Commentary: Frank Gehry's generous and democratic architecture

I first met Frank O. Gehry, who died Dec. 5 at his California home, in November of 1982 when I was an undergraduate architecture student at the University of Virginia. He was known at the time for his own home in Santa Monica — a roller coaster of a design that slashed plywood, corrugated metal and chain link through the carcass of a modest traditional bungalow. Assuming that he had his own version of the lit-crit-based theories of architecture that were popular at the time, my nascent architectural mind wanted to know something of the arcane personal theory behind it. “What’s the deal with the asphalt floor in your dining room,” I asked. “It’s functional,” Gehry replied. “We move the table and chairs out and hose it down.” I was so floored by his direct and unassuming response that I have no memory of what we discussed next. But I understood that he was somebody worth watching.

In Chicago, Gehry is best known for the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, completed just over two decades ago. My first direct experience of a Gehry space was at a 1987 exhibit in Houston. It had been mounted by the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and was the first major overview of his work and it included a fish sculpture you could walk through. The small structure displayed eccentric wood framing clad in shingles that convincingly represented scales. In hindsight, it suggested much of what was to come, although those developments were still unknown.

It led directly to a much larger fish sculpture atop a seaside building in Barcelona that was completed in 1992 as part of a larger complex designed by the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Gehry’s office developed the design with software used by the aeronautics industry — which unlocked the ability to realize these unusual shapes with accuracy and within budget. It also created a relationship between Gehry and Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Chicago-based structural engineers who would help him build the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.

More than a quarter century after its opening in 1997, Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao remains his most celebrated work and the quintessential building of its time.

Rafael Moneo compared it to the great cathedrals. Gehry molds and forms masonry, steel and glass — the essential materials of architecture — into forms previously explored solely in sculpture. While observers always acknowledge connections between Gehry and the contemporary artists who were his friends — Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra and others — he also drew on the deep well of art history including the medieval sculptor Claus Sluter whose 500-year-old work provided the architect with a seemingly endless series of draped and hooded forms that became galleries and conference rooms within various projects. The Guggenheim’s soaring central space features a series of interior towers often compared to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” and Constantin Brancusi’s Paris studio, but I see affinities with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s early unbuilt towers from the same period as well. Gehry’s building pieces— some curved, others faceted — evoke the entire history of art and architecture while also drawing from Bilbao’s unique physical landscape.

The building connects the handsome quarters of the city’s 19th century district with the riverfront, which in the 1990s was a desolate post-industrial hellscape. He brilliantly inverted the typical museum entry; rather than ascending monumental stairs, Gehry brings visitors down broad steps to reveal the riverfront. And his seemingly obtuse forms draw on the immediate context. A long gallery slips under an existing bridge and appears as the beached hull of a ship, now displaying some of the largest pieces of contemporary art. At the other end of the building, a stack of masonry boxes recalls the vast railyard of containers that were still adjacent to the structure when I first visited in 1999.

That was 18 months or so after its much-lauded opening. I originally visited to get a glimpse of what Millennium Park had in store. At the time, it was known that he would be involved in the project, but the scope was still evolving. I was highly skeptical of the almost universal praise that had greeted the building. “The word is out that miracles still occur, and that a major one has happened here,” Herbert Muschamp had written in the New York Times shortly before the building opened.

But Gehry surprised me, much as he had done on our first meeting almost two decades earlier. “The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is as good as you’ve heard; in fact, it’s better,” I reported for Chicago Public Radio following my 1999 visit. “And therein lies the dilemma. While good architecture can be described in words, great architecture demands actual physical experience. If you care about architecture, you’ll just have to go see the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao yourself.”

Closer to home, Gehry was working on his contribution to Millennium Park. One of his initial designs for the Jay Pritzker Pavilion was distinctly un-Bilbao, an homage to Mies van der Rohe with a simple metal cover that looked like a piece of silver paper laid gently over the trellis. The civic powers-that-be quickly rejected that scheme.

As built, Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion band shell is the late 20th century answer to Louis Sullivan’s late 19th century Auditorium — both exuberant displays of unbounded architectural ambition that provide other artists with a strong frame for their work.

Most attention has always been paid to the band shell itself whose forms were quite typical of his work during the period. But his design contains three very distinct elements — the band shell, the trellis and the bridge — and the last two are actually quite different within his oeuvre and responsive to the particular needs of the overall park.

While his forms could seem casual and arbitrary, Gehry was an amazing planner who always produced concise and effective floor plans that smartly organized his buildings so that they were easier to navigate than many seemingly simpler structures. For all its remarkable shapes and flourishes, Bilbao is simple to explore with a central organizing space that leads to three linear wings of galleries.

Much of his development came through watching the work of artists more than architects. His drawings are fascinating — gestural doodles that seem indecipherable until you see them next to a completed building — at which point you understand exactly what he was drawing. But the drawings were always a means to an end — and that end was the building.

While Gehry personified the “starchitects” who received so much attention at the turn of the century, he really was at his best when working with others. The so-called “Bilbao Effect” often focused all the attention on Gehry, but his Guggenheim was just one of a collection of major design commissions in that city during the same period including Norman Foster’s Metro system, and a bridge and airport terminal by Santiago Calatrava. Similarly, Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion plays well with Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, and Kathryn Gustafson and Piet Oudolf’s Lurie Garden.

Gehry’s work was at once bright, shiny and new while pulling on all sorts of historical references — the swooping masonry of John Wellborn Root’s Monadnock Building, the tall soaring glass of Mies’ towers, the curving metal arcs of Serra, among others.

It’s easy to think of Gehry as an episodic architect, but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, his best works stand out and at a quick glance can seem out of place. But his talent as a planner, with the ability to draw things together, was nothing short of astonishing. In Millennium Park, the BP Bridge is an obvious connector, but it was essentially a bridge to nowhere when he proposed it. And the trellis above the Pritzker Pavilion’s lawn was simultaneously a brilliant solution to provide the acoustician with the broadest number of speaker locations to provide superior sound at an outdoor venue, but the stubby columns around the lawn and the shallow vaults of steel help connect the performers on stage, the audience in fixed seating and those on the lawn within a single — and singular— outdoor space.

This is an architecture of democracy and generosity. And it certainly reflects my experience with Gehry as a person.

When my wife and I got engaged, we chose a simple Gehry-designed ring from Tiffany’s. A few months later, I told Frank about her and the ring at a dinner and asked that he meet her. He immediately responded, “I’ll give her a hug!” and proceeded to do just that. His simple thoughtful and gracious gesture remains with us years later. And so do his buildings for which we can all be grateful.

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Edward Keegan writes, broadcasts and teaches on architectural subjects. Keegan’s biweekly architecture column is supported by a grant from former Tribune critic Blair Kamin, as administered by the not-for-profit Journalism Funding Partners. The Tribune maintains editorial control over assignments and content.

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