In 1943, magnate Howard Hughes built a huge hangar for the Spruce Goose, the gigantic wooden plane that took off just once three years later. The businessman chose Playa Vista, a community west of Los Angeles near the Pacific, for this project. A few meters from that work is another industrial space. It was a BMW research center. For 23 years, the site has housed Frank Gehry's offices. The architect, 94 years old, moves in the space of diaphanous light full of that world that he has created outside. There are dozens of models of the projects that have made him one of the most recognized artists in the world. He stops in front of a map of Los Angeles hanging on a high wall. He points to an area colored with a dense red.
—”This is a neighborhood where children have ten years less to live because they don't have parks,” he points out. “It is a public health map. It's all red with problems, but no one gives a damn. Even if we scream and kick…
The area is called South Gate and is 11 kilometers south of Los Angeles. Gehry is happy this morning. He has received an early Christmas gift. After seven years of waiting, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has just approved a project to transform the area with a cultural center together with Gustavo Dudamel. “It will have a 500-seat concert hall, a yoga room, a movie theater, art galleries… It will be on a single street near the Los Angeles River. It's incredible, I still can't believe it will be reality,” he says.
Gehry highlights above all that they have allowed him to roof parts of the river, which is covered with concrete. This will allow you to create 16 hectares of green areas in a Latino community with poverty rates of 13%. “With 800 million dollars I can do it, and all those children will be able to have a little more life. It sounds like a lot of money, but I am sure that health services cost them more,” he says.
Gehry is the son of a violinist of Polish origin and a boxer father who made a living driving trucks when the family left Toronto (Canada) and arrived in the United States in 1947. “Those days put some reality in my life,” he says. “I myself worked as a truck driver for four or five years until I started night school. There I took a ceramics class with a professor who was building a house designed by Raphael Soriano. When he invited me to the construction he saw that I was very excited to see the cranes that were erecting the steel. And he put me in an architecture class,” he adds.
In 1989, at the age of 60, Gehry received architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. In his essay, the jury already mentioned the controversial nature of the adoptive Californian's work. “I didn't know it was controversial. He used corrugated metal and cyclonic mesh because they were cheap materials. I had to work with these materials because they were used all over the world,” says Gehry. He remembers a visit to a fence factory where he saw how it took four people and one machine one hour to make enough mesh to cover the stretch from downtown Los Angeles to the beach.
The Guggenheim in Bilbao was a watershed for the architect, as it changed the face and dynamics of the city with a building. “We didn't know we were doing that, of course. We were just honest,” he confesses. Today he admits that the museum has left Bilbao residents with profits of “billions of dollars.”
Part of his memory is occupied by the criticism he has received in his career. “I was always told that he was not equal to others, but there were those who made fun of that,” he says. From his time in the Basque Country he remembers the attacks by the artist Jorge Oteiza, who considered the project an “authentic soap opera” and something “typical of Disney.” “Did not want me. “He put up a sign that said 'kill the American architect,'” he says. “Then I met him and we became very good friends because he realized that I was like him. “He was an artist looking for ways to express ideas with inert materials,” he says. Gehry claims that Oteiza gave him a work. He has it in his office, on the top floor of the building.
Gehry, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, speaks in a spacious room whose walls are covered with drawings, paintings, photographs with musicians like Herbie Hancock and Yo-Yo Ma, artists like Robert Raushenberg and celebrities like Princess Diana of Wales and Barack Obama. , who awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 2016, one of the highest civilian honors in the United States. Hockey, another of the architect's great passions, covers a good part of the office lobby.
At the back of the immense space there is a television that is updated every day with an image of the construction of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. The Bilbao museum was delivered on time in 1997. On the other hand, its brother in the East has suffered all possible delays. Work began in 2011, but was suspended due to the Arab Spring. The pause was extended by concern about the working conditions of the workers. Then the pandemic arrived. The museum will finally open the doors in 2025.
―”How do you stay motivated to fulfill your vision?”
-“I do not have any other option. If I have a project I must follow my talents and my way of thinking, even if sometimes it is stupid.”
Gehry hides with his good humor the fact that he is always willing to put up a good fight in order to move projects forward. At times he cannot hide the frustration caused by some current clients. When they have a first and last name, Meaghan Lloyd, the head of the office, intervenes in the conversation. “Let's not talk about it, Frank,” says Lloyd, bringing the memories back to the past, where they are harmless to the new works.
The Disney auditorium in Los Angeles turns 20 in 2023. The building is today one of the most emblematic places in the city center. Before its construction, in 1998, it was the subject of a tense dispute with the company's board, which wanted to control how the work was carried out. “The auditorium had plush seats, carpets and chandeliers. It seemed like a very expensive place. They were very comfortable with that. They wanted to enter the room and see a crystal chandelier, bronze railings, precious woods and leather seats. They thought that I, who like to work with laminated wood, was going to force them to use cheap materials, when that was not the case. “I am intelligent enough to know that an auditorium must look good, imposing and important,” he assures.
The board made adjustments to Gehry's project, causing an increase in costs of between $50 and $100 million. “It was money that they threw away because of their presumptions. And there was nothing you could do to convince them they were wrong. Were lemmings going to the fire to prove they were right. Instead, it became clear that they were stupid and wrong. I didn't have to say anything, it was obvious,” he points out. The end of the dispute came when Diane Disney, Walt and Lilly's daughter, conditioned the use of $25 million from the family inheritance to being done as the architect had intended.
This October, the Los Angeles Philharmonic dedicated a tribute to Gehry, who in addition to having built the temple that serves as the orchestra's headquarters, has become an influential patron of the organization. He is close friends with Gustavo Dudamel, who affectionately calls him Pancho Pistolas, a nickname from his college years at USC. He is also close to the Venezuelan's predecessors on the podium, the Finnish Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Indian Zubin Mehta. That night, Dudamel chose Lick, by Claude Debussy, to close the program. It was a nod to two creators who blew up the conventions of their disciplines to become masters.
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