Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli.
Chapter 2: 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.
Chapter 3: 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.
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Chapter 4: 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. And I made a shape, an abstracted, let's call it a fillet of fish, that I used in a show, an exhibit I did at the Walker Art Museum.
And it still had that quality of movement when you looked back and looked around. And I made that out of a wooden frame and covered it with metal. And so that was the beginning of a language. And I took that language into the buildings.
But, you know, in some of your buildings, including the new Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago and the Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Museum, those kinds of curving shapes, they're not made out of wood. I mean, they're made out of steel or titanium.
And how did you realize that that would be – how did you start working with titanium as a medium for something that would be really firm and stable – Strong, but also moldable. Not moldable, I guess it's more, I don't know, are you molding it or are you, how are you getting the shape?
Okay, here's how you do it. I do maybe 50 models. They look, sometimes they look like crumpled paper, so people think I crumple up paper and that's how they get there. And I analyze the shapes as though they're structures with the computer to determine whether I'm within the budgetary constraints. And over time, I slowly evolve these shapes and refine them.
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Chapter 5: What inspired Gehry's use of movement in architecture?
You know, when you go through a childhood like that, and it was a tough one because there were tough times for the family. And you tend to want to cut that part of your life off.
So you don't think about it very much.
Forget about it. But he was involved with the carnival business in a way and used to bring those kind of people home. And I met, as a kid, I met a lot of them. There was a blind boxer, black guy that used to babysit me, I remember. The good thing about it all was the mix of people that I was exposed to as a kid, which has helped me in life.
One thing I think you have not forgotten about from that period, you've said that you were exposed to a lot of anti-Semitism in this small mining town. Did that contribute to the fact that you changed your name when you became an architect from Goldberg to Gehrig?
Well, it was a factor in allowing myself to be convinced by my ex-wife that it was the most important thing to do, I guess. I didn't like the idea of changing it.
Why was it so important to her?
We were going to have our first child, and there had been a lot of anti-Semitism going I experienced, she experienced, and she said she didn't want to bring a kid into the world to go through that. The name at that time was a caricature. There was a radio program called The Goldbergs that sort of caricatured. And I took a lot of heat for it. And You know, I didn't wanna do it.
My father hated me for letting her do it. My mother went along with it. And after she did it, I was so embarrassed. Every time I met somebody, I told them.
But you wouldn't go back to Goldberg now, too late, right?
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Chapter 6: How did Gehry transition from wood to steel and titanium in his designs?
And I remember having all kinds of people, all walks of life coming up to me after and going, wow. I remember – older generations, I remember seeing the Statue of Liberty when I came over from Poland or from Czechoslovakia or from other parts of Europe. And so it touched a lot of people's nerves in that –
It not only dealt with the Cuban immigrants, but I think we're all immigrants in this country. And we all came over from somewhere. So it was neat that it affected other people. And one of the lyrics is, this 90-mile trip has taken 30 years to make. They tried to keep forever what was never theirs to take. I cursed and scratched the devil's hand as he stood in front of me.
One last direct from his big cigar and he finally set me free. That's the last verse on the song From Hell to Paradise.
Raul Malo speaking to Terry Gross in 1995. The guitarist and lead singer of the Mavericks died this week. He was 60 years old. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the newest film in the Knives Out murder mystery series. This is Fresh Air. Our film critic, Justin Chang, recommends Wake Up Deadman, the latest film in the Knives Out murder mystery series.
Like its predecessors, it's written and directed by Rian Johnson and stars Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. In the new film, Josh O'Connor plays a Catholic priest who teams up with Blanc to solve a whodunit in his parish. Wake Up Deadman also features Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, and Glenn Close, and is streaming now on Netflix. Here is Justin's review.
When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries. One of my favorite writers was P.D. James, whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways. For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking.
A detective story, she wrote, confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe, in which problems can be solved by rational means. The new movie Wake Up Deadman, Rian Johnson's latest whodunit after Knives Out and Glass Onion, is too funny and slyly over-the-top to feel like a Petey James story.
To my knowledge, James never incorporated body-dissolving acid or the old poison beverage switcheroo trick. But in his own crafty way, Johnson is also using mystery conventions to open up a spiritual inquiry.
The story takes place in and around a Catholic church at a small town in upstate New York, where a junior priest named Judd DuPlentice, played by a terrific Josh O'Connor, has been assigned to serve. Unfortunately, he's forced to work under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, whom Josh Brolin plays as an angry fundamentalist firebrand.
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