Frank Gehry's World
© Robert Brooks
Frank Gehry still sees himself as an outsider, just plugging away.
Like it or not, Frank Gehry is the world’s most famous architect. And he doesn’t really like it much. About to turn 82, Gehry has spent his career happily playing the role of scrappy outsider. But even if it’s all happening against his wishes, the Canadian-born Gehry is now unquestionably the éminence grise of American architecture, a household name the world over. He pals around with Brad Pitt, had Sally Kellerman serenade him and 500 guests at his 80th birthday party and played himself in an episode of The Simpsons. He’s designed an austerely modern line of jewelry for Tiffany, along with $1 million diamond brooches in the shape of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s floor plan.
“One day they’re going to discover I’m a fraud,” he jokes by phone from his L.A. office, a nondescript former warehouse near Marina del Rey. “A little insecurity is healthy. As soon as you get too fat and sassy…I’ve seen it happen to so many people.” Though exactly what, he doesn’t say. “Whatever this fame thing is, it’s only come in the last 15 years. And because it happened late in life, I don’t believe in it. It’s not real to me. It’s nice when people ask for my autograph, but I’m still Joe Schlepper,” says Gehry. “I can’t help it. That’s how I feel comfortable.”
People use the term “Bilbao Effect” to describe the kind of urban renewal Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum brought to that Basque city after it opened, in 1997. It could also apply to Gehry himself. It’s now close to gospel that the Guggenheim Bilbao is among the best, if not the best, building of the 20th century. Walking into it for the first time, Philip Johnson, kingmaker and dean of American architecture until his death, in 2005, anointed Gehry “the greatest architect we have today.” He later declared the museum “the greatest building of our time.” That sentiment was recently confirmed by Vanity Fair, which polled leading architects on the most important buildings of the last 30 years. Bilbao came out on top in a landslide.
Gehry, in typical fashion, brushes aside the adulation, admitting he didn’t much care for his masterpiece at first. “It usually takes me a couple of years to like my buildings,” he says. “But I’ve learned to enjoy the process. I get my kicks up front. When a building is done, it becomes the people’s, not mine.”
These days the projects come to Gehry, and he can pick and choose. While many clients are no doubt hoping for their own Bilbao Effect, Gehry’s newest projects are decidedly not in the mold of the Guggenheim. In many cases they’re closer to the modest, sometimes rough-and-tumble but dynamic buildings of his early days. Gehry recently flew to Biloxi, Mississippi, for the opening of the first phase of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, a project that was 18 months from completion when Hurricane Katrina destroyed it. Now mostly rebuilt, a handful of domestically scaled gallery pavilions devoted to the unorthodox proto-modern ceramics of Biloxi’s “Mad Potter” George Ohr and other Gulf Coast artists are set among a grove of historic oak trees. The buildings feature vernacular touches like clapboard siding and “shoofly” belvederes as well as more recognizable Gehry elements: curving staircases, jagged, metal-wrapped skylights and twisting, pod-like, stainless steel–clad forms.
In January, New World Symphony artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas, an old friend of Gehry’s, will christen a new campus that the two worked closely on together. The centerpiece is a multifaceted stucco-and-glass building that houses a 750-seat performance hall and rehearsal rooms, which, viewed from the soaring glass atrium, appear precariously piled atop each other, like children’s blocks. From the landscaped park outside, audiences can watch performances and other video programming on a huge exterior wall, part of an effort to ensure a casual cultural experience befitting Miami Beach. “It’s not about getting all dressed up to go to the Philharmonic. People can drift over with their Bellinis or whatever and sit in the park and watch,” suggests Gehry. “Artistically it’s exquisite and impeccable, but from the user standpoint it’s cozy and accessible.”
