Jonathan Morrison
Frank Gehry: ‘It’s not very important to be famous’
As he opens his latest project, the Luma Arles arts centre, the 92-year-old architect tells Jonathan Morrison about the importance of fear — and sustainability
“What makes good architecture, Mr Gehry?”
“How the f*** would I know?”
It’s instant. There’s a twinkle just shy of a starburst in the pale blue eyes, mischief in the half-smile. At least there’s no impatience at a question he must have been asked hundreds of times before. But if Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, doesn’t, er . . . know, there’s probably no hope for the rest of us.
The Guggenheim Bilbao (ALAMY)
At 92, he has made the journey from his home in Los Angeles, which he gave the stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall, to southern France to open his latest building. For the past seven years a twisting mass of stainless steel has been rising above the ochre streets of Arles, the ancient town in the Camargue that so delighted Vincent van Gogh that he cut his own ear off. Now it is finished.
The £150 million project was first conceived in 2008, the result of a commission by the Swiss pharmaceuticals heiress and collector Maja Hoffmann, so it has been a long labour even for Gehry, who is used to long labours. Along the way there has been some wrangling over the site, a former railway factory that was one of the main sources of employment until it closed in 1986, as well as a planning dispute over the height — 56m — and its proximity to an ancient necropolis. Finally there was the pandemic.
If Luma Arles, the 11-hectare arts centre, is a “collaboration” — he generously shares the credit with Hoffmann and Annabelle Selldorf, who has converted the SNCF warehouses into galleries — the tower is unmistakably his. Comprising 11,000 stainless steel panels, carefully dented so they give only a dreamy glow, it is his homage to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, which was painted near by, with crazy jutting windows in place of crazy celestial lights. A glass drum at the tower’s base nods to the Roman amphitheatre a trident’s throw away and is intended “to invite people from all directions to enjoy it; it’s welcoming, not some cold modernist construction”.
He professes himself pleased with the results. “This is a unique building,” he says. “I promise I will never make another one like it. I have tried to evoke the place and the history, the light I love and the mistral [wind]. We spent a lot of time working with the metal so that it has the softness and warmth I had hoped for. It’s my tribute to the region and its past, but it also tries to be something of its own time. It has been a long journey, sometimes a difficult one, but I’m very proud of what we have created here.”
The Stata Center at MIT (ALLAN BAXTER/GETTY IMAGES)
Local opinion remains divided, however, even though unemployment in the region remains stubbornly high, at between 11 and 12 per cent, and the mere presence of a Gehry building is sure to attract international visitors. Gehry, of course, is probably still most famous for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which was completed in 1997 and almost single-handedly brought about the revival of the Basque port, thanks to the influx of tourists that followed. The phenomenon even coined its own cliché, used to describe all subsequent attempts to regenerate dead-end towns with live-wire architecture: “the Bilbao effect”.
“The Bilbao effect,” Gehry grunts, “whatever the f*** that is.”
He doesn’t particularly care for economics. Famously, he changed tack completely at the age of 50, abandoning a lucrative career designing shopping centres and the like for one that embraced his fascination with angular structures and materials such as chain-link fencing and corrugated metal — the materials with which he had just built a house in Santa Monica for himself and his second wife, Berta Isabel Aguilera, with whom he has two children (he also has two from his first marriage). The story goes that he had invited a developer over to celebrate the completion of their latest project and had just finished a tour of the property when his guest turned to him and asked: “Is this what you like?” Gehry said it was. “Well, if you like this, you can’t possibly like that,” his client told him, pointing towards his nearby mall. “So why are you doing it?”
Overnight he gutted his office and began experimenting with smaller projects in his adopted home of LA, where he had moved in 1947 with Anita Snyder, who would become his first wife (and who persuaded Toronto-born Gehry to change his name from Goldberg to avoid antisemitism), and where he first studied architecture. He built homes for some of his artist friends, as well as an ice rink and a law school, and his reputation grew.
The Luma Arles tower in France (ADRIAN DEWEERDT)
Yet it was his pioneering work with CATIA, the software originally developed for designing aircraft, that allowed increasingly complex shapes to be made — and more importantly delivered on budget — that would lead to his future success and one project in particular: the Guggenheim Bilbao, with its broad sweeps of titanium, a building that instantly caught the world’s imagination. The era of iconic architecture had begun. More than that, Gehry had made architecture cool again.
It turns out he doesn’t much care for the label “iconic” either, although his buildings are undoubtedly so. The Walt Disney hall, with its scoops of silver, and the surreal, collapsing shapes of the Dancing House in Prague and the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have become attractions in their own right. Luma looks likely to follow.
“We shouldn’t talk about [Luma] as an iconic building — it’s just a building’” Gehry says. “If all architecture were art, it wouldn’t be iconic, it would just be buildings. But we don’t have those opportunities in our world and that’s a sad fact. Most of the world’s cities look the same: LA’s towers are mediocre and look like the towers in Seoul and in Dubai, where they’re on steroids. They’re not art.”
It’s art that still means the most. He recounts one of his seminal experiences: how he was moved to tears by seeing the statue of the Charioteer of Delphi, fashioned by an unknown sculptor in 470BC. “That an artist was able to use inert materials and make me cry so many years later — I thought, ‘That’s what architecture should be.’
“I always start from the understanding that architecture is art and was always considered as art. Everyone became architects after being painters: El Greco, he became an architect! I’ve always thought that, but it gets pretentious and pompous to talk about it that way as our culture doesn’t see architecture as an art and most buildings are not art.
“So it’s a rare opportunity when a client like Maja believes in architecture and treats it as art.”
Gehry can afford to be picky with clients these days — after all, this is a man who numbers Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt among his friends, who has appeared in The Simpsons, who was the subject of a Sydney Pollack film. It’s an unusual level of fame for an architect, wouldn’t he agree?
“It’s not very important to be famous,” he says. “But I know I am, and when attention is given to me I take it as a little bit of love. But I don’t seek that, it’s not what I’m after.”
Yet the celebrities come flocking. He has met past and present US presidents (falling out with Donald Trump) and Princess Diana. Now he is Hollywood’s own anointed, he’s keeping up with the Joneses, notably Catherine Zeta and Quincy. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has been to visit.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (RAYMOND BOYD/GETTY IMAGES)
Gehry does not appear to be unconditionally in thrall to the money. I ask him what he thinks about Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars. “Some of those people are ridiculous,” he says. “They’ve not had an education, nor are they interested in art; some are only interested in financial rewards, which are temporal, and don’t know where to spend money so spend it on stupid things. If you go back in history, I guess the money was the pope’s, though at least the popes had good taste — look at Michelangelo. But it’s a scary time for nonsense.”
Our time is almost up. I’ve been warned that he tires quickly, although he shows no signs of flagging. The PR from New York is making slashing gestures. But before I can do my Columbo impression — “Just one more thing . . .” — he addresses that first question again, unprompted. Perhaps he has been thinking about it.
“To succeed one has to be slightly uncertain, not sure of oneself, slightly in fear,” he says quietly.
Does he still feel fear?
“Of course — it’s a healthy insecurity, as I call it. I think that’s critical. When it becomes too precious and not real, it doesn’t serve you well. As soon as you become sure about what you’re doing, forget about it . . .”
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