how should a building look?
by Douglas Messerli
Centre
Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, in association with the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (organizers) Frank
Gehry / September 13, 2015-March 20, 2016 / the preview I attended was on
Wednesday, September 9, 2015, with the curators, LACMA director Michael Govan,
and architect Frank Gehry speaking / Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of
Art
In a short
discussion prior to the press preview of the wonderful new Frank Gehry
exhibition which opens today to the public at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, Gehry talked about his early days when he felt that New York architects
were busy hotly competing against one another, warring, at times, more about
architectural tendencies than being focused on the buildings they actually
created. Meanwhile, in the nascent but very active art, music, and literary
scenes of Los Angeles one had the opportunity, he argued, to experiment, to
focus on the artistic activity itself without the judgmental reactions that one
might receive elsewhere.
At the same time, he argued, Los Angeles
had a very sophisticated gathering of individuals, including the many German
and other European writers, musicians, filmmakers, and philosophers who had
escaped Nazi Germany, settling into the Los Angeles basin as they continued
their careers. Just as important, Gehry argues—particularly for his own
development—was the influence of all things Asian, particularly Japanese., he
observed that as in Japan itself a great deal of the Los Angeles architecture
consisted of smaller buildings of wood, the so-called “ticky-tacky” houses of
wood and stucco that had sprung up throughout the region.
It was within that vast urban setting,
working with just such materials as wood, corrugated metal sheeting, cardboard,
asphalt, and even chain-link fencing, that the architect first experimented,
one of the most memorable of architectural examples being his own Santa Monica
residence built from 1977-78, and revised in the early 1990s. That construction
and the various other homes built throughout the region, often deconstructed
the Bauhaus-influenced block entity, by breaking up the various “parts” or
rooms of a residence into its constituent parts.
Indeed, one might even argue that Gehry
was also influenced somewhat by the Spanish style of building, where the
various rooms were strung about a kind veranda or plaza, allowing the daily sun
and pleasurable temperatures to permeate the entire residence.
Yet the various “boxes” obviously
resonated with the Japanese sense of stacking, placing things within other
things, while the walls clearly served almost as the flat moveable surfaces of
Japanese residences that, over time, might allow development and growth of the
residence itself.
That same sense of the urban
relationship of the various parts of a building permeated others of his
structures, including the Loyola Law School (1978-2003), the
Nationale-Nederlanden Building (1992-96) in Prague, the Chiat/Day Building
(1985-1991) in Venice, California, and other works.
Already as early as the the
Nationale-Nederlanden building, Gehry had begun exploring another dimension of
structure that had to do not only with the variation of size and interaction of
the various parts of the whole, but hinted at a startling transformation of
what was considered the basic unit of construction, formerly the rectangle or
box. Suddenly in the Prague construction of two interrelating towers, now
nicknamed “Fred and Ginger,” suggested by the impression that the two buildings,
appearing as humanoid spherical structures, appeared almost ready to lean into
dance (as one faced the front of the construction), a bit like Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers. Here the disparate parts found a new integration into a whole
that would be paralleled by numerous other designs of the period, which
featured radical reshaping of the constructs made possible by the architect’s
development with Dassault Systèmes to create a new Computer Aided
Three-Dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) developed originally for the
aeronautics and automotive industries.
The Gehry show, displaying a large array
of designs and scale models, presents a dizzying panoply of architectural
forms. To help the audience to assimilate all of this visual stimulation, the
original organizers from Paris’ Centre Pompidou have broken down Gehry’s
architectural variations into six categories: “De-composition | Segmentation
[1965-80],” “Composition | Assemblage [1980-90]”; “Interaction | Fusion
[1990-2000],” “Conflict | Tension [1990-2000],” “Flux | Continuity
[2000-2010],” and “Unit | Singularity [2000-15].” To these, LACMA curator
Stephanie Baron has added yet another section, “In the Studio Now,” which is of
particular interest for the Los Angeles public, since several of Gehry’s
current projects involve plans for buildings and spaces throughout the city.
While one finds these various categories useful
in attending to the various focuses throughout Gehry’s now long career, I think
it equally possible to simply see his work as a ongoing series of shifts,
particularly after his original deconstructive activities, in conceiving how a
building or even series of buildings might be shaped, what materials might be
used in their 
making, and how
they interact both in relationship to each other and the surrounding
environment. The overreaching link might be described as Gehry’s own attempt to
create an art, which, he claims, he first perceived while traveling in Greece
where he first encountered the sculpture of Demeter, that might make something
that would literally transform the viewer, changing the way he or she sees the
world.
making, and how
they interact both in relationship to each other and the surrounding
environment. The overreaching link might be described as Gehry’s own attempt to
create an art, which, he claims, he first perceived while traveling in Greece
where he first encountered the sculpture of Demeter, that might make something
that would literally transform the viewer, changing the way he or she sees the
world.
Whether it be his sail like forms of the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1991), the conglomerate of glistening winged and
hooded elements of the beloved Walt Disney Music Center (1989-2003) (which I
first attended at concert with a group that included its architect), the
amorphous shaped Lewis residence (a marvel of a work that was never built), or
the recent Leviathan-shaped Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Gehry’s
architecture is a constant exploration of all the categories which the curators
have come up with, and are not simply delimited to one period in his ongoing,
ever-transforming career.
realizes, in this case, that to do
so is an impossibility. Even if one prefers some designs over others, nearly
all of Gehry’s projects seem interesting and most are as “transforming” as the
Greek sculpture he so admired. Moreover, one recognizes that as stunning as the
66 models and 200 drawings of this show are, the actual buildings and their
surroundings further astound one. So one needs to comprehend that even these
amazing images of the real buildings do not truly reveal the creations in real
time and space. 
Even more than the memorable Heatherwick
show this year at LACMA’s Frank Gehry show promises a future that we can only
hope will be allowed to happen by the legions of unimaginative city leaders and
inferior, competitively-inspired architects, and committed to by short-sighted
local development groups. I would be wonderful if Los Angeles, which has bred
some very remarkable architects over the years, who, unfortunately, did not
successfully alter the often brutal skyline that dominates the vast stretches
of the city, would now be asked to help recreate the Los Angeles and other
dynamic urban landscapes.
Los Angeles,
September 12, 2015
