In 1943, magnate Howard Hughes built a massive hangar for the Spruce Goose, the giant wooden plane that took off just once three years later. For this project, the businessman chose Playa Vista, a community west of Los Angeles near the Pacific Ocean. A few meters from this factory there is another industrial room. It was a BMW research center. Frank Gehry's offices have been housed on the site for 23 years. The 94-year-old architect moves in the space of transparent light full of the world he created outside. There are dozens of models of the projects that have made him one of the most famous artists in the world. He stops in front of a map of Los Angeles hanging on a high wall. He points to an area colored a dense red.
“This is a neighborhood where children have ten years less to live because there are no parks,” he points out. “It’s a public health map. Everything is red with problems, but no one cares about it. Even if we scream and kick…
Gehry shows a card with his new project in his studio in Los Angeles.Zaydee Sanchez
The area is called South Gate and is located 11 kilometers south of Los Angeles. Gehry is happy this morning. You have received an early Christmas present. After seven years of waiting, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, along with Gustavo Dudamel, just approved a project to transform the area into a cultural center. “There will be a 500-seat concert hall, a yoga room, a cinema and art galleries…It will be on a single street near the Los Angeles River. “It’s unbelievable, I still can’t believe it’s becoming a reality,” he says.
Gehry particularly emphasizes that he was allowed to roof over parts of the river that were covered with concrete. This allows you to create 16 acres of green space in a Latino community with a 13% poverty rate. “With $800 million, I can do it, and all these kids will be able to have a little more life. That sounds like a lot of money, but I’m sure health care costs them more,” he says.
Gehry is the son of a violinist of Polish descent and a boxer father who made a living driving trucks when the family left Toronto, Canada, and came to the United States in 1947. “Those days brought some reality into my life,” he says. “I worked as a truck driver for four or five years until I started night school. There I took a ceramics class with a professor who was building a house designed by Raphael Soriano. When he invited me to the site, he noticed that I was very excited to see the cranes putting the steel in place. And he put me in an architecture course,” he adds.
In 1989, at the age of 60, Gehry received architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. In their essay, the jury already mentioned the controversial nature of the adopted Californian's work. “I didn’t know it was controversial. He used corrugated iron and cyclone net because they were cheap materials. I had to work with these materials because they were used all over the world,” says Gehry. He remembers a visit to a fence factory where he saw four people and a machine take an hour to make enough wire mesh to cover the distance from downtown Los Angeles to the beach.
The Guggenheim in Bilbao was a turning point for the architect, as it changed the face and dynamics of the city with one building. “Of course we didn’t know we were doing this. “We were just honest,” he admits. Today he admits that the museum has brought “billions of dollars” in profits to Bilbao residents.
Part of his memory is colored by the criticism he received throughout his career. “I was always told that I wasn't equal to the others, but there were those who made fun of it,” he says. From his time in the Basque Country, he remembers the attacks of the artist Jorge Oteiza, who considered the project a “real soap opera” and something “typically Disney”. “Didn’t want me. He put up a sign that said, “Kill the American Architect,” he says. “Later I met him and we became very good friends because he realized I was like him. “I was an artist looking for ways to express ideas with inert materials,” he says. Gehry claims that Oteiza gave him a work. He has it in his office, on the top floor of the building.
Model in Frank Gehry's studio in Los Angeles.Zaydee Sanchez
Gehry, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, speaks in a spacious room whose walls are lined with drawings, paintings and photographs featuring musicians such as Herbie Hancock and Yo-Yo Ma, artists such as Robert Raushenberg and celebrities such as Princess Diana of Wales and others Barack Obama is covered. , which awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 2016, one of the highest civilian honors in the United States. Hockey, another great passion of the architect, takes up a large part of the office lobby.
At the back of the huge room is a television that updates daily with a picture of the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. The Bilbao Museum was delivered on time in 1997. His brother in the East, however, had to endure all sorts of delays. Work began in 2011 but was halted due to the Arab Spring. The pause was extended by concerns about workers' working conditions. Then the pandemic came. The museum will finally open its doors in 2025.
―“How do you stay motivated to achieve your vision?”
– “I have no choice.” When I have a project, I have to follow my talents and my way of thinking, even if it is sometimes stupid.”
Gehry's good humor hides the fact that he is always ready to fight hard to move projects forward. Sometimes he can't hide the frustration caused by some current customers. When they have a first and last name, Meaghan Lloyd, the office manager, joins the conversation. “Let’s not talk about it, Frank,” says Lloyd, bringing the memories back to the past where they are harmless to the new works.
The Disney Auditorium in Los Angeles will turn 20 in 2023. The building is now one of the most emblematic places in the city center. Before its construction in 1998, it was the subject of a heated dispute with the company's board of directors, who wanted to control the execution of the work. “The auditorium had soft seats, carpets and chandeliers. It seemed like a very expensive place. They felt very comfortable with it. They wanted to enter the room and see a crystal chandelier, bronze railings, rich woods and leather seats. They thought that me, who enjoys working with plywood, would force them to use cheap materials, but that wasn't the case. “I am intelligent enough to know that an auditorium has to look good, impressive and important,” he says.
Frank Gehry in his studio.ZAYDEE SANCHEZ
The board made adjustments to Gehry's project, resulting in a cost increase of between $50 million and $100 million. “It was money they threw away based on their assumptions. And there was nothing you could do to convince them they were wrong. They were lemmings who went to the fire to prove they were right. Instead, it became clear that they were stupid and wrong. I didn’t have to say anything, it was obvious,” he says. The end of the dispute came when Diane Disney, Walt and Lilly's daughter, made the use of $25 million from the family inheritance conditional on it being done as the architect intended.
This October, the Los Angeles Philharmonic dedicated a tribute to Gehry, who not only built the temple that serves as the orchestra's headquarters but also became an influential supporter of the organization. He is a close friend of Gustavo Dudamel, who affectionately calls him Pancho Pistolas, a nickname from his college days at USC. He is also close to the Venezuelan's predecessors on the podium, the Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Indian Zubin Mehta. That evening, Dudamel chose La Mer by Claude Debussy to close the program. It was a nod to two creators who broke the conventions of their disciplines to become masters.
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