DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m David Bianculli. Today, we’re going to commemorate Frank Gehry, who was one of the most famous and influential architects in the world. He died last week at the age of 96. Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which architect Philip Johnson described as the most important building of our time. He also designed the Disney Concert Hall in LA and Seattle’s Experience Music Project, a music museum inspired by Jimmy Hendrix. Gehry’s work has been described as looking more like sculptures than buildings. When Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” profiled him in 2002, Pelley said, quote, “Gehry is to architecture what Einstein was to physics, what Picasso was to painting, what Jordan is to basketball,” unquote. We’re going to listen back to his 2004 interview with Terry Gross. At the time, his latest project was the music pavilion at Chicago’s new 24 1/2 acre Millennium Park.
Like his Guggenheim Museum, the exterior of this Music Pavilion has curving, billowing, floating shapes – shapes that are actually made of heavy, hard steel. Terry asked how him he started working with those steel forms.
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FRANK GEHRY: I came into architecture at the height of modernism. After the war, decoration was a sin. Purity, functionalism, all of that stuff. And…
TERRY GROSS: So it was an era of purity and functionalism, a lot of glass and steel high-rises.
GEHRY: Right. And it became very cold and inhuman and lifeless. Probably some people yearned for bringing decoration back, and they tried it for a while. I went a different route. I thought it was possible within the aesthetics of the day to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building. And I got interested in movement – the sense of movement, having a humanistic effect on an inert building. And there are examples in history of that. And I’ve alluded – I’ve talked about it before – the Shiva dancing figures from India, the – a multiarmed dancer in bronze. And the best ones, when you look at them and turn away and look back, you’re sure they moved. I was fascinated with that sense of movement. And since our culture, when I started making my work, was a moving environment – plains, trains, cars, whatever – I talked about it and I thought about it, but I wasn’t clear about it until I started experimenting, quite accidentally, with fish forms.
GROSS: Let me ask you about fish. I mean, fish, as we all know, have – they have spines, but they’re so flexible. Ad they can, you know, bend and curve. What was the parallel you saw between fish and what you wanted to do in your architecture?
GEHRY: I was interested in movement. And I loved the drawings of Hiroshige and Japanese woodcuts of carp. And I love the quality of them, and I always thought they were very architectural. I also saw a fish as being on Earth 300 million years before man. And when my brethren started to regurgitate the past in the post-modern movement, as it was called, the past they were regurgitating was anthropomorphic. And I said, well, if you’re going to go back, you might as well go back 300 million years before man to fish. And, you know, it was a sort of a sarcastic remark and kind of – I didn’t even realize what I was talking about when I said it.
And I started drawing – whenever I saw one of those post-modern buildings, I would angrily sketch in my book pictures of fish. And I made a 35-foot wooden fish for the fashion house in Italy for an exhibit. And the 35-foot wooden fish was very kitsch and very embarrassing-looking object, but you stood beside it, it had the same character that the Shiva dancing figure – you turned away and looked, and you thought it moved. And so, quite accidentally, I found myself into a language that I was really looking to find. And like everything else, it happened by accident.
GROSS: So you were looking to find a way of making something very stable.
GEHRY: That expressed movement.
GROSS: That expressed movement. And you found it through the form of the fish. And how does that connect to the forms that you’ve used in recent architecture?
GEHRY: Well, I then made shapes – I started to say, what could I do to this wooden fish that would make it less embarrassing as a piece of kitsch? And I cut off the tail, and I cut off the head, and I cut off the fins. And I started to abstract it. And I made a shape, an abstracted – let’s call it a filet of fish…
(LAUGHTER)
GEHRY: …That I used in a show, an exhibit, I did at the Walker Art Museum. And it still had this – that quality of movement when you looked back and looked around. And I made that out of a wooden frame and covered it with metal. And so that was the beginning of the language, and I took that language into the buildings.
GROSS: But, you know, in some of your buildings, including the new Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago and the Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum, those kinds of curving shapes, they’re not made out of wood. I mean, they’re made out of steel or – I mean, titanium. And how did you realize that that would be – how did you start working with titanium as a medium for something that would be really firm and stable, strong but also moldable and – not moldable. I guess it’s more – I don’t know. Are you molding it. Or are you…
GEHRY: (Laughs) Yeah.
GROSS: How are you getting the shape?
GEHRY: OK, here’s how you do it. I do maybe 50 models. They look – sometimes they look like crumpled paper, so people think I crumple up paper and that’s how they get there. And I do – I analyze the shapes as though they’re structures with the computer to determine whether I’m within the budgetary constraints. And over time, I slowly evolve these shapes and refine them. And then you’ve got to decide what skin to put on it, the exterior surface. A long time ago – you know, buildings are a wall and a roof, right?
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
GEHRY: And usually, the wall is a different material than the roof. And I wanted – a long time ago, tried to make the buildings into one shape. I thought if I could make it one piece, that I would have a lot of flexibility. So I – metal roofing is tradition for centuries. And there’s a tradition, and there’s a detailing tradition and there’s a performance tradition, so that you can rely on it not to leak, not to get you in trouble if you follow the rules of it. I started making the whole building. I started to take the roofing material down and make the walls part of the roofing material. So it all was one material. And the choices then were copper, and then you have stainless steel, and you’re pretty much limited to a palette like that.
Now copper, when you put it on a building, turns very dark for about 10 years, and it’s kind of morose. So it – unless you pregreen it – and when you pregreen it, it looks kind of phony to me, so I reject that. And I started using stainless steel. And when you go to Bilbao and you use stainless steel – Bilbao’s a city that has a lot of rain and a lot of gray skies, and stainless steel and gray skies goes dead. You’ll see that. The stainless steel in Millennium Park will go quiet when it’s cloudy. it won’t shine. And…
GROSS: ‘Cause it’s a reflective, so it can reflect the sky…
GEHRY: Yeah, reflects the sky. If the sky’s gray, it reflects the gray sky.
GROSS: Right.
GEHRY: And it goes gray. In Bilbao that would have been difficult. And I found titanium by accident. that in a gray sky, it turns golden…
GROSS: Oh.
GEHRY: …And shines. And so I used it in Bilbao. It’s very expensive. The reason I didn’t use it here, it would have increased the budget by a lot of money. And since these shapes were not – it wasn’t one whole building, they were mostly vertical, I think they’ll be OK.
GROSS: I want to read you a list of descriptions of the Guggenheim Museum that you built in Bilbao, Spain, as written by journalists – a pile of improbably huge fish, fractured tin-foil flowers, a fantastic dream ship, all sails, full sweeping upstream, Marilyn Monroe’s wind-assisted skirts, an exploded artichoke, heart vast hulls of a ship that used to loom over a shipbuilding town, a prehistoric beast advancing with leg and foot toward the water, an explosion in a sardine factory, a monstrous flower, a fairy-tale castle. What do you think?
(LAUGHTER)
GEHRY: Yeah, it’s fine. You know, I try to describe it but not in those kind of terms, no.
BIANCULLI: Architect Frank Gehry speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to Terry’s 2004 conversation with Frank Gehry. The globally famous and influential architect died last week at age 96.
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GROSS: You were born in Toronto.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: And for four years you move with your family to a small mining town in Canada called Timmins.
GEHRY: Timmins, Ontario.
GROSS: Yeah, where your father worked for the distributor of slot machines and pinball machines.
GEHRY: Yup.
GROSS: And, boy, old pinball machines were so great. I mean, they were so – they were kind of like billboards or neon signs or, like, things that would light up and all kinds of like…
GEHRY: Right.
GROSS: …Pictures and stuff. Did you love the design of those pinball machines?
GEHRY: They were always in the basement somewhere in my house, and I used to play with them and help him fix them and stuff like that. Yeah. I guess so. You know, when you go through a childhood like that – and it was a tough one because they were tough times for the family – and you tend to want to cut that part of your life off.
GROSS: So you don’t think about it very much.
GEHRY: Forget about it.
GROSS: Right.
GEHRY: But he was involved with the carnival business, in a way, and used to bring those kind of people home. And I met – as a kid, I met a lot of them. And there was a blind boxer, Black guy, that used to baby sit me, I remember. The good thing about it all…
GROSS: Oh, wow.
GEHRY: …was that – the mix of people that I was exposed to…
GROSS: Yeah.
GEHRY: …As a kid, which has helped me in life. I mean…
GROSS: Well, one thing I think you have not forgotten about from that period, you’ve said that you were exposed to a lot of antisemitism in this small mining town.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: And did that contribute to the fact that you changed your name when you became an architect from Goldberg to Gehry?
GEHRY: Well, it was a factor and in allowing myself to be convinced by my ex-wife that it was the most important thing to do, I guess. I didn’t like the idea of changing it.
GROSS: Why was it so important to her?
GEHRY: We were going to have our first child, and there had been a lot of antisemitism I experienced, she experienced. And she said she didn’t want to bring a kid into the world to go through that. The name at that time was a caricature. There was a radio program called “The Goldbergs”…
GROSS: Right.
GEHRY: …That sort of…
GROSS: Right.
GEHRY: …Character – caricatured. And so – and I took a lot of heat for it. And, you know, I didn’t want to do it. My father hated me for letting her do it. My mother went along with it. And after she did it, I was so embarrassed. Every time I met somebody, I told them.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: But you wouldn’t go back to Goldberg now. Too late, right?
GEHRY: Well, I’m married to a Panamanian girl, Berta, who threatens to go back to it. She’d like to be Berta Goldberg, she says. But I doubt if we’ll do it.
GROSS: Well, you’ve made the Gehry name too famous (laughter).
GEHRY: I think my kids – my son Sam flirts with it ’cause he wants to be an architect. So he may just want to get rid of the Gehry name for a while.
GROSS: Now, your first building that really got a lot of attention and that ended up being pretty controversial was your own home. You had moved into a small, two-story cottage? Is that a fair word for it? And you kind of designed a new home around it. And if you look at it, like, in a photograph, you have this, like, two-story building, and then around that you have – there’s sheet metal and plywood…
GEHRY: Corrugated metal.
GROSS: Corrugated metal. And then on the second story there’s, like, chain-link fencing around it.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: And it almost looks more like an assemblage – you know, like an assemblage sculpture than architecture because there’s so many – it’s so mixed -media.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: And, like, the textures all seem to be kind of conflicting. And you’re not really sure, what is the purpose of the chain-link fence on the second floor. Is there a purpose for it (laughter)? Is it just there as, like, another material to contrast with the other material?
GEHRY: Well, there was a purpose when I did it.
GROSS: What was the purpose?
GEHRY: The kid was 2 years old, and his room had a door to the outside to the terrace. And the first day I was there, he started climbing down the wall (laughter). And so we put up the chain-link fence with the idea that it would be safe. It’d be like a safety place for him to play on the upstairs, outdoors of his room. And then once I started – committed myself to doing that, I then started to do things with the way it looked, I guess, and proportioned it. But it didn’t work…
GROSS: Yeah. And with some pretty odd angles, right?
GEHRY: Yeah, yeah. Well, I started doing that.
GROSS: Yeah.
GEHRY: But I had played with it because chain-link is the most despised material ever. People hate it, and yet they use it so prevalently all over the world. And I was trying to figure out, how could it be so despised and yet so used and so much denial about it? That people use it, and then they say, Well, no, no, that’s a tennis court But it’s a damned chain-link fence. So I decided to study – I like that idea of things that people deny exist and tried to see if I could figure out a way to make it better or usable. Since they were going to use it anyway, maybe I could help them make it look prettier.
And I started to explore the qualities of it that I thought were – you know, as a material, it works like a scrim. If you look at it straight-on, you look through it, if you look at it on the angle, it closes up like a scrim does. And there are different weights of it and different coatings on it, and so I did a whole lot of research on it. By the time I got to the house, I was playing with it. I had the beginning of a language with it.
GROSS: Do you still live in that house?
GEHRY: Yes.
GROSS: Still have the chain-link fence on the second floor?
GEHRY: Yes.
GROSS: Even though there’s no baby?
GEHRY: And the kid climbed out – he climbed over the chain-link. It didn’t work. He climbed over it.
GROSS: When he got a little older.
GEHRY: No, right away.
GROSS: Really?
GEHRY: He was up, over it and out.
GROSS: That’s some athletic baby you had there.
GEHRY: Yeah (laughter). He was something.
GROSS: So do you still – what are your gut feelings now about chain-link?
GEHRY: Well, I don’t use it very much, even though I’ve figured out how to use it. People sometimes ask me to use it, and I refuse. But I’ve done some things with it. I’m not against it. It’s just not – I haven’t been too interested in it. We are designing a new house, though. I am…
GROSS: Oh, you’re designing a new house for yourself?
GEHRY: Yeah, from scratch in…
GROSS: Where?
GEHRY: …Venice, California. And I’m working on it now. So…
GROSS: What’s the most important thing you want that you don’t have now?
GEHRY: A garden. I bought a piece of land that’ll give me a garden.
GROSS: That’s nice. And will there be a kind of architectural design around the garden or…
GEHRY: Yeah. I’m doing a – it’s a half-acre lot, and so I’m building several pavilions.
GROSS: Oh.
GEHRY: More like the Philip Johnson house in New Canaan, where there’s a living room, and then there’s a separate room – a building for bedrooms and stuff.
GROSS: So it’ll be like two separate houses.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: Why do you want that?
GEHRY: I’d like to live in the garden…
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: OK.
GEHRY: …Or outdoors. You can do that in LA quite easily.
GROSS: Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.
GEHRY: Yeah.
GROSS: Well, thank you so much. Congratulations on the completion of the Pritzker Pavilion. And thank you so much for talking with us.
GEHRY: Thank you very much.
BIANCULLI: Frank Gehry speaking to Terry Gross in 2004. The world-famous architect died last week. He was 96 years old. After a break, we remember Raul Malo, lead singer of the Mavericks, who died this week at age 60. And Justin Chang reviews the newest movie in the “Knives Out” franchise, “Wake Up Dead Man.” I’m David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
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