Gehry is the guy who broke out of the modernist box, and this exhibition is installed-appropriately enough-in the radically spiraling museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In part, the exhibition is an infomercial to promote another Guggenheim Museum-one that Gehry himself has designed for New York City. After the unprecedented critical and popular success of the museum Gehry created in Bilbao, Spain, the Guggenheim commissioned him to create one for a site on the East River in lower Manhattan. The centerpiece of the show is a huge model of that proposed structure, featuring swaths of silvery curves, which has been installed near the beginning of the show. If the Guggenheim can raise several hundred million dollars, this impressive building-or a modification of it-could get built in the next decade, a fitting capstone to Gehry’s stunning career.
But while I was in the Gehry show, I found myself drawn not to this apotheosis of Gehry-style circa 2001, but back to his earlier work as an architect, to the first rumblings that this maverick California designer was trying, literally, to think outside the box. I have always been taken by the comparatively crude little cardboard models of some of his houses from the late ’70s and early ’80s. The models were simple, glued boxes that looked like children’s toys from the attic-dusty, with a stain here or there. And they had that unmistakable handmade quality, rather like his real buildings from those years, which were made with cheap materials that clashed, such as exposed wooden 2-by-4s, chain-link fencing and plywood.
The wildest-looking model in the collection is of Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica. Calif. In 1977, he basically took a chain saw to a sweet little pink-shingled Dutch colonial and turned it into a raucous assemblage of jutting forms made of corrugated iron, more chain link and plywood-which drove the neighbors nuts. Of course, the house is now considered a masterpiece and everyone’s calmed down. But you can still see in the model a kind of raw energy and toughness. Gehry was pushing the boundaries, and getting his expressionist inspiration not from the world of architecture but from the work of contemporary artists and sculptors.
As time passed, two things happened in Gehry’s career, and you can see the results plainly in the show. First, he made a building with curves, not just angles, out of harmonious materials. It was the Vitra Museum in Germany, a snowy melange of curving white stucco with zinc roofing. The building’s stunning, like his earlier buildings, but it’s also lyrical, almost pretty-words that would never be applied to the early stuff.
Second, Gehry’s staff discovered a computer program (called CATIA) used for the aerospace industry that could translate the more complex forms he was inventing in his head into something that could be built. With this newfound technological know-how, Gehry’s work only grew more ambitious and assured. He won a competition to build a new concert hall in Los Angeles in the mid-’80s (it’s only now being constructed). The early winning design-on display in the exhibition-looks like a stack of hat boxes, while the final design, thanks to the computer, is a beautifully complex concerto of swoops and curves.
Still, Gehry’s perennial struggle to achieve the forms he wants is evident throughout the show, as much (or more so) in the later projects as in the rough little early ones. His personal design process has remained the same as it was in the beginning: he develops projects by using models, dozens and dozens of them, each a variation on a theme, each a trial-and-error attempt to make a physical replica of an idea he has in his head. Many projects in the show include a selection of these early-stage models. They are often wonderfully crude. More than once-as recently as the design for the new Manhattan Guggenheim-he has used crumpled tissue paper to suggest a totally abstract shape. At some point in the process, technicians begin to plot the forms of the model on the computer.
The architect doesn’t believe in designing directly on the computer, for fear of losing the “juice” of idea, the transition from the mind to the hand in building. He’s determined to preserve a residue of the crafted feel of his early designs, the ones that bespeak his unmistakable human touch. For all its polish as a retrospective of a distinguished career, the Gehry show has an intimate feel. It’s really a tour of an architect’s brain.
