The Liberator

One of the first things I thought of when I heard that Frank Gehry had died was a line from Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. A reporter visits the title character’s former business manager, Mr. Bernstein, to interview him following the newspaper mogul’s death, and he comments that the old man had known Kane since the beginning. “From before the beginning, young fellow,” Bernstein interjects. “And now, it’s after the end.”

I first met Gehry in 1979, when I was a young editor at Progressive Architecture magazine, where my colleagues and I concurred that he was the most gifted of a new generation of architectural aspirants in this country. We were taken by his boldly original approach, which juxtaposed exaggerated, off-kilter forms executed in cheap materials such as corrugated metal, unfinished plywood, chain-link fencing, and chicken wire glass—the architectural equivalent of punk rock, then in its heyday. We were also convinced, however, that his aggressive aesthetic would never catch on with the masses and that he was destined to remain an esoteric cult figure at best. Little did we know that he’d ultimately become a household name among people who had heard of few architects other than an earlier Frank—Lloyd Wright.

The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set.

Although his dramatic departure from architectural convention was at first confrontational and forbidding, it gradually became more buoyant and embracing. As his clients’ budgets increased and he moved from corrugated metal to shiny titanium, unfinished plywood to polished Douglas fir, and rubber matting to travertine flooring, his architecture lost none of its expressive power and appealed to many who’d found his earlier tough-guy efforts more alienating than audacious. But he was never to everyone’s taste, including Marxist intellectuals averse to an architecture of pleasure, who saw him as an agent of capitalist corporate branding (evidenced by his late-career association with the luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, patron of his overblown Fondation Louis Vuitton of 2005–2014 in Paris, for whom he also designed a limited-edition Louis Vuitton “Twisted Box” handbag that cost €3,000).

The first of my twenty-five articles on Gehry (twice as many as I’ve written about any other living architect, plus three catalog essays and a film) was a critique in Progressive Architecture of his unglamorous yet arresting Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributors Offices of 1979 near Baltimore. To prepare for that piece, I flew to Los Angeles with my wife, Rosemarie Haag Bletter—then a Columbia art history professor and among the first academics to include Gehry in university courses—to meet with him. He instantly seemed like an old friend, gave us a tour of his funky Venice Beach office, and invited us to visit his own much-talked-about house of 1977–1978 in Santa Monica. In 1975 he had married his perspicacious and protective second wife, the Panamanian-born Berta Aguilera, fourteen years his junior. Soon afterward they bought this little 1920s Dutch Colonial fixer-upper, which he proceeded to renovate in a most unusual way.

Taking his cues from the maverick site-specific sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark—who used a chainsaw to carve abandoned buildings into environmental sculptures of extraordinary power—Gehry as much deconstructed his new home as remodeled it. He fortified parts of the pastel-painted, shingled exterior with corrugated steel, wrapped layers of chain-link fencing over other portions in angular planes not seen since Russian Constructivism, and slammed a tilted cubic skylight, which looked as if it had fallen from outer space, into the kitchen. In the interior he exposed walls down to the wooden studs and treated vestigial white plaster patches as though they were Robert Ryman paintings. Paradoxically, this messy mash-up also exuded a cozy domesticity. In due course it became such a tourist magnet that in 2018 the couple moved to a sprawling house designed by Gehry and their younger son, on a site overlooking Santa Monica Canyon, where Gehry died on December 5 after a brief respiratory illness at age ninety-six.

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So thorough was Gehry’s reorientation of architecture as an art form rather than an adjunct of engineering that it’s hard to recall how the high end of his profession was perceived before him, when technocrats in big architectural firms seemed indistinguishable from any other business executives. In the mid-1970s, as he approached fifty, Gehry resolved to throw over his profitable relationship with one of the most enlightened developers of the day—James Rouse, best known for his humanely planned, racially integrated new town of Columbia, Maryland. There Gehry designed several structures, including the Rouse Company Headquarters of 1969–1974, followed by a number of other Rouse projects on both coasts, including his Pop-inflected Santa Monica Place shopping mall of 1972–1980. He then reinvented himself as an artist who used architecture as his medium, a move as risky as Andy Warhol’s decision a decade earlier to abandon his lucrative practice as a commercial illustrator and take up fine art.

Instrumental to Gehry’s rise in this pivotal moment was Milton Wexler, a Svengali-like Los Angeles psychotherapist whose chosen clientele of high-achieving creative sorts, many of them in the movie industry, gave him the reputation of shrink to the stars. Gehry, who was as neurotic as he was ambitious, found an ideal sounding board in Wexler, who encouraged his patients to see themselves as exempt from the normative rules of society because of their artistic gift and to pursue their goals with little regard for others. Scarcely adhering to the classical Freudian model of the detached interrogator of dreams and anxieties, Wexler gave his patients copious advice, both personal and professional.

Decades ago Gehry confided to me that his therapist threatened to stop seeing him unless he divorced his first wife, the former Anita Snyder, because he was tired of hearing Gehry’s unending complaints about her. The architect later recalled elsewhere that Wexler also offered him the option of trying to stick with the marriage for three months to make it work, whereupon Gehry walked out on his family. (The couple had two daughters—Brina Gehry, who worked on type production at The New York Review from 1988 to 1997, and the late Leslie Gehry Brenner, a fact-checker at House & Garden, publications to which I contributed simultaneously.) Yet Wexler also bolstered Gehry’s resolve that he was capable of great things artistically, which freed his innate and immense talent for sculptural invention.

In 1980 Art in America published my introduction to his work, “Eccentric Space: Frank Gehry,” which positioned him among the artists he yearned to be identified with rather than his nominal coprofessionals. He palled around with LA painters and sculptors, including Chuck Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Ronald Davis, who accepted him as one of their own. His first great breakthrough work was the studio-residence of 1969–1972 that he designed in Malibu for Davis: a slant-roofed trapezoidal volume clad in corrugated steel—the architectural equivalent of the illusionistic perspectival effects the artist was producing in his large-scale geometric paintings. But as Gehry’s fame grew he gravitated away from homegrown talent (with the notable exceptions of Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell, among the few of them with international followings) and toward more widely celebrated figures.

Most important for Gehry was the Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg, with whom he dreamed up the Chiat/Day ad agency headquarters of 1984–1991 in Venice. They turned this rather commonplace office building commission into a traffic-stopping public art project, thanks to Gehry’s willingness to cede the central portion of his composition to Oldenburg and his collaborator-wife, Coosje van Bruggen. The couple created a forty-five-foot-high sculpture in the form of superscale binoculars that gives the façade a touch of Disneyesque Surrealism as well as the dignity of a twin-turreted civic building by H. H. Richardson.

Gehry was among the five practitioners whom Rosemarie and I chose for Beyond Utopia: Changing Perspectives in American Architecture, a 1983 Michael Blackwood documentary about the emergent generation of artist-architects for which we wrote the script and conducted the interviews. (The other participants were Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi.) We asked each of them to suggest some mundane activity we could film them pursuing, and Gehry chose to cook matzo brei—a traditional Passover breakfast of eggs scrambled with unleavened bread, a favorite from his lower-middle-class boyhood in Toronto, where he was born Frank Owen Goldberg. (In later life he gave conflicting reasons for his name change, which he came to regret.)

The scene, shot beneath the famous crystalline skylight of the Santa Monica house, was exactly as we’d experienced Frank in private. In it his older son, Alejandro, then about six, offers his assessment of the house: “Well, I like that when you look through the top you can see down here in the kitchen.” His father then elaborates that he tried “as best I could to confuse the ideas between what’s inside and what’s outside, the surrealistic idea of being in a house with a house inside with you.” In truth, the communicative quality of his designs is much simpler than that, as expressed by his son when Gehry prompts him to look at the camera and “tell the guys in there what you think about this house,” to which Alejo answers, “It’s good.”

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Many more close connections were forged in the years just ahead. At a Gehry family dinner in Kyoto in 1989, Frank asked me to write his official biography. Not anytime soon, he said, because he still had so much more to accomplish, but eventually. He wanted a letter of intent from me to fend off other writers clamoring for the job now that he’d hit the big time, and I gladly complied. The next day he received the Pritzker Prize at Tōdai-ji, a historic Buddhist temple in nearby Nara. But even after that significant honor, this angst-ridden striver harbored a characteristic LA inferiority complex about New York. He resented being overlooked by the canon-defining Museum of Modern Art, which was slow to recognize his singular importance. And although Gehry was among seven international architects included in Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley’s 1988 MoMA exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture,” it fell to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—then considered the country’s foremost contemporary art museum between the coasts—to give him his first major retrospective.

“The Architecture of Frank Gehry,” a breathtaking mid-career survey, opened in 1986 and traveled over the next four years to five venues, including New York’s Whitney Museum—rather than MoMA, Gehry’s first preference (which, I was told at the time, haughtily declined to take a loan show). Organized by the Walker’s distinguished design curator, Mildred Friedman (known as Mickey), whose husband, Martin Friedman, was the museum’s long-serving director, the exhibition secured Gehry’s name in art circles. But it took another decade and the international press frenzy that surrounded the opening of his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of 1991–1997 in Spain to establish him as the last great architectural titan of the waning millennium. In retrospect, the phenomenon of the so-called Bilbao Effect—the idea that an architecturally thrilling public building can be an economic boon to a city or region by increasing cultural tourism—might be of more lasting import than the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao itself. This marvel of alchemical urbanism serves as a hospitable home for art to only a middling extent, excepting its stunning permanent gallery designed for Richard Serra’s torqued rusting-steel sculptures, but it has become one of the world’s essential sightseeing attractions nonetheless.   

The Guardian’s perceptive obituary, written well before Gehry’s death by the late architecture critic Charles Jencks, a friend and client, and updated by Oliver Wainwright, noted that he “could be impatient and cantankerous, too, particularly later in life.” This was evident at the glittery eightieth birthday dinner for Martin Friedman held in 2005 in Manhattan, where the couple had retired. Gehry arrived very late with a European client of his, both obviously worse for wear as they stumbled laughingly toward their empty places. A series of toasts from the assembled art world grandees was in progress, but when Frank rose and began his tribute by declaring, “I know that everyone thinks the Friedmans made me famous, but they didn’t,” there was an audible gasp in the room. The eminent playwright who sat across from me murmured, “I hope I didn’t just hear that.” It soon became clear that Gehry wasn’t joking as he rambled on to remind the room how he’d done it all by himself. When I later told Mickey how appalled I was, to my surprise she laughed and said, “Don’t you know they’re all like that? Our job was to make Frank famous, and we did it. That’s all that matters.”

In 2001 I suddenly found myself between contracts with the glossy shelter magazines that had been my main source of income, which prompted me to revive the idea of the Gehry book. For all his avant-garde tendencies and bohemian inclinations, Frank always sought establishment validation. In the print media his primary focus was The New York Times, and he assiduously cultivated whoever was its incumbent architecture critic. When I phoned Frank and told him that this seemed the perfect moment for me to start on the biography, his response startled me: “But what would Herbert think?” This was my first inkling that he’d likely broached the subject with Herbert Muschamp, the Times architecture critic from 1992 to 2004. It was typical of Frank’s tendency to promise the same thing to several people, both because he didn’t like to say no to anyone and to make sure all his bases were covered. (The honor went to the former Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, whose Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry was published in 2015.) That the architect could be as ruthless as countless other artists throughout history had somehow never occurred to me.

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After Bilbao, even Gehry’s admirers wondered if he could ever return to that creative peak, but he did so with his Walt Disney Concert Hall of 1989–2003 in Los Angeles, the second of his indisputable masterworks. More refined and harmonious than its Basque forerunner, Disney also fulfills its main function far better: it ranks among the most acoustically successful music auditoriums of the modern era. Soon after Disney opened, however, I began to detect a definite decline in the quality of Gehry’s output. Whether this was attributable to his firm’s taking on too many assignments or to the distractions of cultural celebrity or to some other factor, I could not tell.

In 2004 I wrote a piece for House & Garden on Gehry’s newly completed Millennium Park in Chicago in which I praised several elements of his multipart scheme but found fault with the ensemble’s bandshell, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion:

Here he coasts with what might be termed logotecture, so overly familiar are the gigantic furls of silvery stainless steel framing the wood-paneled proscenium…. The Pritzker Pavilion demonstrates his recent tendency to repeat himself if a client doesn’t challenge him. He should give his trademark motif a rest.

The following year, Frank invited me to a MoMA screening of a new documentary directed by his friend Sydney Pollack, titled Sketches of Frank Gehry, but since no further details followed from Gehry or his office, I put the event out of my mind. Several weeks later, a friend who’d attended the screening asked if I’d seen the film yet, and without saying why advised me to have a look at it. I got an advance DVD from the distributor, played it on my laptop, and more than an hour into it the penny dropped. When the director asks the architect how he reacts to negative criticism, Gehry replies (using a defunct nickname that shows how long he knows me), “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.” Then he adds, “I just keep going. I don’t pay attention. What am I going to do?”

After his equivocating about the biography, this was the last straw, and I wrote him a letter saying that although I would always hold him in the highest regard as an artist, I would have nothing more to do with him personally. Decades earlier, following my adulatory Art in America piece on him, Frank had told me, “If I ever screw up, I want you to kick me in the pants,” and I naively believed him. Clearly the necessary distance a critic must keep from his subjects had evaporated, but for me it was a painful lesson about the realities of transactional journalistic friendships.

Rosemarie and I last saw Frank in 2014, at Mickey Friedman’s memorial at the Century Association in New York City. Knowing he would be a speaker, we seated ourselves as inconspicuously as possible to avoid an awkward confrontation and skipped the reception afterward for the same reason. Gehry never noticed us, and he made full amends for his earlier transgression with a moving eulogy that acknowledged the Friedmans’ decisive part in presenting him to the world as an artist of the first rank.

Now that it’s after the end, I think back to the old, pre-Bilbao Frank, when he was accessible, expansive, confiding, and utterly down-to-earth—a complete mensch. On our early trips to LA, Rosemarie and I would meet him and Berta at the Santa Monica house for drinks and then walk with them and their two little boys, Alejo and Sammy, to an early Sunday dinner at Madame Wu’s Garden, their favorite Chinese restaurant, a few blocks away on Wilshire, long before he was granted his heart’s desire and became the most acclaimed master builder of our age. Mais où sont les won-tons d’antan?