This one is for you...thought you might enjoy it! LOL
The Architect
A relatively dark conversation with Frank Gehry.
BY AKHIL SHARMA
Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:01 a.m.
LOS ANGELES--Frank Gehry is 77, white haired, paunchy, and when we talked one afternoon in late autumn the topics of age and death never seemed far off. Mr. Gehry is, of course, one of the world's great architects, creator of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and enough of an icon to have been among the personalities featured in Apple's "Think Different" campaign.
Describing what it takes for him to accept a commission, Mr. Gehry says, "The determining factor is: Can I get it done while I am still alive?" Explaining why he doesn't build houses any more, Mr. Gehry says, "They involve a lot of personal hand holding. I guess at my age I don't have the patience."
Probably more than most architects, one sees Mr. Gehry's buildings--buildings that have been described as resembling ruffling sails or looking like they are melting--and has a sense that there is a single personality behind them.
"I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do," Mr. Gehry says. "Architects have to become parental. They have to learn to be parental." By this he means that an architect has to listen to his client but also remain firm about what the architect knows best, the aesthetics of a building. This, Mr. Gehry says, is what makes an architect relevant in the process that leads to a completed building. "I think a lot of my colleagues lose it, lose that relevance in the spirit of serving their client, so that no matter what, they are serving the client. Even if the building they produce, that they think serves the client, doesn't really serve the client because it's not very good."
Mr. Gehry and I meet in his office in Los Angeles. The office is in a warehouse; the office itself is a rectangular box in the middle of a hangar-like space that is filled with rows of cubicles. The interview takes a little over an hour and Mr. Gehry, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, drinks one cup of coffee and then asks for a second. We sit at a long rectangular conference table and the only time he requests something be off the record is when he criticizes a museum that he believes is behaving badly towards an architect he admires. About his own clients and concerns he is surprisingly candid.
The idea of an architect having a brand that he can use on a client's behalf is new, he says. "Probably if we were smart about it, we would figure out how to get paid for that service. It certainly is an additional service."
Clients are pushy and ask for things that have nothing to do with architecture. Most recently and most directly in his own experience, Mr. Gehry was asked to put his name on a wine that a client produces. "If I end up selling thousands of cases of wine by just having my name on it, I don't know how I would feel about it. I didn't intend to do that."
Clients seem to like to exaggerate how much something costs; this seems to add drama and glamour to their projects. There are stories, Mr. Gehry says, that when he first began working on the Walt Disney Concert Hall the budget was $110 million and that when the building was finally completed the construction costs reached $275 million. The truth, he says, is that the $110 million was the construction budget in 1989 and when ground was finally broken in 2000, the budget was $210 million. The building was completed for $215 million. "The people that paid for it know the story is not true but they don't care to clarify it."
Because Mr. Gehry's buildings are as much feats of engineering as they are of architecture, it is strange to walk into his office and notice that there are no computers. Mr. Gehry's office is surprisingly spartan. There is a desk and there is a conference table and on one wall are photographs of friends. Sitting at his conference table and speaking of technology, Mr. Gehry volunteers, "I don't know how to turn on the DVD. I barely can use the technology in my car. It's a wonder I don't get into an accident."
The actual physics and engineering of Mr. Gehry's buildings are managed by teams of employees. Some 150 people work for him, and when Mr. Gehry talks about what exactly he does that leads to a building, it seems that he is almost more a manager of personalities and processes than he is someone who sits down with pencil and paper. "The building process is complicated. You have an idea, an image, a dream. You start to fantasize. You've got to get that feeling through thousands of hands to build a thing. Meetings, bureaucracy, accounting."
Considering that Mr. Gehry's buildings appear almost completely indifferent to conventions, I expected Mr. Gehry to be something of an egomaniac. Instead he turned out to be surprisingly modest. Describing a hotel in Spain that he just completed, Mr. Gehry said, "the rooms are comfortable," and when talking about the Guggenheim in Bilbao, he said that he was relieved that the people of the city liked it. The only time Mr. Gehry showed strong pride was when he was discussing being a good employer.
Most architects of Mr. Gehry's stature can staff the lower rungs of their office with volunteers and interns. "I am very proud," he says and sits up at the conference table. "Everybody gets paid. Everybody here is paid. There's no freebie interns. I've never done that. A lot of my colleagues do that, but that offends me so I've never done that." Like only one or two other topics in our conversation, this issue of how he cares for the people who work for him is something that seems to get him excited. "I am very proud," he says, again referring to his employees, "that they always get cost of living index raises and bonuses and more."
Another aspect of Mr. Gehry's old-fashioned virtue is his concern for what will happen to his employees once he dies. When I ask him if his age adds greater urgency to picking projects and finishing projects, Mr. Gehry says, "No. I am not that megalomaniac. No, I think the day will come and . . ."
Then apropos of very little in particular, he says, "What I am interested in is, since it's 150 people here and a lot of people's lives and futures depend on it, how do you create a succession?" Again Mr. Gehry sounds passionate. "There's a way to leave it and pull the plug and I am fine and they"--referring to his employees--"lose." As part of managing for his own death, Mr. Gehry has been trying to build the public personae of the people who work for him, trying to direct some of the limelight that seems always oriented towards him in their direction. In the catalogs and exhibits devoted to his work, he makes sure to mention the people who worked with him on his various projects.
As the interview wound down and the theme of age began to seem a more and more dominant part of our conversation, Mr. Gehry started to talk about some of the problems of getting older. Because he cannot program and has to work through others in order to engineer a building, he said that he is in some ways obsolete. Referring to these computer skills, he asked, "If I knew all that, could I be a better architect?"
The thoughts of death and obsolescence seemed to bother him and make him perhaps slightly melancholy for, again unprompted, he said, "You know I find solace, like a lot of people do, in Bach and Beethoven. I go backwards and just the things I rail against in architecture people doing, I do in music or literature."
Asked how he handled these limits he saw for himself, he said, "I keep going. Keeping going is important to me and not to get sidetracked and to get caught up in self-pity."
In this relatively dark conversation, one story that Mr. Gehry told me and which made him chuckle was that of a friend who is a chiropractor and who asked him to help her lay out her office. "I love doing that kind of stuff," Mr. Gehry said. The friend came over and brought her floor plans and Mr. Gehry spent several hours noodling over them. "I've always had the fantasy of having a little kiosk in the mall where I could do that. Where people would line up and you would charge them 25 bucks and you would look at their plans. I love doing that kind of stuff. They think you are a genius when you move one little wall and get an efficiency and nobody had thought of that before. Small pleasures."
Mr. Sharma is the author of the novel "An Obedient Father" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
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