Building Art : The Life and Work of Frank Gehry

591 Pages·2015·11.77 MB·English

by  Gehry

For Susan
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
WALLACE STEVENS, “SIX SIGNIFICANT LANDSCAPES,”
VI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
1. Night of the Supermoon
2. Canada
3. To Life in the Sun
4. Becoming an Architect
5. Dealing with Authority
6. Discovering Europe
7. Restart in Los Angeles
8. Independence
9. Easing the Edges
10. A House in Santa Monica
11. Fish and Other Shapes
12. Onto the World Stage
13. Walt Disney Concert Hall: First Movement
14. The Guggenheim and Bilbao
15. Walt Disney Concert Hall: Second Movement
16. New York: Trials and Triumphs
17. Frank at Eighty
18. The Legacy of Technology
19. From Dwight Eisenhower to Louis Vuitton
20. An Archive and a Legacy
21. In Paris, Looking Back and Looking Forward
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
Also By Paul Goldberger
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
Preface
I
n the spring of 1974, as a young writer for The New York Times, I went to
Washington, D.C., for the annual convention of the American Institute of
Architects. I didn’t normally go to conventions, but I had just become the
newspaper’s junior architecture critic, and I had the thought that attending the
largest gathering of architects in the country might be a source of a few good
stories, or at least a chance to meet some people and have them meet me. The
AIA had just opened its new national headquarters building and wanted to show
it off, and as a consequence the big party of the convention was held not in a
hotel ballroom but on the grounds of the AIA building on New York Avenue. I
was standing at the edge of the party, which spilled out to the sidewalk, talking
to my colleague Ada Louise Huxtable, when a pleasant man with a mustache
who looked to be in his forties—I was then in my twenties—recognized her and
came up to say hello.
He, too, seemed an unlikely convention-goer, a bit more casually dressed than
most architects, who in the early 1970s tended to look either like insurance
salesmen or college professors. This guy had a quiet, eager freshness to his
manner. He told Ada Louise that his name was Frank Gehry, and that he was an
architect from Los Angeles. His name did not ring a bell; he told us we might
have heard of some cardboard furniture he had designed that was sold at
Bloomingdale’s a few years ago, which did seem vaguely familiar, but I
certainly didn’t know of any buildings he had done. He had a curiosity about our
work as journalists, and was interested in criticism and ideas. He told us he was
more involved with artists in Los Angeles than with his fellow architects. He did
not seem to know many people at the party, and it did not take long to see that he
was something of an outlier. But he was not a typical outlier, or he would not
have been there at all. He was an outlier who wanted in, but, as I discovered as
time went by, on his own terms.
Ada Louise excused herself to return to her hotel, and Frank and I kept
talking. That evening began a conversation that has lasted for more than four
decades, and this book is one result of it. Gehry invited me to talk further if I
ever came to Los Angeles, which I was beginning to do more frequently—I
sensed, more than most New Yorkers, that the city needed to be taken seriously
as a laboratory of architecture and urbanism, although I didn’t understand at that
point how central Frank Gehry would be to what was happening there. But I was
happy to come and see some of his work for myself. In 1976 I wrote “Studied
Slapdash,” an essay in The New York Times Magazine about the house Gehry
designed for the painter Ron Davis in Malibu, which turned out to be the first
time one of his buildings was written about in a national general-interest
publication. So I have been documenting his work from a very early point in his
career, and an even earlier point in my own.
Over the years, as I came to know and admire his work more fully, and as it
grew in both scale and complexity, I wrote about it frequently in The New York
Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, my three professional homes as a
journalist and critic. Gehry and I discussed my writing an essay for a monograph
on his work at several points; none of these projects came to fruition, but when
Alfred A. Knopf proposed to me that I write a full-length biography of him—by
then he was the most famous architect in the world—I asked if he would be
willing to cooperate with me on that project instead of proceeding with the
monograph. I said that if he agreed to work with me, it would be necessary to
open his archives to me, to discuss the difficult times in his personal and
professional life as well as the happy and triumphant ones, and, most important,
to agree that he could have no editorial control over the text. He graciously
agreed to all of these conditions, and this book is the result.
1
Night of the Supermoon
T
he guest list for the party that Bruce Ratner, a New York City real estate
developer, gave in the unfinished seventy-second-floor penthouse of his
new apartment tower in Lower Manhattan on the night of March 19,
2011, was unusual for an event celebrating the opening of a new real estate
project. The singer and activist Bono showed up; so did several artists, including
Chuck Close and Claes Oldenburg. There were actors like Ben Gazzara and
Candice Bergen; the art dealer Larry Gagosian; Harvey Lichtenstein, the
longtime head of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the hotelier Ian Schrager;
and celebrated journalists like Morley Safer, Tom Brokaw, and Carl Bernstein.
These and other famous names had not come to get a preview of the steel-clad
building, even though it was then the tallest residential tower in the city and the
question of what its apartments would be like had been the subject of much
speculative talk around town. Neither were most of the guests friends of Bruce
Ratner. The celebrities—and about three hundred other somewhat less
recognizable people—were friends and acquaintances of a short, somewhat
stocky, gray-haired man with glasses, dressed in a black T-shirt and black suit
jacket, who spent much of his time standing near the windows on the north side
of the penthouse, which had a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline and the
towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. He had designed the building, and he was
arguably the most famous architect in the world.
Frank Gehry had turned eighty-two two and a half weeks earlier, and Bruce
Ratner decided that a birthday party for the architect would be the perfect way to
mark the tower’s completion. It would also encourage everyone to forget that
twenty-one months earlier Ratner had abruptly fired Gehry from another job,
even bigger than the apartment tower: designing the master plan and the
buildings for Atlantic Yards, a huge real estate project his company, Forest City
Ratner, was preparing to erect over railyards in downtown Brooklyn that was to