mobility.” So it is still today--for our privileged artists, architects and patrons--only more so. Yet “such an art cannot really be called free,” Schapiro cautioned, “because it is so exclusive and private”; to be deemed free at all, its “individuality must lose it exclusiveness and its ruthless and perverse character.”

In a similar way Gehry evokes an individuality that seems more exclusive than democratic. Rather than “forums of civic engagement,” his cultural centers appear as sites of spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe. In “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), Guy Debord defined spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” With Gehry and other architects, the reverse is true as well: Spectacle is “an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.” Such is the logic of many cultural centers today, as they are designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate “revival” of the city--that is, of its being made safe for shopping, spectating and spacing out. “The singular economic and cultural impact felt in the wake of its opening in October 1997,” we are told of “the Bilbao effect,” “has spawned a fierce demand for similar feats by contemporary architects worldwide.” Alas, so it has, and it is coming to your hometown soon.