Frank Gehry is taking breakfast in an impossibly pretty sunlit square in
Arles, Provence. I’m staring at a set of squiggles he has just drawn in my
notebook and wondering if I should ask him to sign them. He’d reached for a
pen, as architects in conversation do, and started sketching away. “I’m
doing these pop-up stores for Bono,” he explains. “They’re for his Product
Red company. I’m really excited by them. They’re like pieces of jigsaw.”
He starts drawing slowly, then accelerates until his hand is flying over the
paper. The shapes left on the smoking page could be dancing figures,
snowcapped mountains, blossoming flower buds, leaping salmon - you know how
it is with Gehry buildings. You see in them whatever you want to see.
I’m left with no real idea what Bono’s “pop-up” temporary stores - profits
from which will provide Aids-tackling drugs to Africa - are going to look
like. They seem to be designed to travel around like rock stage sets. I’m
wondering what the squiggles might fetch on eBay, if auctioned for the
cause, because Gehry is the most famous architect on earth, and has been
since he completed the titanium-clad Bilbao Guggenheim more than a decade
ago. This slightly roly-poly little silver-haired man is 80 next February,
and garners millions more mentions on the web than any of his rivals, living
or dead. Brad Pitt has worked with him. (“He’s interested in architecture -
he came by. He’s a sweetheart guy.”) He’s been on The Simpsons, the ultimate
barometer of fame - and keeps a picture of his yellow cartoon self stored on
his phone. And he has just built his own house in Hyde Park. Sort of.
It’s this year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the latest in the ambitious
annual series of commissions they like to hand out to “starchitects” who
haven’t yet built in England (though Gehry has done a rather good Maggie’s
cancer-support centre in Dundee). As usual, he’s come up with something
eye-rubbingly odd - great baulks of timber at crazy angles, set high in the
air and bristling with spiky steel, beneath which are slung big overlapping
panels of glass. This is without doubt the most overdesigned gazebo in
history, and it doesn’t try too hard to keep the rain and wind out, either.
I like it.
“Does it look like an ancient Roman catapult?” Gehry asks, leaning forward
with mock anxiety. “That’s where it came from. We’re storming the British
empire. I don’t know why that came to mind.” As for keeping theweather out
(summer storms traditionally greet the unveiling of the Serpentine
pavilions, which usually leak, sometimes spectacularly), Gehry has a
solution. “This one is meant to leak.
Everyone should bring umbrellas.” As usual with Gehry, however, it’s not as
simple as his storming-the-empire line might suggest. Those great angled
baulks of timber? Ah, he says, he’d used that idea first in a house he
designed for himself, but never built: “So I guess I built my house at the
Serpentine.”
Yet here we are in Arles, where he is designing a new artists’ district for
the philanthropist and arts dynamo Maja Hoffmann, and his models appear to
sport similar big chunks of timber. “Oh,” he laughs. “Don’t assume I’m going
to do that.”
This tells you a lot about how Gehry works. Everything is designed by him -
that is his company’s proud boast - yet he employs about 175 people. What do
they do? They play around with scraps of wood, plastic, card, paper. Gehry
is perversely proud of being computer-illiterate, remarkable given that he
runs a worldclass computer-design business, Gehry Technologies, which is
used by other leading architects such as Zaha Hadid. His assistants often
start projects off, working in what they think is the Gehry manner. Then he
moves on and alters everything, often on a Saturday. Slowly, a workable
design emerges from this trial-and-error process. And only when he is happy
do the mighty computers finally get to work, scanning the models, creating
templates from which the real buildings can be built. “I like to feel the
models in my hands,” he says.
And the models he makes are changing. They used to be all sinuous curves, in
part inspired by the fluid, muscular shapes of fish and duly covered in
scales of titanium or stainless steel or glass. Now he seems to have gone
all chunky, artfully arranging stacks of boxes. There was always a rough and
ready side to Gehry’s buildings, but now they are getting more consciously
primitive. Why?
“I look at this and I think - maybe I’m commenting on that other architecture
that’s coming out at the moment, that’s smooth and voluptuous,
computer-driven. I hate that computer-designed look.”
He warns, however, that this chunky phase may be short-lived. His design for
another Guggenheim - this time in Abu Dhabi, one of a string of
starchitect-designed cultural buildings for the emirate - reverts to
fluidity, with dramatic use of cone shapes.
Abu Dhabi represents the present culmination of the icon-building craze,
something Gehry is none too keen on. “It’s like a group grope,” he says.
“One building by me, one by Norman Foster, one by Zaha, one by Jean Nouvel,
one by Daniel Libeskind. It becomes a cabinet of horrors. That’s what
they’re doing in Abu Dhabi.”
It’s the jostling scrum he objects to, not the look-at-me architecture.
“Public buildings deserve to have a certain level of iconicity and
personality,” he says. “Historically, that’s what makes them define the
cities and communities they’re in.”
Besides, it depends where the plum site is - and in Abu Dhabi, it’s his. “Had
I been given Zaha’s or Nouvel’s sites there, I wouldn’t have accepted the
project,” he says. “I don’t know why they did. They gave me this point right
out on the edge, so I’m totally alone, and it’s fine. I’m doing
Mont-Saint-Michel.” Museum as romantic monastery island, out in the Gulf:
possibly only Gehry would think of that.
Even so, doesn’t he feel in any way responsible for the icon-building frenzy,
I persist? This riles him, and he shoots right back: “The only regret I have
is that literate journalists say that. The presumption is we’re illiterate,
and I don’t like that. I mean, I read books, I listen to music, I study a
lot of things. And it’s not just...plop.”
He knows where this is headed: criticism of funny-shapeism. And he’s right -
his buildings aren’t just plop. Love ’em or not, you have to concede that
they are impressively thought through. It’s lesser talents who do plop, and
that’s what I was getting at. But suddenly, on this sunny July morning in
Arles, coffee and croissants in front of us, Gehry is getting into a bit of
a strop. It takes a while for his good humour to return.
Especially when we consider the rocky ride he’s had in Britain. He’s managed
two buildings so far - this one temporary - plus plans for a housing scheme
and sports centre in Hove, East Sussex, that became so compromised that he
quit. Of the Battle of Hove, he says he feels let down.All he will add is:
“Something went on there that I don’t completely understand.” He designed
both the Maggie’s Centre in Dundee and the new Serpentine pavilion for free.
“So, in Britain, it’s zero for zero in terms of my financial rewards. I’m
not complaining.”
In his 80th year, Gehry - California-based, but Canadian by birth - still has
a way to go to match the productive longevity of the American Frank Lloyd
Wright, who nearly made it to 90. Or Oscar Niemeyer, co-designer of
Brasilia, who is still busy at 100. He admits he can’t imagine doing
anything else but design, and that insecurity drives him as much as
anything. “When Bilbao finished, 10 years ago, nobody asked me to do another
museum, until now. When I finished the Disney Concert Hall, five years ago,
nobody asked me to do another concert hall. It’s not important, it’s only
curious. My friend Peter Sellars [the theatre director] says, ‘They didn’t
ask Wagner to write another Ring cycle.’ But I don’t think that’s the
reason.”
What is? “When people choose an architect, they also choose a style. If they
pickme, they know they’re not going to get that. So they don’t take the
chance. They think I don’t listen. They think I just do this–”
he crumples up a piece of paper and throws it down, just like his Simpsons
alter ego. “If someone took the time to ask my clients, they’d find out it’s
quite the opposite.”
Is he ever overawed by his own work? Was it hard to get past the triumph of
Bilbao? “If I get self-conscious, I’m dead,” he replies. “I just assume I’ll
continue to push myself. I’m insecure. I never expect the building I’m doing
to be great. So I try - and it is what it is. I’ve been lucky.”
We’ve sat unnoticed in the square, but now it’s time for his next press
conference. He strolls off in the sun to meet the great and good of the
Provençal arts scene. Rain-sodden London awaits. I open my notebook and find
his sketches there. But who’s going to believe me? They’re unsigned.
The Serpentine Pavilion, W2, is open to the public from July 20; www.serpentinegallery.org
Gehry’s greats
1 Bilbao Guggenheim (1997) Made him a global superstar. The first time
technology could deliver his vision.
2 Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles (2004) A shining monument to
music.
3 ‘Fred and Ginger’ office building, Prague (1995) Two
figures in a clinch. Symbolised the Eastern bloc opening up.
4 Experience Music Project, Seattle (2000) Allegedly based on a smashed
guitar.
5 Maggie’s Centre, Dundee (2003) Small, but lovingly crafted.
Speaking as one who lives and works in Seattle, I must say that listing the Experience Music Project is an absurd joke. It evokes laughs, and odd expressions. Very few in Seattle ever think or talk about it at all, and we NEVER refer to it when giving directions. It was a waste of Mr. Allen's Money.
Cid, Seattle, USA
Since when did great architecture have anything to do with efficiency?
aztec69, Oceanside,CA, USA
The Bibao Guggenheim is stunningly beautiful from the ouside and from within. Gehry is an artist as well as an architect.
philip , Málaga,
I'm a big fan of Gehry's work, but Experience Music Project, Seattle is one of his worst!
Tom, Chicago, USA
Don't let this guy loose in your town. He produces hideous and inefficient buildings. The awful EMP in Seattle is referred to as the 747 crash. Worse designs than those from Rem Koolhaus. Seattle has one of those as well, the Seattle Library main building, a very inefficient monstrosity.
Del, Seattle, USA