Frank Gehry

frankFrank O. Gehry makes generous architecture.

More than the radical playfulness of their organic forms or the sensual erotics of their spatial flux,

what sets his buildings apart from most of the architectural landscape is their sheer generosity, liberal, openhanded, abundant, magnanimous.

EMR

c o v e r , t o p l e f t Communication and Technology

Center; View of main entrance. EMR was conceived during the same

period as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1991-97), and the building’s

more curvilinear forms were some of the first developed by Gehry’s firm

using CATIA software

Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesotac o v e r , t o p r i g h t View of the main entrance looking west with downtown Minneapolis in the distance. The busy location adjacent to a walkway connecting the campus with the Washington Avenue Bridge further integrates the museum with the University.

1 • F R A n k G E h R y GehryGehry the Architect

These are not words that fit most buildings, even great buildings by great designers of the past. But they describe Gehry’s buildings. He makes architecture that makes people feel like they’ve been given an unexpected gift.

How he does it is worth considering. Take the 1997 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which has been the object of such lavish and universal praise. Before going to Bilbao I’d read all the kudos and analysis. I’d read about the advanced computer technology brought to bear on the construction of evanescent sculptural forms, which make for a phantasmagoria of architectural space. I’d read that the building offers rare hope to eternal skeptics about the possibility for significant architecture and planning as catalysts for the spiritual revival of neglected urban environments. I’d read that, finally, here was a building about which critics did not have to say “yes, but;” they could just say yes, without having to qualify it. Not until I got there, though, did I begin to understand what makes this building so unusual. Generosity has a lot to do with it.

The building is of course a masterpiece of contextual urbanism, billowing up from a bend in the river to meet the gruff city and gentle hills surrounding it. The famous titanium cladding identifies the spaces for contemporary art inside the immense structure, separating them out from other functions that are housed in elegant limestone boxes, and from administrative spaces clad in stucco painted bright, exuberant colors. Gehry’s riff on Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous

rotunda for the Guggenheim’s parent museum in New York is a marvel of savvy design, at once respectful of its origin yet determined to be unique. The atrium explodes upward, establishing a central vertical spine around which the rest of the building unfurls on several floors. This light-filled tower of curved, shattered, sometimes transparent planes allows a visitor to continuously orient himself wherever he goes in the rambling building. The big surprise of the vast Guggenheim Bilbao is that, despite its gargantuan complexity and unorthodox appearance, you never feel lost or confused inside. You always know where you are. So you give yourself over, willingly, to an exploratory sense of architectural discovery. It’s a building you can trust.

The generosity of Gehry’s architecture can be traced to two sources. One is his own home, the famous Santa Monica bungalow that the architect disassembled, reassembled and wrapped inside a second structure of chain link and two-by-fours. The other critical source is his drawing.

Gehry’s home remakes the great Southern California domestic tradition of indoor-outdoor living. This tradition characterizes the region’s vernacular architecture, from courtyard haciendas to suburban ranch houses, as well as its unequaled legacy of household masterworks by Wright, Irving Gill, R.M. Schindler, Richard Neutra and many other distinguished architects. For example, the kitchen and dining room of the Gehry house occupy a former outdoor space, where

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nationTale-nedelanden Building a b o v e View of glass-clad tower.

the driveway to the garage used to be. The floor remains asphalt, acknowledging that history, while an interior wall is composed from the exterior wall of clapboards of the original living room next door, which can be glimpsed through an intact picture window. Sitting “inside” the new house yet “outside” the old one, you’re inside and outside at the same time. Formally, the indivisibility of inside/outside space recalls the seamless flow of a classic Donald Judd box, in which the conventional distinction between a sculpture’s inside and its outside is erased. Bucking the history of Western sculpture, a Judd box is not a discrete mass occupying space and with a hidden interior realm. Neither is Gehry’s house.

Unlike a Judd box, though, domestic space is not just formal. Domestic space is emotionally charged, incorporating a complex psychological dimension that changes over time. Even for a visitor to Gehry’s house the experience of being simultaneously inside and outside is psychologically disconcerting; the renovated bungalow gives surprising physical form to an instantly recognizable quality of domestic estrangement and alienation. The past century’s architecture has been mostly conceived in formal and social terms, but central to Gehry’s achievement has been this uncanny articulation of psychological space.

The key is in his drawings. A Gehry building begins with a sketch, and Gehry’s sketches are

distinctive. They’re characterized by a sense of off-hand improvisation, of intuitive spontaneity. The fine line is invariably fluid, impulsive. The drawings convey no architectural mass or weight, only loose directions and shifting spatial relationships. The Guggenheim Bilbao is a remarkable turning point in Gehry’s work öand in the history of architecture÷because it manages to maintain in built form the impromptu sketchiness of his drawings. It’s a sketch in real space, a sketch you can walk into. Drawing is the medium most capable of closely recording the evolution of artistic thought÷from brain to hand to pencil to paper and back to brain. Walking through Gehry’s sketchy building is like navigating a projection of psychological space that is continuously unfolding. The result: Every visitor is always located at its exact center, and the center moves with you.

That’s generosity. All the rapturous ink that has been spilled in the wake of Bilbao turns out to have been something other than what it initially seemed. Not just critical love letters, they’re heartfelt thank you notes.

Frank Gehry considers the Walt Disney Concert Hall to be his first major project in his own home town. No stranger to music, he has a long association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, having worked to improve the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl. He also designed the Concord Amphitheatre in northern California, and yet another much earlier in his

r i g h t View of north façade. At its base, the glass-clad tower provides a canopy

over the main entrance.

“Gehry’s sketches are distinctive. They’re characterized by a sense of off-hand improvisation,

of intuitive spontaneity”

3 • F R A n k G E h R y

career in Columbia, Maryland, the Merriweather Post Pavilion of Music.

The Museum of Contemporary Art selected him to convert an old warehouse into its Temporary Contemporary exhibition space while the permanent museum was being built. It has received high praise, and remains in use today. On a much smaller scale, but equally as effective, Gehry remodeled what was once an ice warehouse in Santa Monica, adding some other buildings to the site, into a combination art museum/retail and office complex.

The belief that “architecture is art” has been a part of Frank Gehry’s being for as long as he can remember. In fact, when asked if he had any mentors or idols in the history of architecture, his reply was to pick up a Brancusi photograph on his desk, saying, “Actually, I tend to think more in terms of artists like this. He has had more influence on my work than most architects. In fact, someone suggested that my skyscraper that won a New York competition looked like a Brancusi sculpture. I could name Alvar Aalto from the architecture world as someone for whom I have great respect, and of course, Philip Johnson.”

sense of off-hand improvisation, of intuitive spontaneity”

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5 • F R A n k G E h R y

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao The museum’s signature roofline is a composition of twisting, curving forms that unfold like a flower over the atrium.

l e f t In a reversal of traditional architectural strategies, a processional staircase plunges from the street-level plaza down to the main entry of the museum, simultaneously straddling the sectional drop and making possible the atrium’s soaring height which would have otherwise overwhelmed the nineteenth-century scale of the surrounding neighborhood.

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a b o v e r i g h t Approach to the museum from the south along Calle de Iparraguirre.

Walt Disney Concert hallr i g h t Walt Disney Concert Hall design sketch.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao a b o v e l e f t The light-flooded atrium reaches a height of 165 feet and provides a central circulation space around which

the galleries are oriented. Although Gehry originally conceived of it as a more rectilinear

space that would accommodate art on its walls, he was persuaded by the client to

develop a more highly sculpted space in the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum in New York.

construction of the Cabrillo Marine Museum, a 20,000 square foot compound of buildings which he “laced together” with chain-link fencing. These “shadow structures” as Gehry calls them, bind together the parts of the museum.

Santa Monica Place has one outside wall, nearly 300 feet long and six stories tall, hung with a curtain of chain link, and then a second layer over it in a different color spells out the name of the mall.

For a time, Gehry’s work used “unfinished” qualities as a part of the design. As Paul Goldberger, New York Times Architecture Critic described it, “Mr. Gehry’s architecture is known for its reliance on harsh, unfinished materials and its juxtaposition of simple, almost primal, geometric forms...(His) work is vastly more intelligent and controlled than it sounds to the uninitiated; he is an architect of immense gifts who dances on the line separating architecture from art but who manages never to let himself fall.”

One building that is part of the touring Pritzker exhibition is the Chiat/Day Office for Venice, California. The proposed three story, 75,000 square foot building will sit

Early Life

Born in Canada in 1929, Gehry has become a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1954, he graduated from USC and began work full time with Victor Gruen Associates, where he had been apprenticing part-time while still in school. After a year in the army, he was admitted to Harvard Graduate School of Design to study urban planning. When he returned to Los Angeles, he briefly worked for Pereira and Luckman, then rejoined Gruen where he stayed until 1960.

In 1961, Gehry and family, which by now included two daughters, moved to Paris where he worked in the office of Andre Remondet. His French education in Canada was an enormous help. During that year of living in Europe, he studied works by LeCorbusier, Balthasar Neumann, and was attracted by the French Roman churches. In 1962, he returned to Los Angeles, setting up his own firm.

He has said on more than one occasion, “Personally, I hate chain link. I got involved with it because it was inevitably being used around my buildings. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

A project in 1979 illustrates his use of chain-link fencing in the

7 • F R A n k G E h R y

above three underground levels of parking for 300 cars. The entry to the building is through a pair of 45’ tall binoculars designed by Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen. The shafts of the binoculars will contain an office and a library.

A guest house he designed in 1983 for a home in Wayzata, Minnesota that had been designed by Philip Johnson in 1952 proved a challenge that critics agree Gehry met and conquered. The guest house is actually a grouping of one-room buildings that appear as a collection of sculptural pieces.

He did a monument to mark the centennial of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association. It was built by 600 volunteers from the union in the cavernous central hall of the National Building Museum (formerly known as the Pension Building) in Washington, D.C. The 65 foot high construction was galvanized stainless steel, anodized aluminum, brass and copper.

There is an interesting note regarding a statement Gehry prepared for the 1980 edition of “Contemporary Architects,” Gehry states, “I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.”

In an artistic climate that too often looks backward rather than toward

the future, where retrospectives are more prevalent than risk-taking, it is important to honor the architecture of Frank O. Gehry.

his Work

Refreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his populist Southern California perspective, Gehry’s work is a highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of architecture.

His sometimes controversial, but always arresting body of work, has been variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent, but the jury, in making this award, commends this restless spirit that has made his buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent values.

Always open to experimentation, he has as well a sureness and maturity that resists, in the same way that Picasso did, being bound either by critical

acceptance or his successes. His buildings are juxtaposed collages of spaces and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the back-stage, simultaneously revealed.

Although the prize is for a lifetime of achievement, the jury hopes Mr. Gehry will view it as encouragement for continuing an extraordinary “work in progress, “as well as for his significant contributions thus far to the architecture of the twentieth century.

For Frank Gehry, like most architects, the art of building is a serious and searching business. He pursues his muse with love and frustration, with a sense of discovery in each undertaking, and an exceptional set of skills. At a time when retro reigns, he follows the modernist route of an original vision that postmodern traditionalists have tried so hard to give a bad name. He takes chances; he works close to the edge; he pushes boundaries beyond previous limits. There are

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work takes architecture a significant step farther as an evolving, challenging and creative art.

But there is more to Gehry’s work than an adventurous spirit and original imagery. He combines building elements on a site in a way that is not only intrigningly sculptural but also innovatively contextual, whether it is the small gem of a law school at Loyola University in Los Angeles, an ambitious Amencan cultural center in Paris, or a commercial complex that suddenly sparks a humdrum block. What may look like arbitrary, and to some, offputting, abstract geometry outside reveals itself inside as a series of unusual and inviting relationships achieved through a thoughtful analysis of the program in terms of a multidimensional concept of sensuously orchestrated space.

If there are many facets to Gehry’s work, there are also several

corrugated cardboard, a welcom old shoebox presence, ingratiatingly paper-pompous and comfortably user-friendly. There is wit, but no fashionable in-jokes or one-liners; these are light and lively designs and buildings that lift the spirit with revelations of how the seemingly ordinary can become extraordinary by acts of imagination that turn the known into new configurations that engage the mind and eye, that explore unexpected definitions of use and style. For Frank Gehry, these explorations characteristically take place at the point where architecture and sculpture meet in anxious and uneasy confrontation; this is the difficult, dangerous and uncharted area that he has made his own. That he has reconciled art and utility in a handsome, workable and intensely personal synthesis of form and function is his singnlar achievement. Gehry’s

times when he misses the mark, and times when the breakthrough achieved alters everyone else’s vision as well. And he believes, as most architects do, that it is always the next project that will realize his aims and ideals his own.

For those that work this way — exploring levels of philosophy and practice thaat renew both the spirit and meaning of an ancient art — there is a quiet, but genuine joy that is the architect’s secret elixir. Delight breaks through constantly; there are no gloomy Gehry buildings. One cannot think of anything he has done that does nt make one smile. There are the fish, as pure sculpture or useful objects, ornamental or occupied, luminous or glistening, a piscine preoccupation that has led to lamps, anthromorphic (anthropofishic?) restaurants and skyscraper towers. There is the furniture of

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Gehrys. There is the media Gehry as defined and promoted by the press: the casual, laid-back Californian whose work is touted as fashionably “pop” or “punk,” who uses funny materials - chain link, exposed pipe, corrugated aluminum, utility-grade construction board - in a funky, easy, West Coast way. The image is part of the media-chic of Venice and the seductive charms of Santa Monica, the places he has made his habitat; this is nouveau California at the cutting-edge of style. It is the fashion to admire his ofibeat spirit but to wonder how well the work will travel.

An then there is the real Frank Gehry, who is all and none of this: an admirer of the quirky, the accidental and the absurd, tuned in to the transient nature of much contemporary culture, while he is deeply involved, personally and professionally, with the world of serious art and artists. There is a closet elitist, if elitism is equated with a fierce admiration for the great works of art, architecture and urbanism. Above all, he is an obsessive perfectionist engaged in a ceaseless and demanding investigation of ways to unite expressive form and utilitarian function. He practices architecture in the most timeless and sophisticated sense, but with a very special spin.

The spin is that Gehry’s work goes to the heart of the art of our time, carrying the conceptual and technological achievements of modernism (as real and instructive as its much better-publicized failures) to the spectaularly enriched vision

that characterizes the 1990’s. He builds on the liberated “box” that Frank Lloyd Wright broke open forever, and the liberates spaces that Le Corbusier raised to luminous heights. (“Ronchamps humbles us all,” he says.) Gehry continues and personalizes the 20th century tradition. This is a kind of architecture utltimately made possible and logical only by modern technologies and lifestyles. He pushes the modern miracle of radically redefined structure and space into sudden bursts of “pure” form — a surprising exterior stair, a skylit room that offers as much abstract art as illumination

b e l o w Final design model, scale ¼”= 1’, with view of main entrance at corner of First Street and South Grand Avenue.

Walt Disney Concert halll e f t Design process model, scale 1/8”=1’. Gehry considered a combination of limestone and steel sheathing for the exterior.

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1 1 • F R A n k G E h R y

inits crowning construction.In every case, the building is

painstakingly programmed, and the program is the generator, or at least, the co-generator, of the solution. Sometimes the parts are broken down into the “single room” elements that Gehry favors for their plastic possibilities. But the choices are never arbitrary; he does not seek novelty or superficial effect. He does not make sculpture and stuff it with after-the-fact uses. Nor does he sheathe his unconventional forms and spaces in trompe l’oeil masonry to suggest a weight and solidity of construction that are not there. They are wrapped in skins of metal, plywood, composition board or glass for flexibility and appropriateness of scale, for transparency, opacity or reflection, for changes of color, climate and light. As an alchemist of

sorts, constantly changing dross into something less than gold but much more than common aluminum, Gehry professes to be unsure of what is ugly and what is beautiful. It is irrelevant; he uses the everyday and ever present stuff of the expedient and low-cost construction of our immediate environment for surprising aesthetic revelations and unexpected elegance. The cultural references of these materials are as strong as the structural and aesthetic rationale.

One of Gehry’s benign, mock-monumental cardboard furniture lines is called Easy Edges; even the name has a comfortable, laid-back sound. But his is not easy art; the more relaxed it seems, the more rigorous the creative effort that underlies it. Add wit, as Gehry does, and the deception is greater still; art mocks earnestness as life mocks

Walt Disney Concert halll e f t , t o p Plan of third level:(1) Entry (2) Lobby (3) Concession (4) Pre-concert room (5) Founder’s room (6) Concert hall (7) Antechamber (8) Organ (9) Mechanical Room

l e f t , b o t t o m l e f t Final design model, scale ¼=1’, with view of main entrance.

l e f t , b o t t o m r i g h t View of the interior model, scale unknown.

a b o v e View of interior model showing lobby along South Grand Avenue side of building. Gehry has located circulation areas, small rooms, a café, and retail space in the pockets between the outer building façade and the auditorium structure.

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Fredrick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesotal e f t The dynamic stainless steel façade completely masks the rectangular structure of the museum when the building is seen from the west; an entirely different impression of the form is gained when it is viewed from inside the campus.

1 3 • F R A n k G E h R y

art. But art and life are inseparable, whether the relationship is one of imitation, as earlier centuries believed, or observations on a world outrageously out of control, as is so often the case today. Architecture does more than comment; buildings define and accommodate attitudes, customs and style. This has made the art of architecture an unending series of sublime surprises. Whether it is the revolutionary vision of the Renaissance or the Baroque, the dramatic disruptions of classical convention of Schinkel and Soane, or the 20th century’s intoxicated pursuit of the future, nothing goes back to the way it was before. In every case, architecture has been vitalized and opened up, with new directions charted that had not previously existed and that affect everything that follows. Today there are those who understand history so little that they would cut off all avenues of discovery in favor of reworked revivals.

And so debate will continue about Frank Gehry’s work. It is hard o imagine a “finished” Gehry look, except among his imitators, who are legion, or an oeuvre that will not continue to evolve. There has been much that was tentative or unresolved in his earlier projects, as he set the mot difficult problems of the union of art and architecture as his highest task. Today his ever-larger and increasingly international commissions are marked by an impressive, hard-won clarity and order.

r i g h t The metallic surface of the west façade takes on dramatically different appearances depending on the time of day and weather conditions.

b o t t o m The two-level Washington Avenue Bridge conducts both pedestrian and vehicular traffic to the museum and campus. The museum’s dramatic façade acts as a greeting to approaching visitors

1929 born

1947 moves with family to Los Angeles

1954 graduated from University of Southern California

worked for Victor Gruen Associates

1962 founded Gehry Partners LLC, located in Santa Monica

1968 designed The O’neill hay Barn, located in Capistrano

1972 introduced his Easy Edges Furniture series

1978 built The Loyola Law School

1979 designed Cabrillo Marine Museum, located in San Peddro

designed Spiller Residence, located in Venice, California

1980 designed The Santa Monica Palace

1985 built The Chiat/Day Building

1989 built The Weisman Art Museum

Pritzker Archetecture Prize Laureate

1994 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Award

1995 built The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

1997 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture

1998 built The DZ Bank Building

1999 built healthcare Center, located in Cincinnati

2000 built Condé nast Cafeteria

built The Experience Music Project

2001 built Gehry Tower

2003 built Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

built Maggie’s Centre

2004 designed Trophy for the World Cup of hockey

built Jay Pritzker Pavilion

2007 built Weatherhead School of Management

2008 built The Art Gallery of Ontario

Geh

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Life

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Frank Gehry Exhibit10 January 2011 – 10 April 2011

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third Street (between Mission + Howard)

San Francisco, CA 94103415.357.4000

Frank Gehry Exhibit is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition is provided by the Koret Foundation. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The San Francisco presentation is made possible by generous support from Doris and Donald Fisher, the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, and Nancy and Steven H. Oliver. Additional support is provided by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

Experience Music Project b a c k c o v e r Seattle (1995-2000).

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao c o v e r , b o t t o m r i g h t

(1991-1997)

Experience Music Projectc o v e r , b o t t o m l e f t A corridor

runs through the building from the plaza-level ticket lobby to a second entrance along Fifth Avenue. The only interior space of the EMP

designed by Gehry, it includes various public amenities, such as a restaurant and bookstore.