26/04/2021 Frank Gehry Is Too Busy to Retire - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/arts/design/frank-gehry.html

What Would I Do?ʼ Frank Gehry, 92, Is Too Busy to Retire

The Pritzker-winning architect is focusing on social justice projects — and can be something of a lightning rod — but he also has
lighthearted pursuits.

By Robin Pogrebin

April 13, 2021

LOS ANGELES — It was midafternoon on a Monday and the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry — despite having just
turned 92 in a pandemic, completed the top floor of his building in the Grand Avenue development, and prepared for a show of new
sculpture at the Gagosian Gallery — had little interest in sitting back to reflect on this potentially meaningful moment in his life and
career.

Instead, he was on the move — giving his first studio tour since the Covid-19 outbreak, far more eager to discuss the myriad designs
he has underway, most of which have been proceeding. (Only a high-rise in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards stalled, and his office laid off
eight of 170 employees as a result).

Projects include this city’s version of New York’s High Line, along the Los Angeles River; new office buildings for Warner Bros. in
Burbank, and the scenic design he’s doing for the jazz opera “Iphigenia,” by Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding, which is heading
to the Kennedy Center in December. Nearly 3,000 miles away, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is set to unveil its Gehry-designed
renovation and interior expansion in May (an event the architect plans to attend).

Asked whether, given his age and accomplishments, he has considered taking a break or scaling back, Gehry dismissed the idea.
“What would I do?” he said. “I enjoy this stuff.”

A rendering of the Grand in Downtown Los Angeles, with Frank Gehry’s new residential tower and hotel, right, including a retail plaza and restaurant. It faces his
Walt Disney Concert Hall, left, shown with projections on its stainless steel skin. Red Leaf, via Related/CORE and Gehry Partners, LLP

Buzzing through his sprawling work space, the architect said he has now reached a point in his career where he has the luxury of
focusing on what matters to him most: projects that promote social justice.
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“I’m just free,” he said, “now that I don’t have to worry about fees.”

Gehry’s increasing emphasis on giving back seems to have intensified his commitment to this city. He is, for example, designing
housing on Wilshire Boulevard for homeless veterans. And about six years ago, he and the activist Malissa Shriver founded
Turnaround Arts: California, a nonprofit that brings arts education to the state’s neediest schools.

“These are labors of love,” Gehry said.

The Mansur family compound in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, made of stainless steel with stone piers. Gehry’s son Alejandro will paint the colorful canopies covering the
terrace of the family wing, at the back. Erik Carter for The New York Times

He has volunteered his time in designing a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s youth-focused educational arm, Youth
Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), in the Inglewood Civic Center south of the city, to be completed in June.

Gehry said he was inspired by Venezuela’s publicly financed musical education program, “El Sistema,” which gives underserved
children the chance to play in orchestras. A product of that program, Gustavo Dudamel, the music and artistic director of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic, who fills the same roles for YOLA, called the Gehry creation “a metaphor that says, ‘Beauty matters.’”

In transforming a 1960s bank building into a concert hall for the youth orchestra, Gehry said he pushed the organization to raise a
little extra money to achieve a 45-foot theater, the same size as his Walt Disney Concert Hall. “It pops up,” he said, “like a lighthouse
for the community.”

Gehry — who designed a center for the New World Symphony in Miami as well as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and the
Guggenheim’s branch planned for Abu Dhabi — remains animated by cultural projects with an educational component (he recently
joined the board of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, a nonprofit organization that trains promising young musicians).

He is perhaps most energized about the River Project — an effort funded by the Los Angeles County department of public works to
revitalize the 51-mile channel that runs from Canoga Park to Long Beach and was paved over in 1938 to prevent flooding.

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Gehry with a design model of the SELA Cultural Center, in South Gate, Calif., which will offer educational programs and performance spaces, including a 500-seat hall
for a community where the opportunity gap is large. Erik Carter for The New York Times

River L.A., a nonprofit group — with the support of Mayor Eric M. Garcetti — recruited Gehry to develop a master plan for the site;
out of that came the idea for an urban platform park over the concrete with grassy spaces and a $150 million cultural center.

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Called the SELA Cultural Center (named after its Southeast Los Angeles location), it will be financed with public and private funds
and serve as a space for local artists as well as professionals. Those likely to contribute programming include Dudamel; Michael
Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Benjamin Millepied, the founder of the L.A. Dance Project.

This cultural component has yet to take specific form. Millepied said he will start “by identifying good local dance organizations and
understanding how to best collaborate with and support them.”

But some have criticized Gehry’s involvement in the project — a public comment period on the plan ended recently — as big-footing
community leaders, lacking experience with outdoor space and inviting gentrification.

“The potential for a tragic backfire is huge,” warned a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “We could pour millions of public dollars
into a plan that looks impressive but drives out its target audience — communities that have found it hard just to survive in recent
decades.”

Gehry has tried to address such concerns and emphasized in an interview that his focus was on creating affordable housing and open
space.

“We’re working on social housing opportunities,” Gehry said, “to promote home ownership among the existing population.”

Aerial view of the Los Angeles River, now a flood control channel remade with concrete. The site for the new SELA Cultural Center will be at top right, past the 710
Freeway. Gehry Partners, LLP

Nevertheless, activists remain unhappy about Gehry’s approach to the project, preferring to return the tributary to its original state.
“As famed as Gehry is, and as much as that fame has brought attention to the river, there is no better architect than Mother Nature,”
said Marissa Christiansen, the executive director of Friends of the LA River, an advocacy group.

Gehry’s current proposal “shows a lack of innovation and comprehensive understanding of the watershed that feeds the river,” she
added. “It hasn’t been fully studied yet to see if there are other possibilities.”

Gehry, as the face of his firm, remains the target of such criticism, but Gehry Partners is made up of long-serving members who work
closely with him, including his wife, Berta, Meaghan Lloyd, David Nam, Craig Webb, Tensho Takemori, Laurence Tighe, John Bowers
and Jennifer Ehrman.

The operation has become something of a family affair. In addition to Berta Gehry, the head of finance, Gehry’s son Sam is also an
architect (he designed his father’s new Santa Monica home) and his other son, Alejandro, is an artist who contributes work to his
father’s projects. (Gehry’s daughter, Brina, teaches yoga in New York.) “We’re a mom-and-pop shop,” Gehry said.

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And while he can be a lightning rod on the River Project, he is also engaged in more lighthearted pursuits, such as his reinterpretation
of the Hennessy X.O bottle for the cognac’s 150th anniversary last year: a crinkled sleeve of 24-carat- gold-dipped bronze, encased in
sculptural glass.

Inspired by his 5-year old granddaughter, who calls him, “Nano,” Gehry created an oversized “Alice in Wonderland” tea party,
complete with a Mad Hatter. That piece, along with colossal vertical fish lamps of polyvinyl and copper suspended from the ceiling,
will be featured in Gehry’s sculpture show, opening June 24 at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space.

A model of Luma Arles, opening this summer in Arles, France. The cultural center was commissioned by Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation. The exterior is stainless
steel. Erik Carter for The New York Times

“Late in his life, he’s really free to be creative without compromise or collaboration,” said Deborah McLeod, senior director of the
gallery. “How much fun this is for Frank Gehry to make whatever he wants.”

While the architect appears slightly more stooped and his hair more wispy, he continues to exude a childlike excitement about design
details.

Like how he played with blocks of metal for the Swiss art patron Maja Hoffmann’s $175 million arts complex, Luma Arles, scheduled to
open in late June.

How he’s experimenting with a softer metal to achieve the effect of a watercolor painting with his design for a museum of medicine on
the campus of the China Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan. “By folding the metal,” Gehry said, “you will get a beautiful surface.”

And how he used white glass for his Warner Bros. project along the Ventura Freeway, as he did for Barry Diller’s IAC world
headquarters on the West Side Highway in New York City. “I thought of them like icebergs,” Gehry said of his buildings, “floating
along the freeway.”

Dressed in a blue T-shirt and brown corduroys, his reading glasses perched atop his head, the architect talked about how much he’s
enjoyed his give-and-take with Jeffrey Worthe, the developer of the Warner Bros. project, for whom Gehry is also designing a hotel
complex on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. “He cares about architecture,” Gehry said.
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A model of China Medical University’s Medicine Innovation Museum, Taichung, Taiwan. The undulating steel facade catches the light and makes the building look like
a watercolor. Gehry Partners, LLP

Worthe, for his part, said he’s been surprised by Gehry’s openness to input and cost savings. “He never thinks it’s perfect,” Worthe
said, “never thinks he’s got all the answers.”

That is not to say that Gehry doesn’t retain a healthy ego. In talking about the popular contemporary art museum he designed for the
Louis Vuitton Foundation in 2014, the architect said, “I think we nailed it pretty good.”

And he clearly takes pride in designing private homes for prominent clients, such as the elegant family compound in Cabo San Lucas,
Mexico, for Hassan Mansur of the Surman automotive group. Or the Colorado “Meeting House” he designed with a contoured
stainless steel roof for Michael and Jane Eisner in 2018.

Perhaps most notably, Guggenheim Bilbao made the idea of destination architecture de rigueur, though Gehry said he is focused on
the challenges ahead, not what he has already accomplished.

“I don’t know if I take credit for anything,” Gehry said. “I’m not that interested in that.”

“I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he continued, “but I can look at projects and see all the things I should have done differently.”

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Models of the King Street residential project in Toronto. The 74- and 84-story towers are the architect’s tallest to date and are meant to reflect the ambient light of the
city where he was born. Erik Carter for The New York Times

One project retains a special pride of place: the pair of towers that are part of the King Street development in his native Toronto — the
architect’s tallest project to date.

“New York has Rockefeller Center — it’s a coherent architectural piece and it lasts, it holds its own,” Gehry said, adding that he hoped
his King Street effort “holds together like that.”

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“My grandmother’s street is just up there,” Gehry said, pointing to a rendering on the wall. “My grandfather’s hardware store was
here. So I hung out on this street.

“The city gave us extra height,” he added, “because it was me coming home.”
Robin Pogrebin is a reporter on the Culture desk, where she covers cultural institutions, the art world, architecture and other subjects. She is also the co-author of “The
Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.” @rpogrebin • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Retire? Gehryʼs Got No Time.

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