“Architecture is a Borrower”: Words of Wisdom From Frank Gehry and Eric Owen Moss

“Architecture is a borrower,” Eric Owen Moss said on Wednesday night, during a conversation with Frank Gehry at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (better known as SCI-Arc). “It gloms onto events and speculations in the arts and culture and science.”

Moss raised a compelling point on the varied sources of architectural movements and nomenclatures. He cited the Bauhaus’s adaptation of the Ford assembly line concept as an approach to constructing buildings, the physiological reference of Metabolism, and even how Deconstructivism, the widely accepted label for Gehry’s brand of architecture, stemmed from a body of literary criticism.

Gehry, of course, isn’t one to adopt labels.

“I was thrown into it because my house was sort of a visual onomatopoeia of Decon,” he said. “Not according to me, but according to Mark Wiggly, who put me in a show… Personally, I’m not into it. I don’t follow it.”

“You know,” said Moss, “Philip [Johnson] once said to me, ‘I know whats Decon’s about. It’s the diagonal line.’”

“He said that? I thought it was about copying fish.”

And that is how, over the course of 90 minutes, the conversation unfolded, meandering — like a Gehry façade, perhaps — between serious theoretical explorations, mixed metaphors, fondly remembered anecdotes, and little jabs between two longtime friends and fellow fixtures of the Los Angeles architecture scene. The single point that managed to stay the course throughout the length of this haphazard route was that architecture is not a hermetic discipline. (The title of the talk, “You Can’t Rehearse What You Haven’t Invented Yet,” is a quotation by jazz composer Wayne Shorter.)

What’s Gehry got to do with Lucien Freud, and how does architecture run parallel to and overlap art, music, or literature? He laid it all out, dispensing little bits of his multidisciplinary evolution. His own tangents and recollections shed light on what these seemingly disparate practices, at least implicitly, have to do with architecture. There’s the well-known influence that Robert Rauschenberg’s art played on the design of Gehry’s groundbreaking Santa Monica residence, of course. There are also the structures he visualizes while listening to the Brandenberg Concerto, and the fact that the music of Pierre Boulez is the exception to his distaste in minimalism. There’s even the time he mailed the complete works of James Joyce to Jay Z (perhaps that didn’t change Gehry’s practice too much, but it’s a good story).

“There are no real rules that we understand for art and music, and probably for architecture,” Gehry said towards the end, encouraging the audience of students to stay curious, and not to limit their ideas to any conceptual boxes.

Too long; didn’t watch? Below, the most uplifting and duly incendiary sound bites of the evening.

On a signature style

Eric Owen Moss: Lucien Freud once said, “All art is biographical.” Is that you? Is Bilbao your built self?

Frank Gehry: If you push that idea you can take that as an egomaniacal use of someone’s money and resources to express yourself. You have a personal signature, and you are bringing it to bear on a problem. I think for me, it’s exciting. The addition of the new place and the new client the new program excites me; I don’t think I repeat myself because of that. When I teach, I ask my students to write their signature. Your signature is intuitive, direct, it’s not contrived, and that’s what we’re looking for — that individual expression of the stuff we’re made of. When you do that, you’re the only expert in it, so it doesn’t matter what anyone else says. You may not be discovered by the rest of the world, other people might not like it, but you’re still in tact with your own person.

EOM: Let’s talk about broader accessibility to work… You’re making something that no one has ever seen before, that has no story to be shared, no collective understanding.

FG: I don’t think about it that way. I suppose you’re right. When Bilbao was being designed, in the press, everybody hated it… Now, if I need love, I just go to Bilbao for a few days.

On being an artist

FG: Richard Serra once said… “Frank Gehry is not an artist.” He said that on Charlie Rose, and he is a friend. There is that thing hanging in space about architecture as an art, and if you raise it to an art, can it be to the service of a big bad developer? I think that it can. But when anybody says to me Gehry, you’re an artist, I say no, I’m an architect. I would rather say that and do away with the discussion with that person.

On minimalism in architecture

FG: There’s a humanity in your concept, I hope… The minimalists don’t like that, because you’re supposed to be cold. Rich people feeling guilty like minimalist houses.

[Here, a singular groan from the audience.]

On minimalism in music

FG: By chance I watched [Pierre Boulez] conduct in New York. He was very minimal. Arms like this, instead of like this. And the passion was amazing.

On ownership

FG: I hate the idea of being marginalized by the construction industry, as architecture has been. I think the AIA inadvertently, by its overprotection, has infantilized us so we don’t take responsibility. I see it in my own office. Yesterday we hired a new curtain wall consultant. I said why? Because it gives us protection. Bingo, that’s exactly what I’m trying to fight against. You gotta take more responsibility for your work.

On James Joyce

EOM: James Joyce’s wife once asked him, “Why don’t you write books more people can read?”

FG: Ah, James Joyce. I met this guy Jay Z years ago. I sat next to him at lunch, and I didn’t know much about bippity boppity. I said to him, who was the first rapper? I didn’t know what else to say. He gave me a few names that sounded like bippity boppity, and I said, “Would you consider James Joyce?” He said, “Who dat?” So I sent him a complete works of James Joyce. It sounds pure rap.

On technology

FG: When I did the first Vitra building, I had trouble describing a compound curve with the tools I had from school, which was descriptive geometry. I was drawing this thing and making it all relevant, and they built it, and there was a kink. The contractor proved to me that he followed my drawings, so it was my fault that I didn’t represent it properly. It wasn’t my fault. It was both of our faults. It was the process fault. That led me to Dassault and CATIA. That didn’t happen overnight. It was a year or so in between when I realized the power of the tools that were available. I dreamt, or speculated, that the architecture could regain control of the game. Whoever has the most information wins.

And finally, a last word on L.A.

FG: Most people from the East Coast and Europe have generally not paid much attention to us. They don’t take people from L.A. seriously. It’s given me the freedom, generally, to play the games I was playing without anyone believing I was doing anything. I didn’t have that scrutiny. I believed that to be an asset.

Photographs by PoYao Shih via SCI-Arc