Author: Charlotte Gill

The Bilbao outpost of the Guggenheim museum is, on paper at least, very odd: curved titanium blocks, 20 ft tall, silver and menacing. It is a building with no right angles, instead a pell-mell of waves. First hand, it seems oddly aquatic, its fluid walls reflecting the cool sunshine of the Basque Country. No other living architect has Frank Gehry’s gift for transforming brutish shapes into buildings that exude light and grace.

When the museum was unveiled in 1997, not even Gehry anticipated the cultural shift he had unleashed in the world of architecture. One journalist described the ‘Bilbao effect’ – a new archetype for museums and concert halls. The burnished structure of the Bilbao Guggenheim was a spectacle in itself. After Bilbao, a slew of other ‘spectacle museums’ were commissioned, such as Daniel Libeskind’s lightning-bolt-shaped Jewish Museum in Berlin and Vietnam’s Hanoi Museum by GMP. But though Gehry’s reputation soared, he did not build another museum for a decade. “Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.”

Unstructured beginnings
Though the Guggenheim may be his most famous project, after 68 years in the business it is not his only noteworthy endeavour. Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to California in 1947 and got a job driving a delivery truck while he studied, first at the Los Angeles City College, and then at the University of Southern California’s Architecture School, from which he graduated in 1954. At his first wife Anita’s request, he changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry in 1956, in an attempt to dodge the anti-semitism he had encountered. With his new wife and new name, Gehry moved to Massachusetts to study at the Harvard School of Design.

A decade later, Gehry had radically shifted track, dropping out of Harvard, divorcing, remarrying, and known not for architecture, but as a furniture designer with his cardboard chair line Easy Edges. The undulating curves of the corrugated cardboard, sold between 1969 and 1973, were groundbreaking, even in the age of Moon Unit chairs. Ironically, it was this initial move away from architecture that boosted Gehry’s career in the field; with the money he earned from Easy Edges, he remodelled the family home in Santa Monica. To transform the cottage, Gehry built an outer shell of corrugated iron and added a glass pyramid conservatory. The redesign has all the features that have become Gehry’s signature: metal exterior, fluid blocks and lots of glass.

The Gehry Residence attracted a lot of attention and the architect was soon designing homes all over California. The best known of these early commissions is the Venice Beach house, a » multi-coloured shoreline property with its now-famous ‘lookout tower’. Built in 1986, it is very different from Gehry’s other works, being very angular and made of conventional materials; there are no metal walls in sight. Excluding this anomaly, Gehry is known for using unusual materials. While he is most readily associated with striking, shiny metals like titanium, corrugated iron and expanses of glass are also favoured.

Building fame
Gehry was a celebrated architect in California long before the rest of the world became aware of his work. But by the early nineties he had snagged two of the most coveted projects going: the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Opened three years after its European counterpart, the Disney Concert Hall is also an amalgamation of titanium curves and is perhaps even more breath-taking thanks to its LA location, surrounded by skyscrapers and art-deco gems.

Gehry once said that if he were a narcissist he would move to Bilbao

But though the theatre is a masterpiece, inside and out, it was one of the most fraught jobs of Gehry’s career. Highly regarded for his strict adherence to budgets, when other architects play fast and loose with clients’ bottom lines, it was a shock when the Disney Concert Hall came in so far over budget that two lawsuits were filed. Neither against Gehry or his company, but the builders cited complicated building plans for the high costs. The lawsuits were eventually settled out of court.

And Gehry’s penchant for buffed silver surfaces might have been fine in a town of 400,000 people and no tall buildings, but they caused a whole lot of disruption in downtown LA. Most of the Concert Hall’s façade has a matte finish, but the Founders’ Room and Children’s Room were buffed to a perfect shine. While very beautiful, the glare of the incessant California sun reflecting off the perfect silver almost blinded drivers. The silver walls also acted as a parabolic mirror, causing offices in neighbouring towers to overheat unbearably, skyrocketing energy costs with the additional air-conditioning requirements.

Though the problem was easily fixed, criticism against Gehry was relentless; the concert hall was even featured in the History Channel’s Engineering Disasters series. But the architect has no time for this: “They fixed it for $40,000,” he told a reporter. “I just sent some people over there with steel wool.”

Challenging boundaries
Flaws or not, the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Bilbao Guggenheim remain two of the most iconic buildings in the world. Journalists coined the term ‘starchitect’ in the nineties, around the time the Bilbao museum was unveiled. Yet Gehry was not the first architect to challenge the boundaries of the medium; Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Foster, Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers, to name a few, are all early practitioners of ‘spectacle architecture’.

But none of them worked to the scale Gehry did in Bilbao. The Centre George Pompidou in Paris, by Piano and Rodgers, opened in 1977 to critical acclaim and was paradigm shifting with its grittiness and engineering efficiency, but it is positively conventional when pitted against the Disney Concert Hall. Gehry is the most modest and low-key of men; his work is so explosive it does all the talking for him.

Gehry once said to New York Magazine that if he were a narcissist he would move to Bilbao. He is quick to dismiss labels like ‘starchitect’ as “it suggests an egomaniac trying to flaunt his wares at the expense of the public. It’s an opportunistic journalistic trick”. For him, it should be about the quality of the work, especially in a world of pre-fabricated design. “There’s so much bad stuff being built that people don’t address, so they fasten on to the half of one percent that gets into uncharted territory for humanistic and idealistic reasons. There is ego involved; everyone has to have that, or they don’t do much. But architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations, because people go on vacation and they look for it. When I go to Bilbao, they want to touch me.”

For Gehry, it is all about the trade; at 84 he shows no signs of stopping. His most recent high-profile project is nothing less than the 433,555sq ft building that will eventually house the Facebook Corporation. It might be his biggest challenge yet, as Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants a discreet structure. The model unveiled for Facebook West, as the building in Menlo Park, California will be called, is lacking in titanium walls and irregular angles, but there is no question about the design pedigree. The atrium is a handsome glass cube, with an impressive full-lawn roof garden. The whole complex is raised on stilts, with a car park hidden beneath. It is functional, but it is beautiful.

The Facebook West design is yet another testament to Gehry as an artist, as well as an architect. There are few designers as multi-facetted as he, and a quick glance at his portfolio reveals that few are quite as successful.