Gehry Talks Inspiration for Acclaimed Buildings

Three of the most acclaimed recent architectural works in the world were initially met with scorn and derision.

Their creator, renowned architect Frank O. Gehry, told his stories of overcoming criticism at the Institute of Politics on Friday as he discussed the design and construction of three of his most famous buildings—the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and his private residence in Santa Monica, Calif.

Gehry, who once dropped out of the Harvard Graduate School of Design before eventually winning the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, was part of the team charged in 2004 with creating a master plan for Harvard’s expansion into Allston. He also designed the Ray and Maria Stata Center at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which sued Gehry’s firm in 2007 for alleged design flaws.

At the packed IOP Forum event, Gehry spoke at length about his inspiration for renovating his Santa Monica home. With a budget of what he said was $50,000, Gehry built a new house around the existing Dutch gambrel structure. He said he wanted to preserve the iconic presence that his home had as the only two-story house in the immediate area.

“Because I didn’t have much money, I used corrugated metal. And because I was interested in the nihilism that was prevalent, I was looking for a metaphor for that…and I sought out the most despised material universally—chain link fence,” Gehry said.

When completed, the new structure was hardly popular with the neighbors. Gehry said they complained that the residence was no longer “normal.”

Gehry said he retorted to one neighbor: “You’ve got two trailers in your backyard. You’ve got a chain link fence around those. In your front yard, you have a wreck of a car up on blocks.”

Gehry also discussed the “Bilbao effect,” asserting that the opening of the Guggenheim Museum that he designed helped improve the Spanish city’s then-faltering economy.

“The shipping industry was dead; the steel industry was dead; the brick factories were dying; all of the industries were in decline,” Gehry said of pre-Guggenheim Bilbao. “Today...it’s a different city. It’s got a real smile on its face.”

According to The Economist, tax revenue from tourist spending in Bilbao recouped the museum’s cost of construction in less than three years.

Though today Gehry is something of a local hero, the initial public reaction was harsh, with threats even made against the architect.

A similarly arduous journey — from idea to execution to acclaim — marked Gehry’s 17-year “odyssey” on Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall project. Increasing costs led to a halt on construction, and Gehry said he was blamed for the project’s failure.

“Sixty million dollars, seventy million dollars down the tubes—and I was blamed for it,” he reflected. “That was tough for me, because you go out to dinner at a restaurant, and everybody knows somebody from the Philharmonic. They come over and say ‘How could you do that, how could you? Our big chance to get a concert hall and you screwed it up!’”

Today, the concert hall—which is home to the 12-year-old Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose CEO Deborah Borda moderated the event—stands as one of the city’s cultural landmarks.

—Staff writer Luca F. Schroeder can be reached at luca.schroeder@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @lucaschroeder.