Frank Gehry, 25 years after the Guggenheim: "From the beginning I felt that the Basques respected me"

Architect Frank Gehry poses exclusively for ICON in his Los Angeles studio.Chantal Anderson

Frank Gehry is 93 years old but he leads a life of... 63?

"I still swim and work full time," says the architect who built the Guggenheim in Bilbao a quarter of a century ago and, with that undulating skin of titanium scales, forever changed the idea of ​​what can be a museum.

And even what can be a facade.

Gehry speaks from his studio in Los Angeles, where he goes daily to take care of "four or five projects."

A residential complex that has just opened in London, for example, or the new auditorium of the Coburn School, which will open a stone's throw from another of its auditoriums: Disney Hall, the imposing silver structure —depending on how you look at it, like a fish splashing the city—which was inaugurated five years after the Guggenheim.

Born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, Gehry immigrated with his parents and sister to California as a teenager.

Almost a century later, the endless Los Angeles map has ended up dotted with buildings of disconcerting beauty signed by him: sculptural and abstract silhouettes that do not resemble anything, and that this short man decided to project without hesitation when, one night in 1980, Upon seeing the eccentric home that had been built in Santa Monica, the boss of the mall developer he used to work with said, “Frank, why are you wasting your time dealing with commercial builders?

Why don't you dedicate yourself to doing what you know how to do?

Image of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the auditorium that he designed in parallel to the Guggenheim and opened in 2003.Chantal Anderson

He arrived in Los Angeles from Canada and found blinding heat and light.

How were those days?

She was 17 years old.

We were not going through a good economic time, so we lived a bit precariously.

But we were optimistic.

We all got jobs: I drove a truck and my father did, and my mother worked in a department store candy store.

Little by little we managed to establish ourselves.

At first I did not want to be an architect.

He would drive the truck at night and then go to pottery class, and there the teacher, Glenn Lucas, who was a wonderful man, told me that he should give architecture a try.

That there was something in me.

He signed me up for night classes at the University of South California, I did very well, and I was admitted to the second year.

It was an achievement for someone like me.

I could'nt believe it.

He met many of the greats of Californian architecture of the fifties: Rudolf Schindler,

Schindler and I were friends.

And I knew Neutra, but I didn't get along very well with him.

He was quite arrogant [laughs], although I love his family very much.

His wife was a cellist and she used to go to her house when she played.

But he did not

with that architecture.

I was more integrated into the art scene.

People like Ed Moses or Ed Ruscha.

We are still friends.

I mean those who are still alive.

The house that Frank Gehry built in Los Angeles.Chantal Anderson

At the end of the fifties, at the beginning of his career, Gehry had realized that the sleeves of half-built houses that multiplied thanks to the real estate euphoria of Los Angeles were more aesthetic as soon as they were finished.

“There was something special about those structures before they were covered in filigree wood,” he tells critic Paul Goldberger in his biography.

His interest in the world of art fueled that taste for the unfinished and for common materials.

He befriended Bob Rauschenberg, who used to apply everyday objects on his canvases.

At the same time, John Chamberlain was sculpting expressive masses of sheet metal, when they weren't bits of bodywork.

Gehry was interested in art that he experimented with formats and materials: he tried to collaborate with Robert Smithson, pioneer of the

and author of

—a spiral jetty built in the Great Salt Lake—, but he died in a plane crash.

Later with Gordon Matta-Clark, famous for his radical cut or pierced buildings, but the artist also died before his time.

His work did come to fruition, at the beginning of the eighties, with the sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen:

, a giant Swiss army knife shown at the Venice Biennale in 1985, or the Chiat/Day building, whose binoculars Three-story buildings have been one of Los Angeles' attractions since it opened in 1991.

A material can create emotion.

This is never talked about in architecture

In the eighties, Gehry reached new conclusions about the shape of things, and this, again, had nothing to do with the architecture of his contemporaries.

“I met Peter Eisenman.

He was so funny.

And Michael Graves, and Richard Meier and all those people.

But mine didn't have much to do with it.

I didn't design pristine white buildings.

And I wasn't interested in the postmodern either.

One day, during a conference attended by all of them, when it was my turn, I questioned them: “For God's sake, can't you try to make architecture that doesn't look to the past?” I told them.

Philip Johnson had just built the AT&T building [a skyscraper with a Chippendale pompadour considered the masterpiece of postmodern architecture] and everyone was working with historical references.

My proposal was that, if the world was movement and change,

Shouldn't we be inspired by what was really happening?

In the end, frustrated, I told them: “If you have to look back, go back 300 million years and look at the fish.

The fish in the ponds

are beautiful, architectural”.

A corner of Frank Gehry's studio, full of plans and models with which he finishes deciding the shape of his buildings.Chantal Anderson

And what did they answer?

I don't remember, but I started drawing fish and then making them.

Was the first one at the port of Barcelona?

No. Earlier I was asked for a sculpture of a fish for a fashion show at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

It was my first time so I commissioned it from Cinecittà: a ten-meter wooden fish.

I didn't go to the show, so I didn't see it finished.

In fact, I preferred to forget it because I had seen photos and I was embarrassed, it was super

... With the bad luck, or good luck, that in Turin they inaugurated a new museum and dedicated two rooms to my work.

And one was for the fish.

When I finally saw it, sure enough, it was a ten meter long fucking

monster .

But if you stared at it, it gave a sensation of movement.

It was amazing.

And wasn't that what you had always wanted, to generate movement with materials?

He often mentions the idea of ​​chaos when he talks about the tension between the different shapes and forces that come together in his buildings.

I am not interested in chaos.

Well, I'm not interested in creating it [laughs].

And reflect it?

I was just trying to find an architectural language that would make sense in our times.

Researching in the aeronautical industry, I discovered CATIA, a French

.

We started working with him and it turned out perfect.

Thanks to this we were able to build the fish in Barcelona, ​​then Bilbao, and we began to make buildings with curves.

Is there a way that I haven't been able to build?

You can do anything!

[Laughs] I love the sense of movement that those buildings have.

Possibly the Disney Hall was too much for the public when it was opened, but now, with hindsight, it seems even reasonable.

Over time everything becomes acceptable, right?

Yes Yes.

Chiat/Day Building or 'Binoculars' (1991), in Venice Beach, designed with sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen.

Today it houses Google offices.Chantal Anderson

At the time it was incredible that Bilbao opened on time and on budget.

Yes. My fee was ten million dollars, ten percent of the budget.

We built it very efficiently thanks to CATIA, but it would not have been possible without the collaborative spirit of the Basques.

Now they are good friends.

With Bilbao there is a special relationship.

It was a very important building for them and from the beginning I felt that they respected me, that they treated me like a human being.

Basques are tough.

Solids.

Without foolishnesses.

They mean what they say and say what they think.

And they are faithful to their decisions.

I realized that with them it was not even necessary to sign a contract.

We had one with Guggenheim, but it wasn't necessary.

There was mutual respect.

We also learned a lot from the experience.

I would love to hear it!

I think we were not used to marveling at an example of contemporary architecture in our own country.

It was usual to marvel at a Gothic cathedral.

I understand.

There were also the usual negative consequences: museums as a tourist magnet rather than as an artistic proposal, the proliferation of show architecture... But the Guggenheim forced us to ask ourselves what a museum is, what we want its role to be, and what is a monument.

It is a building that condenses most of the debates on architecture of the last two decades.

Yes, it can be.

What do you think?

I love that a single building facilitated that economic return that the city sorely needed.

Having designed it, and having contributed to its existence, makes me feel very proud.

I guess the phenomenon has been repeated in other places, I don't know.

We tried to make the public feel something like Walt Disney Concert Hall, but American cities take us architects much less seriously [laughs].

Canadian architect Frank Gehry.Chantal Anderson

Now the new LACMA [Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art], by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, has been controversial, cutting the exhibition space from the existing scheme.

Have you seen it?

Yes, but I have stayed away.

It seems a bit mystical [laughs], and I don't know if I get along very well with that kind of mysticism.

Mystics seem to have alternative values.

But if it works, it works.

We'll see when it's finished.

But is it very different from when you have pushed for a project to go your way?

I am fortunate that the buildings I have made have had a positive impact wherever they have been built.

I'm just saying that I don't harbor that mystical feeling, I don't think it's causing divine euphoria in the firmament, or something like that.

Unexpectedly, Gehry defines himself as a "realist".

"I want to provoke emotions with inert materials," she explains.

He discovered it during a trip to the Greek site of Delphi with his friend, the painter Ed Moses.

The architect “went crazy” when he saw

, a bronze from the 5th century BC that represents a slender male figure dressed in a long tunic (in whose delicate folds another genius, Mariano Fortuny, was already inspired for the famous pleating of his Delphi dress).

“I realized that such beauty had been created by the hands of an anonymous artist and I burst into tears.

And I wondered if I could do something similar, "explains Gehry.

“Because a material can cause emotion.

It is never talked about in architecture and that is why I was disgusted by the appearance of postmodernism: it consisted of copying, it did not take responsibility for your place and your time, which is what the

represents.

That is my illusion, and my priority when I work”.

I realized that with the Basques it was not even necessary to sign a contract.

There was mutual respect

Gehry's virtuosity with architectural form was revealed to the world thanks to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, a project that Philip Johnson, the controversial patriarch of American architecture, described as "the best building of our time", and which made its author a atypical star: he even got to appear on

.

"It's as if David Foster Wallace sold more books than John Grisham!" wrote Paul Goldberger, critic for

.

The architect friend of the artists, the misfit at school, the one who insisted on arguing with the millionaires who commissioned him a house, ended up starring in the architectural revolution of the turn of the century: when the Getty Center in Los Angeles was inaugurated in 1997, designed by Richard Meier, that enormous white building was already born a dinosaur.

(Subsequently, in the debate over whether to think more about content before planning a new museum, it was again Johnson who summed up the new-age sentiment: “When a building is as good as that, screw the building! art!").

A quarter of a century later, Gehry continues to sign projects of monumental beauty such as Luma Arles, a

culture that shimmers like a trembling mountain in the southern French sun.

It was a computer program that freed Gehry's imagination, but it is a pleasure to discover it also in his less blinding projects, such as Easy Edges, the sinuous cardboard furniture he created in the late sixties, or the Vitra Museum, with its baroque volumes and messy, opened the same 1989 that won the Pritzker Prize.

Or the home she built for her family in 1978 in a middle-class neighborhood in Santa Monica.

The architect bought a traditional wooden house and expanded it, giving it unusual shapes and textures, with railings, corrugated iron, glass and asphalt.

Gehry imagined it inhabited by ghosts.

"But cubist ghosts!"

The entrance to Disney Hall, covered in steel plates.Chantal Anderson

Pure Hollywood: a mockup of movie posters and movie seats in Gehry's studio. Chantal Anderson

You will be used to people reacting passionately to your work: when you renovated your house, some neighbors threw stones at you.

[Laughs] I think that was just the fault of some drunk kids, he had nothing to do with the house.

But the neighbors came and complained, asking me how I had dared to do that to the neighborhood.

The one across the street crossed to tell me that our house was horrible, and I replied: “Yours is the one across the street, right?

Well look, you have a metal fence around the garden.

You will see that I have used it here.

And I see an old trailer.

Here is also sheet metal.

If you consider the total aesthetic of your house, it turns out that you are experimenting with the same materials as the artists of today.

You just don't realize it!"

And what did he reply?

That his was

.

Anyway.

The house is still there, although now my friends from the music world use it when they come to town.

I think we'll end up donating it to some foundation.

We are still in Santa Monica.

We have been here for 60 years, it is our city, but now we live in a wooden house that my son designed.

You can see it, he was in

.

What is a typical day like for you?

I have breakfast with my wife and then I come to the office.

A good part of the team has been with me for more than 30 years.

I think we enjoyed.

Frank Gehry in his study, leaning on his Cross Check chair (edited by Knoll).Chantal Anderson

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