Remembering Architect Frank Gehry
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.
Who was Frank Gehry and what is his architectural significance?
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 L.A. and Seattle's Experience Music Project, a music museum inspired by Jimi Hendrix. Gary'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, 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 his music pavilion has curving, billowing, floating shapes, shapes that actually are made of heavy, hard steel.
What are some of Frank Gehry's most famous works?
Terry asked him how he started working with those steel forms.
I came into architecture at the height of modernism. After the war, decoration was a sin. Purity, functionalism... All of that stuff.
So it was an era of purity and functionalism, a lot of glass and steel, high-rises.
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. I've alluded, I've talked about it before. The Shiva dancing figures from India, that a multi-armed... 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, planes, 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.
Let me ask you about fish. I mean, fish... Fish, as we all know, they have spines, but they're so flexible and they can bend and curve. What was the parallel you saw between fish and what you wanted to do in your architecture?
I was interested in movement, and I loved the drawings of Hiroshige and the Japanese woodcuts of carp. And I loved the quality of them, and I always thought they were very architectural. I also thought of fish as being on Earth 300 million years before man. And when my brethren started to regurgitate the past in the postmodern 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 postmodern 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 when you stood beside it,
How did Frank Gehry develop his unique design style?
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 happens by accident.
So you were looking to find a way of making something very stable, right?
That expressed movement.
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?
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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:02
2
Who was Frank Gehry and what is his architectural significance?
0:02–1:11
3
What are some of Frank Gehry's most famous works?
1:11–5:02
4
How did Frank Gehry develop his unique design style?
5:02–11:57
5
What inspired Gehry's use of movement in architecture?
11:57–34:28
6
How did Gehry transition from wood to steel and titanium in his designs?
34:28–44:56
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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