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POLLACK: Is starting hard?
GEHRY: You know it is.
I don't know what you do when you start, but I clean my desk,
I make a lot of stupid appointments
that I make sound important.
Avoidance, delay, denial.
I'm always scared that I'm not gonna know what to do.
It's a terrifying moment.
And then when I start, I'm always amazed.
So, that wasn't so bad.
POLLACK: If you're a complete layman and not an architectural specialist,
what's so hot about Frank Gehry?
What's all the fuss about?
He's changed the look of a very,
in a sense, conservative field.
RUSCHA: He mixes the freewheelingness of art
with something that is really concrete and unforgiving, which is the laws of physics.
And you put up a post-and-lintel construction or a building,
and, man, that thing has got to stand.
And I believe all of his buildings have been standing.
FRIEDMAN: He's an architect who is also an artist.
He takes so many risks.
And that's what artists do. Artists take risks
to do something new that no one has seen before.
OVITZ: I look at him as a hyphenate.
I look at him as a writer-director.
Someone who sits down, conceives of something,
thinks it up with just a blank piece of paper in front of him.
And then has the ability to execute it into a visual image.
He's the leading architect in the world today.
It's very easy to say.
If you say, "Wow," when you're in a place, there must be something happening.
Well, and the challenge is to get it in two dimensions on film.
JOHNSON: Hopeless.
You better give it up and become an architect.
Yes. Yes.
And is carrying you in?
That facade is not frontal,
and that curve comes, leads right into it.
All right, now let me just shoot that curve.
POLLACK: Frank's got his own original and sort of perverse way of doing things.
We've been friends for several years.
We spent a lot of time together
bemoaning the difficulties of trying to find personal expressiveness
within disciplines that make stringent commercial demands.
Several people approached him
with the idea of making a documentary about him.
And when he asked me if I'd do it, I thought he was crazy.
It's not just that I didn't know anything about making documentaries,
I didn't even know anything about architecture.
"That's why you're perfect," he said.
Pretty funny.
It's weird.
Well, let's look at it for a while, be irritated by it,
and then we'll figure out what to do.
POLLACK: What don't you like?
I don't know yet.
GEHRY: It seems a little pompous,
a little pretentious.
This is the part I don't know how to put in words. It's just...
POLLACK: Yeah, that, but that's the most important part.
If one of these guys came down, and this guy came down,
and this one became part of that, then I would start to like it.
Now it's coming. Yeah.
Now this guy starts to...
That's not a good one.
This side, I still don't like this side. Craig, I still don't like it.
I know why I don't like it, you know. I'll tell you why I don't like it.
'Cause this has to get crankier, see?
POLLACK: Crankier?
Okay.
But it *** up the... It would work for the African mask.
It's just corrugated.
You want to try it?
Oh, God.
Heaven help us.
You need one less corrugation.
You gotta get it flatter, like Maggie.
WEBB: Two?
Yeah, two is great.
Yep.
Yep.
GEHRY: That is so stupid-looking, it's great.
POLLACK: It's so stupid-looking?
Isn't it? It's just...
(EXCLAIMING)
GEHRY: I always liked making things with my hands.
I remember, I must have been about eight years old,
and my grandmother used to get a sack full of woodcuttings
for the wood stove.
So every once in a while, she'd open the sack
and throw the stuff out on the floor,
and sit down on the floor with me and start building things.
We'd make cities and freeways.
It was so much fun.
I remember when I was struggling,
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
Somehow I kept remembering
sitting on the floor with the blocks.
Intuitively I thought, "Maybe I could do something like that."
POLLACK: Do you remember the first time you met Frank, Ed?
Oh, gosh, probably in the early '60s.
He was, uh, uh, completely aligned with artists,
and I found that interesting, to be somebody
who, uh, was always, uh, there,
uh, at art exhibits, and, uh,
and parties with artists and all that.
And not too many architects mixed with artists.
My colleagues who were doing architecture that were my age
(CLEARS THROAT)
were making fun of what I was doing.
So I didn't have much of a support system from them.
I had a kind of blank stare.
And here were these funny artists, that I just loved their work,
were treating me like I was part of the team, you know?
You know, the artists weren't wed to the tradition.
They could do whatever they want, and they'd respond on a gut level.
I don't think they're heavy intellectuals, you know?
But I'm not saying that they are, you know, that they're stupid,
but, you know, they didn't come out of a school.
So they did what felt right, what looked right.
They'd manipulate things and really push the limits
without the feeling of tradition and history.
And I think Frank got a feeling about architecture that, you know,
"Hey, you get an idea, why don't you try it?"
GEHRY: Berta found the house.
It was comfy, and it had a little garden,
and we could afford it.
When I bought it,
I realized I had to do something to it before we moved in.
I loved the idea of leaving the house intact and not messing with it.
I came up with the idea of building the new house around it.
The idea was that they would find this little bungalow,
and then it would give Frank a kind of laboratory to work in.
GEHRY: We were told there were ghosts in the house.
I decided the ghosts were ghosts of cubism.
The windows,
I wanted to make them look like they were crawling out of this thing.
At night, because this glass is tipped,
it mirrors the light in.
So when you're sitting at the table,
you see all these cars going by,
you see the moon in the wrong place.
I mean, the moon is over there, but it reflects here,
and you look at it up there, and you think it's up there,
and you don't know where the hell you are.
You know, Frank seems to live in the moment.
You know, I'd like to think that I do,
but I think Frank really does creatively live in the moment.
He takes an idea that someone says and finds out what they're about
and what they think they want,
and then suddenly, he's creating it.
And the kind of materials that he chooses to use...
Most of the things are things that are used...
I like to think of them as used as building factories,
or building some... building something
that we don't think of as a...as a house.
JENCKS: Let me tell you how he finished his house.
One day he went up to shave in the bathroom, and there was no, um...
There was no light to shave by.
And so he picked up a hammer
and knocked a hole in the ceiling
into the California sun, and then he shaved by it.
GEHRY: At the same time as I did this house,
I was building Santa Monica Place.
The night Santa Monica Place opened,
we had a dinner here with the president of the Rouse Company,
who's a lawyer,
and he says to me, "What the hell is this?"
I said, "Well, you know, I was experimenting and playing with it."
He said, "Do you like it?" He said, "You must like it."
I said, "I do."
He said, "Well, if you like this, you can't possibly like that,"
and he pointed over there, towards Santa Monica Place.
And I said, "You're right, I don't."
And he said, "So why'd you do it? So why did you do that?"
I said, "'Cause I had to make a living."
And he said, "Stop it!"
He says, "You should stop it. Don't do that."
And I said, "You're right."
Now at that moment,
45 people in my office were working on a project for him.
And he and I shook hands that night and decided to quit everything.
It was like jumping off a cliff. It was an amazing feeling.
And I was so happy from then on.
I mean, even with all the stress of it, it just made me very happy.
POLLACK: Your decision to say no,
how did you go about that?
How did you assume you would generate projects?
You get work through other architects and other designers.
Mostly from people I'd worked with before
that liked my work, liked me,
and would bring me into projects.
It was touch and go.
You remember, I was always going bankrupt.
POLLACK: No, I just...
Yeah, I know. I know.
Well, I can remember
that I always thought I was pretending to be a director, you know.
Well, then at some point, I...
It just went away, the feeling of pretending went away,
and I felt, "Okay, I'm a director."
I guess I'm a director now, you know?
People started coming around and saying things like,
that I was talented, that I could do this and that. They thought I was...
Something was going on.
GEHRY: When I was a kid, my father used to draw with me.
That was something I just loved doing.
POLLACK: What did you draw?
GEHRY: The only thing I remember, I was about 13,
I drew a picture of Theodor Herzl
when I was in Hebrew school.
And I remember the rabbi pinning it up on the board,
telling my mother in Yiddish that I had goldene hant.
I had golden hands.
I really remember that.
Also, we used to go to a summer place in Northern Ontario.
And my mother had this lady analyze handwriting.
The lady read my handwriting
and said that someday I was going to be a famous architect.
POLLACK: You know, I don't think you and I have ever talked about
how the architecture started.
I took a class in perspective
with Mr. Workman, and I failed.
I got an F.
I couldn't stand it. So I went back and took it again and got an A.
Then I took a class at USC in ceramics.
The ceramic teacher said, "I have a hunch you should take an architecture class.
"I'm going to enroll you at night.
"Every Monday night there's an architecture class."
I got an A in the class.
And they transferred...
They recommended that I go into second year Architecture.
And then in the middle of second year,
my teacher called me in and said,
"Frank, this isn't for you. You should get out of it."
When he said it, it didn't mean *** to me.
POLLACK: Oh, wait a minute, now, come on.
You mean, he, this guy says to you, "This is not for you,"
and it didn't devastate you?
It devastated me, but I didn't give up.
And that was just before the name... The name change, so...
Uh...
And it was...
You know, you could rationalize it as anti-Semitism.
When did you change your name?
1954, I think.
My wife, my ex-wife.
When she wanted something she just got it, right?
And...
So I was ***-whipped more than...
And it was hard.
And I... So I told everybody.
For five years, I would be introduced as Frank Gehry,
and I would say, "My name was Goldberg."
GEHRY: We're gonna bring the walls in tighter and make them porous.
So that means these can't be solid glass.
Yeah, see, we can remove this.
So that... That's the fan just for the office floor.
We work back and forth between the planning
and the models.
So, you make a bunch of plans and then you try it on the model,
and then you get forms, and you start to look at it
and you see opportunities.
And then you gotta come back and regroup and make all this work.
So, it's a give and take,
because if this doesn't work, that doesn't work.
This is the Museum of Tolerance building in Jerusalem.
That's the restaurant overlooking the park.
This is the bookstore. And you walk...
I don't know yet.
We're... We're just fussing with it. Probably it'll be metal.
This is the Grand Hall.
You can imagine the kind of character of the light,
coming through the top and through these cracks and...
It's gonna be really a grand hall.
POLLACK: This is a smaller version.
GEHRY: You know, I always work on two or three scales at once.
Keeps me real.
By changing scale, why does that keep you real?
Because in my head, it keeps me thinking of the real building.
I don't get enamored with the object, these things.
GEHRY: Yeah, you could.
You get... It could become jewelry, you know. It could become...
This could become the object of desire, which I don't want it to be.
We started with this.
A stair-step glass thing that we found.
And then we started to do
these kind of more free spaces.
POLLACK: And there's where the transition happened, over here.
GEHRY: I knew this wasn't going to...
This would be enormously expensive and looks chaotic
and would be really hard to organize that.
Now, here it is. Here.
POLLACK: Wow!
GLYMPH: Everything begins with the models.
The problem is the world runs on paper.
So we've had to devise ways of automating drawings
so that we can continue to feed building departments and inspectors
and agencies and contracts
and the legal system, that are all aligned against doing it this way.
What we have done is elaborate on
a number of ways of scanning or digitizing those models
to bring them into the computer
so that we can go directly from the three-dimensional physical model
to two-dimensional drawings.
What it did was embolden Frank to go farther.
He could actually be more sculptural with more confidence,
and with a great deal of accuracy.
I think what was critical to us was to bring the technology into Frank's process
in a way that absolutely didn't change him or his process.
In the old days when you do the...
When you try to document the building in two-dimension
with a plan, with a section, with an elevation,
your understanding
and your way to be able to describe the building is very limited.
And the contractor and the people who are building it
have to, sort of, put it together.
There's an element of interpretation there.
Whereas with this particular process,
the level of precision allows the designer more flexibility
and freedom
to explore the shapes and the forms and the geometry of the building.
PAULSON: This model that you see here would get sent to the contractor.
And then they would take that information,
extract it into a computer file and send that directly to the manufacturer,
who would then build the part.
So, theoretically, there is... There is no need for paper,
unless they want it as a verification.
Frank still doesn't know how to use a computer,
I mean, except to throw it at somebody.
But, you know, he got the fact that this was kind of like an amazing tool
that was entirely suited to his ability
to pick up this cup, crumple it up,
stick it on top of this building and say, "That's an interesting shape.
"Let's see if we can take that shape into some sort of design."
I love the shaping I could do when I'm sketching.
And...
And it never...
When I was doing it, it never occurred to me
that I would do it in a building.
The first thing I built of anything like that
is the, uh, Vitra in Germany.
I was in a band, and we were touring Europe.
And I was into the fifth week of the tour
and was in that, sort of, um, twilight state
that occupies most of your days when on tour.
And my head was banging against the condensated window
on a mid-December afternoon.
And I was just looking out at the fields of Germany.
And, you know, across a plain green field,
suddenly this alarming structure reared up,
and it jolted me out of this state.
We got to Freiburg,
and I asked, "What was it I'd just seen back there, 10 miles?"
And they said, "Oh, that must be Vitra."
GEHRY: I started playing with the spiral stair.
I loved the way that curve
read against the rectilinear.
I tried to draw it with descriptive geometry.
But when the guy built it,
there's a kink in it. It didn't work.
That drawing didn't represent what really happened in the site.
It was when I got frustrated and asked the guys in the office,
"Isn't there a better way to describe these things?
"'Cause I'd like to play with curved shapes
"if I could just describe them."
That's what led us to the computer.
To my knowledge, it's the first building where
that new freedom and the new movement came.
The snake, for instance, that staircase is a snake,
and that was something very new for me to see that,
because I come from Switzerland, a very static country,
a very static architecture.
And I think that the attraction was that
there was something strange, a bit messy.
But in the end, these forces unleashed found a new order.
GELDOF: Architects have a lot to answer for,
in as much as that it's *** 99% of the time,
and, you know, depresses people on their way to work and that.
And largely I adhere to an English writer's dictum.
Auberon Waugh is his name, the son of Evelyn Waugh,
who suggested that should you meet an architect at a party,
the best thing one could do is hit them.
And I generally go along with this until I, sort of, encountered Frank's work.
GEHRY: I grew up in Canada.
I used to go to the lectures, Friday night, at the University of Toronto.
I went to a lecture when I was 16.
It was actually November, the 14th, 15th, 16th, something like that.
1946.
The reason I know that is I went back afterwards
to find out who the guy was that gave the lecture,
'cause at that point I didn't know from architecture.
There was a white-haired man that got up and spoke about stuff he was doing
that really appealed to me. It was very...
I'd never seen buildings like that.
I didn't go home and decide I wanted to be an architect.
That was just in my memory banks.
After I became an architect,
I realized that must have been Alvar Aalto.
I would say my work is probably closer to him
than any of the other previous generations.
POLLACK: How many years have you been seeing Frank?
Thirty-five years.
I met him as a patient.
Ed Moses, the painter, sent him over.
Milton took me in and agreed that I could...
After the second thing he said,
"You're in limbo with your wife." He said, "I'll treat you if you
"make up your mind.
"For three or four months, you either commit to stay home,
"and make it work, or you leave right now."
So I left his place, and I left.
I went, got my clothes and moved
(LAUGHING) to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
I had two daughters and a wife.
He lacked a lot of confidence. He was,
uh,
talking often about being bankrupt.
And he meant more than just monetary bankruptcy.
He meant bankrupt in his relationships,
bankrupt in his ability to get his clients
to accept what he was doing.
He was always being, uh, Frankie Toronto.
He was always fighting. As a Jew, he was fighting the Catholics and he was...
He had to show them he was a toughie.
GEHRY: I was angry,
but I wouldn't express it, you know.
So Milton got me into that group
with 14 other characters.
And for two years, I went to the group and never said a word.
One day they all pounced on me.
They said, "You've been sitting here for two years, judgmental as hell."
You know, and they uncorked me, and I realized that they were right.
It was... It was... Because all of them were saying it, I couldn't dismiss it.
He looked up to me as some kind of mature, adult figure.
True or not, that's how he saw it.
And when he realized that
our roles were changing,
that he in a sense was becoming the teacher,
'cause I didn't know very much about art or architecture,
I think it helped him
to, uh, take on the role of the adult in the relationship.
And also,
instead of trying to seduce his clients,
I think he took on more adult roles in relation to his clients.
He began to teach them, as he was trying to teach me,
to tell them what they needed to see, how they needed to see it.
I think in that sense, my naivete
was probably a very valuable asset in the therapy.
We go through life, early life, preoccupied about ourselves.
The world revolves around our butts and stuff.
And as you mature, you expand into the rest of the world,
and you become part of a world culture,
and you, sort of, find out the hard way even
that the world doesn't revolve around your butt,
and that unless you play team...
A lot of people
think that I made Frank a great architect,
which is total nonsense.
Uh, I didn't make him famous, he made me famous.
Just the other way around.
Matter of fact,
after, uh, some of the publicity about Frank came out,
a number of architects wanted to come in treatment with me.
(POLLACK LAUGHING)
I always said no.
I said no because I knew damn well
I could not make them Frank Gehrys.
I could open up the floodgates,
but if there's no flood back there...
This guy that I studied with,
this great teacher that I had, used to say
that talent was liquefied trouble,
he always used to say. That was his phrase.
You know, there are certain people
where the trouble doesn't seep out
into another part of the brain,
where it can be transformed into something else.
But that almost all talent
was some form of liquefied trouble.
All of it is frustration
with something as it exists that you're trying to improve on.
You won't remember this, but years ago when we first met,
you talked to me about filmmaking.
I was struggling with,
uh, with,
the world I was confronted with,
which is a commercial world.
They weren't interested in what I was doing.
And I talked to you about it one night.
And you said that you faced the same commercial world,
and that you made peace with it by
finding this small percentage of space
in that commercial world where you could make a difference.
And that was amazing to me, Sydney. I've... I've never forgotten that.
Now, if you hear in my talks after that,
I always talk about it that way.
I say, "There's a sliver of space..."
I almost use your words.
(MEN SHOUTING)
EISNER: Basically, and it's still more important to me than architecture,
is Frank's interest in hockey.
My sons are hockey players.
I spent hours at hockey rinks from midnight to 6:00 in the morning.
There were not that many around LA.
And I would bump into this guy who was not 22 years old.
I just struck up this relationship with this person
who did chainlink and boxes.
As we were getting into architecture,
and I was looking for the next generation of American architects,
he was on the list of architects who were, kind of, pushing the envelope.
We bought a hockey team.
We needed a practice rink.
He designed for us the hockey rink in downtown Anaheim.
It is a piece of sculpture sitting in this town.
And I think that and Bilbao, and a couple of other things, are his best work.
The inside is reminiscent of those hockey rinks
that Frank grew up in, in Canada.
All wood, all trusses, looks very traditional,
looks like you could be nostalgic for being in Toronto in 1940-something.
There's the double rink.
The outside is two, like... Well, I don't know, ***?
I don't know. But they're like this. So it's a strange woman.
You give Frank the functionality.
You make sure in the hockey rink
you have the workout room and the locker rooms and all that stuff,
and you're on Frank that way.
And then he delivers the picture.
POLLACK: Do you ever think of architectural shapes
unrelated to a job?
No.
Well...
I mean, if I'm sitting around the house, you know,
I'll put some music on or something, and the music will have a...
It'll suggest some sort of movement or something,
and I'll start thinking of shots.
Yeah, there is.
When I, uh, saw that painting, this one...
So this is in the, uh, Sainsbury Wing, British Museum.
It's a Hieronymous Bosch.
If you look at it, this is a composition.
And I start thinking of them as a composition of buildings.
This is the floor plan of the Israeli project.
And creating a composition...
POLLACK: Mmm.
GEHRY: Now, it's not literal,
but I just find those kinds of inspirations and they...
You file them away somehow. You don't even know you're doing it, then you...
It comes out, right?
That... Yeah. That's exactly what I'm talking about,
Right.
Once I saw this that way...
I mean, I'd actually seen this painting before
and never connected with it like I did that day.
And I got to the painting and it dropped me, you know, like,
I felt the ground cut out from under my legs.
It was so powerful.
And I saw it as architecture.
I think that's what gives me confidence to do stuff when I see it.
Once you get it embedded, you do it
'cause you're confident that it's gonna work.
And I think what some of my colleagues do,
they think of architecture in a hermetic way.
It's... It's X.
And it's not X-plus, it's not X-minus. It's X. It's...
It's got restrictions, it's got rules.
If you do this with it,
it ain't architecture anymore.
GEHRY: Everything has been done before in some way or another.
The only thing that changes is technology.
What bugs me are these *** rules that my profession has
as to what fits and what doesn't.
There is a certain threatening aspect to taking a leap.
But once you try that,
once you say, "Okay, I have a right,"
you can't stop.
POLLACK: I understand what you mean that everything has been done before,
but I've never seen a building like Bilbao.
It's gotten more sensual and musical.
Where did all that come from?
GEHRY: I think it just evolved.
I was looking for a way to express feeling
in three-dimensional objects.
You know, if you go back in history,
if you go into Chartres Cathedral,
it drops you to your knees.
FRIEDMAN: He just let go.
He began to develop all of the ideas
that he'd been beginning to work with.
And went the whole way there.
I don't think there's a building that comes anywhere near it
in inventiveness in this period of our history.
JOHNSON: I swear I don't know why,
it moved me just as much at the end of two days
as it did when I first walked in.
POLLACK: Well, he sees that the whole reason
for being an artist is that moment in somebody's eye
That's right. That's it.
The most impressive cathedral at the end of the 20th century
is to me, without question, the museum in Bilbao.
You see it and you gasp with astonishment!
It's like a vision of a kind of paradise.
I don't really know him, you know. I'm not... I'm not an intimate of his at all.
SCHNABEL: It has reminiscences of things.
You walk down into the entrance, and you feel like you're in Luxor.
It has the scale of Egypt.
What's important is to be satisfied with what you and the light... See,
that's the one thing that Frank understands, is light.
See, it's... It's the shape of light as it hits another shape.
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. And then, as you put it, it's peripheral.
Architecture is nothing but peripheral.
KRENS: When Bilbao came up, we moved on a lightning track.
The Guggenheim would select three architects.
Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Coop Himmelblau.
Each firm would be given $10,000,
one site visit and three weeks to come up with a concept.
Yeah, I remember we rented a suite of rooms
in the Frankfurter Hof, I think, in, uh, in Frankfurt.
We flew up there on the 17th of July,
assembled all the models, spent a day in deliberations
and when we emerged, Frank was selected as the architect.
I think, I don't know who said this,
I think it was a British journalist,
but I think he said that this looked like
it was, uh, an object from outer space
but which had landed here a century ago.
So it's foreign, in the sense that it has nothing to do
with any of the buildings which are around.
But at the same time,
there is a... There is a quality of it
which makes it belong to its place.
I mean, you take this out from here,
and nobody would understand the city now.
ABASOLO: We have 350,000 inhabitants in the downtown.
The first year we received 700,000 visitors.
And then, a kind of a community self-esteem
has increased so much.
We have moved from admiring the architect,
to be proud of being the clever ones
who did this project and have chosen this architect,
and we have this building which the whole world admires.
SCHNABEL: When I see a building like the building that Frank made,
I wanna stick my stuff in there.
It makes me feel encouraged.
It makes me feel like, "Hey, there's somebody that's, like,
"setting up an arena where something incredible could occur."
He threw down the glove.
Let's put something in here
that can really take somebody
into that transcendental state that you feel when you're making art.
We need some sort of naysayer in this whole discussion,
and if that's me, that's fine.
But I... I am ambivalent about his work.
He has used the expanded field of art,
the expanded field of sculpture. As sculpture and art,
in general, became bigger, broader,
it moved out into wider and wilder sites.
When it came time to make a museum,
Gehry used that expanded scale
as an opportunity to trump it, in effect,
with a building that really functions as a spectacle.
So, I'm not sure how well it serves art.
FRIEDMAN: Either you believe in the white cube,
or you are Frank and you say, "Artists want to be challenged."
I think museum people are very torn.
The great thing about Bilbao is that it does both things.
What Frank calls the stodgy galleries,
they're very, very simple, sort of, old-fashioned rooms.
And then he did a lot of spaces that are really extraordinary.
SCHNABEL: For me, I like to have enough room.
I feel very comfortable in his spaces.
He understands scale.
And if it does compete with the art,
maybe that art isn't good enough.
Everyone seemed to embrace this building and this architect
as the great new form,
the great new form-giver of our time.
And I just... I just don't... I just don't see it.
There are moments where I think he has delivered the goods too quickly.
He has... He has given, uh, his clients too much what they want,
kind of, a sublime space that overwhelms the viewer,
and a spectacular image that can circulate through the media
and around the... around the world, as brand.
People have this idea. What is the architect's service?
What's the ideal of service?
The service was to be appropriate, okay? That was the big word.
And it still is the big word, which means blend in,
nobody notices, camouflage, you know.
Put up a 70-story, uh, a new 70-story office building,
but make it look like the little art-deco thing right next door.
So, who gets anything out of that?
You have to not only talk about the freedom,
but you have also to talk about the courage of an architect
who had the conviction to say,
"Well, that's not what architecture should be doing,
"and that's not what cities should be doing."
I never expected Bilbao to be the kind of hit
it turned out to be.
In fact, when it opened, I was very self-conscious about it.
And thought,
"Oh, my God, what have I done?"
KRENS: Somebody asked me once about Frank's ego,
and I said, "Well, you know, you shouldn't be put off by the, uh,
"the kind of Columbo-like exterior, you know, the crumpled raincoat,
"and the sort of shuffling, kind of like self-effacing manner."
I said, "Frank's got the biggest ego in the business."
And the reason that I know this is that
he also has a perception of the process
that instead of reacting negatively to a criticism,
he'll basically say the reverse of what you might expect
somebody with a big ego to say.
"Let's just rip it apart and start again."
Because he knows that when he does it the second time,
he does it... He does it from a higher plane of knowledge.
It's a second opportunity to do that. Now that's real ego.
I act like nothing's happening, you know?
I'm... I'm, "Oh, shucks, ***,"
whereas inside I've got a...
You know, I'm... I'm ambitious, I'm eager, I'm...
I'm competitive as hell.
But I cover it up. My personality has been to cover it up.
There is nobody that strives
for excellence that isn't competitive in some way.
Yeah, but even if, you know,
you and I are in a different business, I'd probably compete with you.
'Cause I have this conflict about that,
that you know, I want to be... Oh, shucks, I want to be a nice guy.
I don't wanna be in your face, and yet I am in your face.
And I am ambitious.
I think that's the same with the work.
It's... I feel like it shouldn't...
You know, when I got to Bilbao and saw it for the first time, I said...
I got embarrassed.
I thought, "Oh, my God, how did they let me do this?" You know?
Well, you also have to consider his wife, Berta.
I mean, she's part of the whole equation, too.
Because, you know, he had this anger,
if you want to call it, on one hand,
and getting out there and doing those things,
and then his family life was stabilized.
And that's probably kept him afloat.
At first, they had all kinds of rough-edged conflict.
For example,
Berta wanted to be married.
Frank had been married, and he didn't care about being married.
Then he decides, "Okay, I'll get married."
He became this much softer, much more accepting, much more loving person.
Less defiant, less uncertain, less angry.
He seemed so calm and together and sweet.
And yet his architecture shows something completely opposite.
GEHRY: There are a set of rules about architectural expression,
and they have to fit into a certain channel.
Screw that. Doesn't mean anything.
I'm gonna do what I do the best.
And if it's no good, the marketplace will deny it.
I think as he became more confident in his relationships,
I think that he became more daring
in the willingness to fantasize far-out stuff.
GEHRY: I'm watching everything, you know.
I can get excited about some fashion thing
or some crystal chandelier.
WEXLER: I'm tempted to say, "It's Frank's right brain."
There's something in there, in that right brain,
that allows him to take those free associations,
and then make them practical realities.
OVITZ: If you ask me to simply describe Frank's work,
I'd call him a contemporary cubist sculptor.
Frank uses shapes and forms
unlike anyone has ever used them in the building of a structure.
GEHRY: Years ago, a reporter asked me how I get my inspiration.
Just intuitively, I pointed to the wastebasket beside me.
And I said, "Look in there, you see.
"Think about the caverns and the spaces
"and the textures in that waste basket."
You know, you can look anywhere and find inspiration.
It was by accident that I got into the fish image.
My colleagues were starting to replay Greek temples,
you know, in the post-modern thing.
I don't know when was that, the '80s.
And that was hot.
Everybody was re-doing the past.
I said, "You know,
"Greek temples are anthropomorphic.
"And three million years before man, was fish.
"If you want to... If you gotta go back, if that's where you gotta go,
"if you're insecure about going forward,
"and you gotta go back, damn it,
"go back 300 million years.
"Why are you stopping at the Greeks?"
So I started drawing fish in my sketchbook.
I just kept drawing this fish,
and then I started to realize
that there was something in it.
JENCKS: You know that story of his famous Formica furniture?
Frank looked at this material,
which is the most pristine material in the world,
and it's so uptight that he said to himself,
"It's not me." You know, "I can't do this."
And he just was rattling around and broke it up into little pieces.
He took it, and he threw it on the floor in fury.
And some of the pieces suddenly looked to him like fish scales.
He immediately thought, "Aha!"
A good friend of mine was designing this building.
He said, "Why don't you put a little sculpture on the corner
"and make it a fish?"
This hotel is a Ritz-Carlton.
And the guy that owns Ritz-Carlton at the time
was in Tennessee, in Nashville.
He couldn't come to the meeting when we made the presentation,
so he sent his guy.
And he kept getting down,
crouching down and taking this picture.
A few days later, the client called me up and said, "We got problems.
"I'm building a multi-million dollar hotel,
"and I ain't gonna have my patrons looking up the *** of a fish."
POLLACK: Do you recognize big changes
in your work over the last 30 years?
Well, with my starting days as an architect, I was involved with
less expensive buildings.
I couldn't afford to
pay for that beautiful detail.
RUSCHA: In the early '60s, Venice was a place of cheap rents.
The artists would come in.
Larry Bell was one that was close to Frank at that time,
and Larry began putting up these walls,
interior walls, in his studio
and leaving them, uh, uh, bare, and, uh,
where all the scars show.
And showing the scars
became a kind of thing there
that a lot of artists were doing out of practicality,
and then finally out of a kind of style thing
that Frank also began waking up to.
GEHRY: I grew up a modernist.
"Decoration is a sin."
That's the mantra of modernism.
So if you can't use decoration,
then how do you humanize a building, how do you humanize a thing?
Materials could be expressive.
He was really making a statement
that architecture was very much about the materials,
as well as about the design and the look of it.
It was all to do with making the most out of little bits
of throwaway things such as industrial material,
picket fence, corrugated metal and a chainlink.
GEHRY: Jasper Johns was doing it.
Rauschenberg was doing it.
They would make beauty with junk.
WEXLER: When he was doing that chainlink stuff,
he went to Mickey Rudin's house.
And Rudin said to Frank,
"What are you doing with that ugly chainlink?
"How stupid that is!
"I mean, you'll just destroy the looks of the world.
"You'll make the whole world uncomfortable
"with that damn chainlink of yours."
Frank said, "Mickey, come on over to the window, will you?
"What do you see out there?"
Let's accrue value here. We're gonna do this.
We're gonna open this.
Yeah.
You know what's confusing to me is what you see from here.
Perhaps, what you do here is there's still kind of a grade situation.
CHAN: A little.
Well, if you do that, you know, you could almost do that,
and we walk under it to the lakefront.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, if we do this, it takes it out of the realm that I was worried about.
Well, I wasn't... I wasn't worried about that. I don't...
I know, you don't worry about the same things I worry about.
I'm more naive.
Edwin is more contentious with me than Craig is.
POLLACK: Yes.
GEHRY: For me that's great,
because it just makes it all much more interesting.
And he's been with me 15 years.
For the first five years he was here, he didn't talk.
I couldn't get a word out of him.
He just sat and watched.
And then now, 15 years later, I can't stop him from talking.
I don't think I could do the buildings alone anymore.
I've gotten so used to the team to play with.
ARNOLDI: He surrounds himself with good people.
What he likes to do is, he gets a vague idea, kind of, very loosely.
"Well, you know, something kind of like... You know, something kind of like this.
"But kind of like, you know, what I'm thinking is something more kind of like that.
"You know what I mean? So this kind of thing is what I got in mind.
"You know what I mean?" And the guys will be standing around,
"Yeah, I think I got it, Frank."
And they run off and they do some stuff and they come back and he goes,
"No, no, no, not quite like that.
"I thought it should look a little bit more like... like this.
"You know what I mean? My gosh, you guys have just... You know,
"I want you to really, kind of... More like that, you know what I mean?"
No, but if you see the stair, like you see here, where it ends...
Yeah, do that.
WEBB: The communication is almost non-verbal.
'Cause we've worked enough together
that he can say, like, two words, and I'll understand what he wants.
A quick sketch or a reference to a painting
or a piece of sculpture and say, "Try this."
The only thing I'm worried about is
these guys wanted something a lot more exuberant.
I'd rather go to that middle-color titanium.
That would be beautiful. See that red titanium?
But you sure it's not going to be too red?
GEHRY: The other day we're doing our offices.
He sent me a fax, where I was,
and he said, "Would you mind if we flipped the plan?"
So that's typical Edwin.
You know, I would do that myself, if he wasn't there.
But he's there.
I think of it as an opportunistic thing.
Maybe one of the kids in the office,
just the way he put the model together that day
made me see something.
They see they're part of it.
So it engenders a great sense of teamwork,
which gets you to the end.
Craig and I will go home tonight, separately,
and we'll agonize about this.
WEBB: We'll have a dream tomorrow that...
...and we'll say...
And we usually come to the same conclusion when it's wrong, right?
And what makes it wrong is...
What's wrong is if it's too easy.
POLLACK: Wait, wait, wait.
Or we think we're falling into some kind of cliche.
GEHRY: Or we already did it.
That's different. That's different than "too easy," right?
What do you mean by "too easy"?
GEHRY: I guess I gotta suffer a little before...
POLLACK: Oh, but that's neurotic.
(ALL LAUGHING)
POLLACK: How do you tell the difference between
an aesthetic discipline and neurosis?
If you've ever been a client of Frank's, it's a frustrating situation.
You know, because you hire Frank
'cause you just love him and you want him to do whatever he wants to do.
And people are real encouraging, "Oh, be far out."
But he starts getting far out, and they all fall in love, "Oh, I love that."
Yeah, but he doesn't. He wants to change it.
Until it becomes a frustration game, where,
"God, Frank, when are you going to finish this thing?
"It looked good 40 times, and you're still going."
GEHRY: What's exciting to me is the process.
And when people look at this stuff,
because it looks like it just happened,
they don't realize how much time and effort went into the incubation.
GEHRY: So I'm always compelled to explain all that.
POLLACK: Have you ever had a situation where you've accepted a job,
GEHRY: What to do with it?
POLLACK: Or do you get the impulse first, and that's what makes you go after the job?
GEHRY: No, I don't go after the job anyway.
I wait till the jobs hit me on the head.
I guess I... I don't like rejection.
So I just wait until they come to me.
'Cause when you go after it and you get rejected, I hate that.
And I accept the projects based on whether I like them, the people.
Frank has figured out,
which some architects don't quite figure out,
is that the most important influence on the design
is the client.
And if there is a terrific client to work with,
you get a terrific building. If there isn't, you don't.
I started talking about water.
And Frank and I started talking about water,
'cause he likes boats and I like boats.
I said to him that my real dream, here,
would be, one day, that I was building a new boat.
And that one day, I'd sail up the Hudson on my new boat,
and as I got, you know, past the Verrazano,
and I'm past Battery Park and coming up the Hudson,
there, somewhere on, like, next to the water,
would be this building.
And the next thing, Frank
did his little swiggles.
And it's essentially that.
And what it was that he created was sailcloth.
I mean, the idea of making a white building
is, you know, when you think about it, a little insane.
Why do you make a white building
that from the inside, actually, you can look out?
So then began this odyssey,
which was, "How do you get glass?"
And, also, it was, "Let's do the whole thing in glass."
Nothing else but reed glass.
No steel, no shiny things, no aluminum,
no parapets, just glass.
Frank is... I've...
Any problem that comes up,
he finds some solution to.
There's something that you never figured out,
that he goes away and comes back and solves it.
POLLACK: What's the process like? Did he ask you questions?
Did you guys just free-associate together? Did you just talk?
I don't... It's not like,
you know, "Would you like square or round windows?"
Or "Would you like, uh, uh,
"you know, flocked wallpaper?" I mean, no.
It's not a query. He doesn't really ask you.
He smells, you know.
You talk. I mean, he sucks up whatever is going on in the room.
With Frank, the work of models,
constantly screwing around with them,
ripping something out, you know,
or just molding it almost,
POLLACK: Exactly.
...is such a profoundly creative process.
I mean, it's not like any building project
I've ever understood.
Literally, if you go back and you take the little squiggle,
whatever it's referred to in the pro jargon,
POLLACK: Yeah.
I think I have a talent not for recognizing artistic genius
but for recognizing talent. I love what he was doing.
And I kept getting, during the... From the day we started,
I kept getting richer and busier.
And he kept becoming more and more well-known.
And then as the adventure of the design of the house proceeded,
it was wonderful. I mean, it was so exciting.
And I'd go out there, and he was able to do research...
...on material and design things
that he never would've had the money to do.
And I said, "Look, you just give me bills for whatever you do,
"just keep sending me bills. And if I have a problem, I'll talk to you."
And I never had a problem. They turned out to be $6 million.
POLLACK: Jesus!
And, if I had to do it over again, I'd do it again.
POLLACK: Well, what happened? Why didn't it get built?
Well, we went on for about 12 years.
And I think what happened between 50 and 60,
I no longer... I was... I no longer wanted to live in a big house.
I no longer wanted to give big parties.
I no longer... My lifestyle changed.
What started out to be a dream
would've been... I was building a museum.
When we sat down for that last meeting
and the number was $82 million...
...that was it.
WEBB: The trouble with having the glass here
is that the top of it goes up into this gable, which is really awkward.
And either you come up and you shelf over,
whereas if you come here, you can go straight up.
I'd like to see that, 'cause I liked this awkwardness here before.
GEHRY: This is a building we did pro bono
for the memory of a friend of ours.
That was the original design for Maggie's Place up there, that little model.
I had these nightmares, that Maggie was talking to me,
and that that was too much architecture, and she wanted me to tone it down.
And I threw out the thing and started over again.
JENCKS: Having worked with Maggie, he understood the idea of the center,
which is to be an informal space for cancer patients.
He took on this commission at his own cost
because he was a great friend of Maggie's, you know?
We're not paying him a penny.
And out of love for Maggie, I think he really is committed
to a notion of an architecture that relates to healing.
Informality, non-institutionality, and a certain amount of humor,
and places for reflection, are very important.
It's a very nice place to get up and look out over the landscape.
That's terribly important for the cancer sufferers,
to see their illness in a context which is bigger than themselves.
POLLACK: Why did you come to Los Angeles?
My father got sick.
And they... You know, it was those days when they said,
"Go to the southern climate."
He was broke. He was actually... He lost everything. He was...
POLLACK: What kind of work did he try to do?
He became a truck driver for Yankee Doodle Pop Company.
And I got a job truck driving in The Valley, for a cousin.
This is where we lived, in here.
We just didn't have anything. It was really rough.
POLLACK: You got a job as a truck driver. How long did you do that?
GEHRY: Two or three years.
I met some interesting...
I delivered a breakfast nook to Roy Rogers and Dale's house.
And they were, you know... I came from Canada.
I didn't know from movie stars, right? I couldn't believe it.
And they treated me like family. They invited me to Christmas dinner.
(LAUGHS)
POLLACK: How do you get out of driving a truck to something else?
What I was interested in as a kid then,
my cousin used to take me up flying,
and I loved it. I'd get out there and just, early morning Saturday,
and stay till Sunday night and watch planes and...
So I got a job washing airplanes.
Where did this come in terms of...
Before architecture.
So, I was freaked out in love with flying.
So I could've gone that way, you know, if somebody had just
given me a job and really seriously taught me how to fly,
I probably would've been happy.
It's funny how it feels almost fragile
Yeah, right.
...that are so meaningful for their whole lives.
You know, I feel the same way.
GEHRY: If I have a big envy in my life, it's about painters.
I wish I was a painter.
What I'm fascinated with is the moment of truth.
There's the canvas, it's on your easel, you got a brush,
and you got this *** palette of colors, and what do you do?
What's that first move?
I love that dangerous place.
GEHRY: Never.
(GEHRY LAUGHS)
I wouldn't dare.
Because I wouldn't know what to do.
I know how to do a building.
Since a building ultimately is a surface,
it's ultimately got something to do with painting.
But I've never been able to achieve
what in my mind is a painterly surface.
POLLACK: Oh, yeah?
You know, you look at the Charioteer,
that sculpture in Delphi.
It's a Roman sculpture.
And it says, "Artist unknown."
And it's one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture. And you...
Think about that. I just...
When I saw it, I started crying, Sydney, because...
How powerful that is, that the guy doesn't have his name, you know.
That it grew out of a moment in time when there was a consensus
and that happened.
That's antithetical to democracy, I think.
And I'm hoping that out of democracy comes an expression that is...
The consensus is democracy.
How does that express itself? It expresses itself chaotically.
And that chaos, we're starting to feel, is beautiful.
Frank believes in accidents. But I think it's important to say
that some of his accidents are failures
and some of his work is extremely ugly.
People shy away from saying that because they are...
In a sense, his reputation is so strong now.
Of the anti-Frank Gehry contingent, is there anybody that hits a spot?
Well, when I see something negative, I usually try it on.
Like you're trying on a pair of jeans. I try it on for size.
I wear it. I think, "Well, maybe there's something here." I look at it.
And then, I must get something out of it because, you know, I'm sure...
But I don't digest it intellectually.
I don't take it in as a, "Oh, I gotta do this," or "I gotta do that."
A reporter just did a thing, saying, on the Museum of Modern Art,
saying that Toronto deserved to get a Museum of Modern Art,
instead they're getting a second-rate Frank Gehry building.
Even Marty Filler, who I like, wrote about
Chicago and said he thought it was logotecture.
So, that was his way of saying, "I'm repeating myself."
POLLACK: How does that affect you when you read that?
I just keep going. I don't pay attention.
I mean, what am I gonna do?
I think of it as water going down a gutter,
and suddenly this wonderful bubble has come up above all the other water,
and they can't wait to, like, just pop the bubble
and bring it down under the water and push it down to the bottom.
As a critic, I think it's incumbent upon me
to make an emphatic stand,
to, kind of, hold a line of disagreement,
so that other people are not simply caught up
in the culture of affirmation, the culture of embrace,
that has surrounded Gehry.
This is the only history we're going to be living in, okay?
This is the one. We can read about the ones that came before,
this is the one that's happening now.
And, fortunately, there are a few people
who understand how to respond to these challenges,
and Frank Gehry is one of them.
There is only so much that architecture can do.
But what he's serving is the "so much"
and trying to realize it.
POLLACK: If you had to criticize Frank, what would you criticize?
I wouldn't. I wouldn't criticize him.
'Cause I think it's like, you know,
flies flying around on the neck of a lion.
It's like, you know, watching a movie
like Apocalypse Now
and saying that you think that Robert Duvall is over the top.
GEHRY: Because buildings take so long to realize,
by the time I get to the finished building, I don't like it.
'Cause I see all the things I would've done, that I should've done, I think.
What takes over, what makes you forget all the little trivia,
is then the way the light hits the material,
the reflections, adds a dimension
that you didn't have in the models and drawings.
That's how it lives. It becomes a living thing.
The only thing an architect can do is
be optimistic about how it interacts with the surrounding buildings.
It can be a passive player, it can be a stoic player,
it can be a passionate player.
My thing is, I don't like the Chandler. I don't...
I mean, it's not great architecture.
But it's here, and people have a lot of feelings about it.
It's part of the community.
So you have to respect that, whether you like it or not.
I mean, I think that's like being a good neighbor.
And, so, I tried to make a building
that would preserve the iconic importance
of the Chandler.
To defer to that, I decided to break down the scale of the Disney Hall
into smaller pieces, so it's not the same language.
POLLACK: Yeah.
GEHRY: Now, the shapes of the exterior of Disney Hall are based on sailing.
When you're wing-on-wing, with the wind behind you,
it forms a beautiful space.
And if you look at the front of Disney Hall, it's wing-on-wing.
It's the two sails and you're at the helm.
And this is the foyer.
And here, when you look up, you'll be able to see the levels.
SALONEN: No matter how great the design is,
if it doesn't sound great, it's going to be a failure.
Frank was very clear about this from the beginning.
He said, "This is a hall for the orchestra, and this is a building for music.
"And that has to be the first priority.
"And everything else, uh, is of lesser importance."
And I thought this was quite a statement from an architect.
It's very unusual that an artist such as Frank
puts the ego bit to a, sort of, lower level of importance
than the actual function of the building.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
I don't know how to do this.
(PEOPLE WHISTLING)
Okay. Thank you.
Let's get the hell out of here, yeah?
GEHRY: Holy ***!
Where's the beer? Where's the beer?
POLLACK: Do you ever get depressed when it's finished?
POLLACK: A little bit.
GEHRY: Yeah, I do.
You know that better than I do. You can't let go.
When I let go is a year later
after its test of time, didn't leak,
people like it.
Then I, sort of, let myself out a bit and enjoy it.
POLLACK: Do you ever wonder what part of you did that?
Yes. Oh, yeah, all the time.
I say, "What? Where did that come from?"
Yeah, I do.
It's like a magic trick. I call it a magic trick.
But, you know, when I was a kid,
taking that ceramics class at SC before I became an architect,
Glen Lukens... You'd put the glaze on and the stuff,
you'd put it into the kiln,
and it would come out looking so beautiful sometimes.
And you'd say...
I'd say to Glen, "God, that's beautiful. I didn't...
"How did that happen?"
And he said, "Just claim credit for it from now on,
"because somehow you made it happen."
POLLACK: So you haven't seen any of this all together?
GEHRY: When I came last, it was a mess.
It looked very precarious, like it might not happen right.
You get scared and you wonder, "God, what are these people going to think?"
I wanna hide under the covers.
(GEHRY LAUGHING)
GEHRY: I know you do.
The structural engineer on this is a guy from Stuttgart, Jorg Schlaich.
He's my age.
And I think he's probably the best living structural engineer in the world.
You know why this floor is like this?
Because the offices down below,
by code, have to have a certain amount of light.
And the only way we could get it, and to have this balcony,
was to make it a glass floor.
You know, I'm not going to get to live here and stay here.
So I'm only going to see it today and I leave.
And maybe I'll see it three or four more times in my life.
For me, it's like one of my children.
And I love it.
POLLACK: So what's next, Frank?
Is there anything you haven't done that you want to do?
GEHRY: I'm superstitious, so I never say that.
When you're a younger architect and starting out,
you're seeking some kind of impossible perfection.
You could spend your life thinking about
this ephemeral building that would be great to do, you know.
It would be the capstone of my career.
You realize, as you mature, that there's no "there."
You ain't gonna get there.
A great many people come to me, hoping they can change themselves
and settle their anxieties,
their problems in their marriage or whatever.
They want to know how to handle life better.
When an artist comes to me,
he wants to know how to change the world.