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LOS ANGELES, California / Los Angeles Times / Top News / March 1, 2009
Renowned architect Frank Gehry turns 80 today.
Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
As the renowned architect turns 80, the recession slows down his remaining grand projects.
By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
Frank Gehry, who turned 80 on Saturday, is the most famous architect in the world by a healthy margin. He is also, arguably, the most significant talent in American architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright. His firm, Gehry Partners, has streamlined a process in which his free-flowing sketches are turned into digital designs and then into dazzlingly unorthodox buildings around the world.
Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, one of architect Frank Gehry's signature structures. Brian Vander Brug/LA Times
The success of Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustical and architectural triumph, has solidified his sometimes rocky relationship with Los Angeles, where he arrived with his family from Toronto in 1947 as a teenager. He has become a surprising pop-culture icon, designing a jewelry line for Tiffany and starring in a documentary by the late Sydney Pollack and in cartoon form in an episode of "The Simpsons." He remains engaged in a range of new work, designing a huge branch of the Guggenheim Museum for a waterfront site in Abu Dhabi and fine-tuning a proposal that is among four finalists for the Dwight Eisenhower memorial in Washington, D.C.
And yet if Gehry now stands atop a mountain he spent much of his career trying to ascend -- driven by a fierce ambition he has often tried to conceal beneath what he calls an aw-shucks persona -- he does so at a moment when the mountain itself is beginning to crumble beneath his feet. After a decade in which a handful of leading architects became global stars -- with Gehry leading the charge -- and private and government clients alike were willing to finance jaw-dropping feats of architectural innovation, funding for new construction has suddenly vanished, as if overnight.
Most distressing of all for Gehry, two projects that he saw as capstones to his career, gigantic mixed-use developments on L.A.'s Grand Avenue and at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, have both been put on hold.
"I've had a disappointing year, couple of years, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," he said in a wide-ranging conversation in his office last week in which he was by turns ruminative, weary and hopeful. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."
Architect Gehry's first free-standing building in Manhattan, the new headquarters of Barry Dillers' internet company IAC.
Jennifer S Altman for LA Times
Click to read on....
At 80, Gehry remains a hungry consumer of new ideas and images and remains noticeably sensitive to perceived slights -- retaining the chip on his shoulder that has long provided him with a competitive edge over more sanguine peers.
christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com
Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times
Renowned architect Frank Gehry turns 80 today.
Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
As the renowned architect turns 80, the recession slows down his remaining grand projects.
By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
Frank Gehry, who turned 80 on Saturday, is the most famous architect in the world by a healthy margin. He is also, arguably, the most significant talent in American architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright. His firm, Gehry Partners, has streamlined a process in which his free-flowing sketches are turned into digital designs and then into dazzlingly unorthodox buildings around the world.
Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, one of architect Frank Gehry's signature structures. Brian Vander Brug/LA Times
The success of Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustical and architectural triumph, has solidified his sometimes rocky relationship with Los Angeles, where he arrived with his family from Toronto in 1947 as a teenager. He has become a surprising pop-culture icon, designing a jewelry line for Tiffany and starring in a documentary by the late Sydney Pollack and in cartoon form in an episode of "The Simpsons." He remains engaged in a range of new work, designing a huge branch of the Guggenheim Museum for a waterfront site in Abu Dhabi and fine-tuning a proposal that is among four finalists for the Dwight Eisenhower memorial in Washington, D.C.
And yet if Gehry now stands atop a mountain he spent much of his career trying to ascend -- driven by a fierce ambition he has often tried to conceal beneath what he calls an aw-shucks persona -- he does so at a moment when the mountain itself is beginning to crumble beneath his feet. After a decade in which a handful of leading architects became global stars -- with Gehry leading the charge -- and private and government clients alike were willing to finance jaw-dropping feats of architectural innovation, funding for new construction has suddenly vanished, as if overnight.
Most distressing of all for Gehry, two projects that he saw as capstones to his career, gigantic mixed-use developments on L.A.'s Grand Avenue and at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, have both been put on hold.
"I've had a disappointing year, couple of years, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," he said in a wide-ranging conversation in his office last week in which he was by turns ruminative, weary and hopeful. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."
Architect Gehry's first free-standing building in Manhattan, the new headquarters of Barry Dillers' internet company IAC.
Jennifer S Altman for LA Times
Click to read on....
