Building Blocks

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Building Blocks
Frank Gehry

Architect Frank Gehry’s industry-changing career took off after he remodeled what became his Santa Monica home with industrial materials and a chain-link fence in 1978 to show beauty in the utilitarian. From there, Gehry went on to design a series of striking buildings that earned him the revered Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989. Despite accolades within the architectural community, he didn’t become a household name until 1997 with the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and, five years later, downtown L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. He will receive the third annual J. Paul Getty Medal, established to honor leaders in the fields in which the J. Paul Getty Trust supports, in September. The Toronto-born architect, a fan of sailing and live jazz, explained in a recent interview with the Business Journal at the Playa Vista office of Gehry Partners how he’s kept beauty in architecture through old and new projects.

Question: When you get new commissions, is there pressure from the client to do something different or more innovative?

Answer: I’m always pushing myself to do something that’s not like what I did last time. And new clients always bring a new perspective. When you work with clients and listen to them like I do, and spend time with them and make the building really for them, it does turn out to be different.

Along those lines, you just designed a boat, your first. How did that come about?

Richard Cohen, the owner, is an old friend and former client, and now he’s a new client. He called me one day and said, “I know you’re a sailor and I’d like to build a sailboat and would you be interested?” I said, “Yeah, I would.” He hired Germán Frers, the Argentinian boat designer. I’m the decorator, but I directed him. I wanted a flat top, no bump-ups. If you’re going to race it, it’s great to have a flat top and it looks beautiful on the sea.

What had you designed for him previously?

We did a building for him in the ’80s at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street in Boston. It was an existing building and we added a floor at the top and it won some big award in Boston, which was strange because Boston has a very conservative architectural persona. So when that group heard I was designing it, they panicked. But when it was built, they gave me an award.

So what does that say about you?

It says I’m a good listener. I do believe you have to be a good neighbor when you build a building, contextually. The way I do it isn’t the pro forma way other people do it.

How so?

They copy historical things. If you look at the building I did in New York, the 8 Spruce St. residential tower, it’s next to the Woolworth Building. The Woolworth Building stair-steps, so I did the stairsteps and didn’t put the cap on top. If I would have put the cap on top, I would have been mimicking and I wanted to respect the other building.

Why is that important to you?

I’m old-fashioned in that sense. You do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s the golden rule.

Do you see that happening here?

A lot of what the cities build is not innovative. Most of the buildings built in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Korea – wherever you go, it’s probably the same high-rise. Developers use the same model, the curtain wall is prettily packaged, they’ve got 20 versions of it, but it’s pretty simple and the buildings look alike. There’s no respect for cultures and subcultures and the people that live there, so the cities start to look all alike.

There is always pressure to keep costs down in these projects. How do you do that while maintaining a creative vision?

When I was starting out, I realized there was this serious denialism in our culture that we weren’t really looking at what we were getting. I figured out that chain-link fencing was the most hated material in history. But it was used ubiqutously worldwide. I thought I’d like to explore that: Can you make chain link better so people would like it? When I was starting out, that’s all my clients could afford. We were using the cheapest materials available and I was trying to show them you could build a sculpture, or sculptural spaces, that are beautiful to be in using the cheapest materials.

And you can do that with all your designs?

Bilbao, it was $300 a square foot when it was built in 1997. When I tell people that, they don’t believe it. It’s the chain-link thing.

Are you designing homes any longer?

I stopped doing them, but now we do whatever comes through the door if we like it.

Did you ever have a time when you didn’t want to do architecture?

No, I always do it. I love it.

What keeps you in architecture after all these years?

I get a kick out of doing this stuff.

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