Frank exchange

FRANK Gehry talks about the building he has designed to house the LVMH art colelction.

A model of the Foundation Louis Vuitton, designed as a bridge between the Bois de Boulogne and the Jardin d'Acclimatation, a children's amusement park, in Paris. The museum will include "chapels" for site-specific installations. Picture: Foundation Louis Vuitton

FRANK Gehry is a rare breed of architect. For a start, he has a sense of humour.

Here’s Gehry on  the subject of so called green design: “It’s become an excuse for a lot of bad architecture where something is accepted just because it’s green, but if it’s green and it’s ugly, then who cares? It would be better to have global warming and get it over with than live with that.” This was in response to a question from the audience at a public talk in Hong Kong earlier this year; the crowd’s reaction was more comedy club than museum lecture hall.

Then later. “Mr Gehry, what do you think about some of the accusations that your buildings are extravagant?” Says Gehry with a wry smile: “Bullshit.” More laughs, and this in a city where extravagance is worshipped.

He went on to reason why he thinks his buildings represent value for money. “Bilbao [the Guggenheim Museum] was built for $US300 per square foot and the building might look like excess but it ain’t. It was very modest,” he says. “In the first eight months that it was open the building had paid for itself – that’s $US100 million [$110 million]. Gone. Paid for. And it has generated income on an increasing scale, this year it’s over €300 million [$490 million] for the community because of the building. So is that excess? People like it. I can go there and live for free for the rest of my life and I never have to pay for food or hotels or anything …” More laughs.

Gehry told New York magazine in June that while he has an ego he is no “starchitect”, adding: “When I go to Bilbao, they want to touch me. If I were an egomaniac, I’d just move there.” After all, if it wasn’t for the Guggenheim Museum he designed for the city then it would still be an industrial backwater.

Today Bilbao’s economy is focused on tourism with the museum as its centrepiece. Even when it comes to explaining the reaction he gets from clients to his ethereal concept sketches, such as the one above which was his first offering to Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man and the chairman of Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton, for the design of his Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Creation, now under construction in Paris, he goes for comedy over pretence.

“I do tonnes of sketches and they don’t make any sense until, well, until after the building is built and then they make sense,” he says in an interview. “When I drew that [referring to the LVMH building sketch above] I didn’t know what it would be like in the end. This and the building of study models goes on for months and it drives the clients nuts,” he says, laughing.

Arnault, on the other hand, is used to dealing with creative types, to giving artists long leashes and to reaping the rewards. He let Marc Jacobs loose on Louis Vuitton and in the process turned it into the most profitable luxury brand today. He gave John Galliano carte blanche as the designer for Christian Dior. When it came to the design of a building to house his company’s art collection he wanted Gehry for it. “Frank is the most talented and fascinating architect of his time and I was very impressed with him when I met him,” says Arnault, in Hong Kong earlier this year to open an exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art to showcase some of the works that will be housed in the new Paris museum. “It was a real pleasure and a fantastic experience to work with him because we have a real exchange. Sometimes when you work with an architect it’s all them and you are there just to pay for it.”

That exchange between client and architect is something Gehry says he looks for when working on a new project. “It makes it better for me because it changes the direction,” he says. “I always like to work with clients who have an idea or who are strong thinkers in their own right, with their own point of view, because then you can engage in a dialogue. So if you work that way when the building is finished it looks

different, it’s a different kind of collaboration.”

As a consequence of the effect of Gehry’s Guggenheim on the city of Bilbao, there are those who approach him to design projects because they assume the obligatory city approvals will come more easily with his name attached. Gehry says he’s developed a nose for this sort of client and often turns work down “if it’s not real or if people have a warped image of what I do”.

When it came to working with Arnault he knew there was a simpatico between them. And for Gehry the location had a lot to do with it. Paris, he says, became his favourite city after he lived there for a year in 1961. Then he saw exactly where the building would be. “Bernard took me to the Jardin d’Acclimatation [a garden at the northern end of the Bois de Boulogne, much loved by Parisians since the Second Empire] and I felt I had stepped back in time to the world of Proust, that for a brief moment we had left 21st-century Paris behind. I almost started crying because I thought I had died and gone to heaven and I remember I started talking about Proust right away. I read Proust like the Bible. When I get depressed I go there. It’s so simple and honest and direct. I imagined that Proust must have walked here.”

The building Gehry has designed for Arnault is a flowing glass and steel structure which, according to Gehry, will have a sort of movement about it. “Paris doesn’t need anything to make it a better Paris, it’s pretty special already. So I thought of this building as a cloud because there is an ephemeral quality about what Bernard wanted me to achieve. He asked for it that way and I thought it was a wonderful response to the neighbourhood. It’s reflective but it’s not a reflective office building. I don’t think it’s going to be an intrusion. It’s very important for me to be a good neighbour,” says Gehry.

Gehry celebrated his 80th birthday this year and although his firm has taken a hit in the global recession – over the course of a year 100 employees have left Gehry Partners as commissions in New York and Los  Ageles have foundered – he gives no indication that retirement is on the horizon. As well as the Louis Vuitton foundation, Gehry Partners has several major projects under construction, including a Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi, a 76-storey apartment building in New York, the Lou Ruvo Brain Institute in Las Vegas and the future home of the New World Symphony orchestra in Miami.

Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 into a Polish-Jewish family that moved to Los Angeles in 1947. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954, established his own firm in 1962 and eventually became a naturalised US citizen. It was his first wife, Anita Snyder, who urged him to change his name. In 1966 he divorced Snyder and in 1975 married Berta Isabel Aguilera.

After more than 20 years in business, based in California, Gehry finally received national recognition for his work in 1978 – ironically for the design of his own home, a renovation to a two-storey bungalow in Santa Monica. The extension was constructed from inexpensive materials such as corrugated metal, plywood and

chain link and remains widely influential to this day (as well as being something of a tourist attraction).

Since then he has won virtually every important architectural award, including the Pritzker prize in 1989. He has been the subject of an episode of The Simpsons, the subject of a Sydney Pollack movie, Sketches of Frank Gehry, and the subject of a television commercial for Apple. He has designed furniture as well as a range of jewellery for Tiffany & Co.

Gehry is a rare breed of architect for another reason: he has a knack for bringing in his projects on budget. “I pride myself on meeting budgets and some of the toughest developers in the world who I have worked with will attest to that,” says Gehry. He is the first to admit that although he barely knows how to turn a computer on, computer technology is what has allowed him to build such unique forms and to keep costs from blowing out. He worked with the French company Dassault to develop software that would not only allow him to document these shapes but would also produce more detailed and accurate drawings – the more information an architect can give to a builder the more accurate the builder’s quote will be. Gehry’s practice is also moving towards paperless documentation whereby builders will work on site with laptops rather than pages and pages of drawings.

He is also remarkably pragmatic when it comes to discussing the design process. “It’s hand-eye co-ordination, that’s what architecture is. It’s a stream of consciousness from your head to your hand to something and, as with the best artists, you can’t explain how you got there. If you start to explain how you got there it takes all the fun out of it, so I don’t like explaining it.”

And he is refreshingly unprecious about his finished buildings. When the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was completed it copped flack because the reflection of the metal roof heated up neighbouring apartments and dazzled motorists. “I fixed it for $US40,000,” says Gehry. “I sent some people over there with steel wool to dull it down.”

Despite his critics – who say his buildings are overwhelming in their spectacle, or seem to be designed as sculpture first and working buildings second – the Walt Disney Concert Hall is a testament to Gehry’s stated method of designing his buildings from the inside out and for his attention to the users of the building. “It always starts with the inside, it has to. It has to be a nice room, the orchestra needs to be comfortable and they need to be able to hear each other.

Psychologically, people feel better in a music hall which is clad in wood rather than plaster, so we spent an extra $US5 million doing that, and we got natural light into the concert hall, which is often not the case. It’s actually one of the buildings I use myself. It’s six years old now and I go to concerts there, but for the first

two years they didn’t like me going because I picked out all the mistakes and drove everybody nuts, but now I just enjoy it.”

This story originally appeared in the November 2009 edition of Wish magazine. Wish is published free with The Australian on the first Friday of each month.