Sketches of Gehry

Sketches of Gehry

Saw a documentary on architect Frank Gehry, directed by Sydney Pollack. It was interesting in that it showed the creative process at work. Gehry started with pen and paper and a lot of squiggles to come up with an idea. He then moved to create a doll house like model, which was done with crumpled paper, shiny silver paper and scotch tape. He seems interested in how light falls on buildings, and centers his buildings on that theme, the angle of light on a metal structure.

The documentary was made in a casual conversational style, both director and actor were known to each other, and this made it laid back but honest.

Gehry was born in Toronto, as Frank Goldberg. His wife fearing that Anti-Semitism was holding his career back, convinced him to change his last name to Gehry. He worked before becoming an architect as a truck driver and an airplane washer. He was told "this isn't for you" by an architecture professor. Since then he changed the look of an essentially conservative field with such buildings as Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park in Chicago, and the building he's probably best known for, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. His designs dot the landscapes of California, Paris, Germany, Toronto, Israel and Panama.

Here are some quotes from Gehry, that I found significant. The sequence starts with him being scared, to being uncertain and then creating something with knowlege and understanding.

"I'm always scared that I'm not going to know what to do," he confides to close friend and director Sydney Pollack.

"I told him `I do my best work when I don't know anything about it," Gehry laughed, then quickly added that "lack of knowledge going into a project isn't a bad thing if you learn along the way."

"You worry more about things in a deeper sense (if you don't know), Gehry said. And there's models out there and other stuff you can look at as you try to understand what people did wrong and people did right."

The film is a detailed sketch of the architect. And it is composed with interviewing people like actor Dennis Hopper (who lives in a Gehry house), to critic Hal Foster (who heads Princeton University's architecture department), and to Gehry's 97-year-old psychoanalyst. Who remarks that lots of wanna be Frank Gehry’s have come to him but he has turned them away, saying I didnt make him successful he had that creative spark inside him.