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Relax. Don't Do It.
Frank Gehry's words of advice to a roomful of Columbia shapemakers.
By Philip Nobel
August/September 2003
Frank Gehry's voice was low--his words unspooling at a lope, his pauses
deliberate and long--but there was a little smile in and around his eyes
as he spoke. He knew he was being naughty, and, droit du seigneur, he
didn't care. He was in front of a full auditorium three levels deep under the
architecture school at Columbia University, giving the second keynote (Rem
Koolhaas had delivered the first a month earlier) to kick off a giant
conference with a presumptuous name--"The State of Architecture at the
Beginning of the 21st Century"--and epochal aims: to record the cultural
moment on the occasion of the departure of the school's long-serving dean,
Bernard Tschumi. The lights were on, and the slides were waiting; Gehry had
preempted his default stump speech to preach abstinence in the bawdy house of
form, temperance to the theory-drunk, patience at a school where the
professional model is the shooting star: streak, flash, burn out.
"It's hard to start getting notoriety when you're just starting out,"
he said. "You see it with a lot of movie stars and people like that.
I've had a few artist friends who peaked in their thirties and just went
down the tubes. Just went to drink and drugs. Maybe they would have done
that anyway. So take your time. My message is: take your time. Pace yourself.
Make a firm kind of base for yourself as you go forward. Make alliances
with great people who are going to partner with you and help you make the
buildings."
It was not a crowd that would welcome that particular common sense. Poor
Tschumi squirmed through the episode and then tried to sandbag Gehry with
the first question after the talk. (He said, approximately: "You
seem to be untroubled by your decision to change the skin of your buildings
from stone to metal, even as the form remains the same. How can you explain
that?" He wanted to say: "Hypocrite! You do as you wish! I spit
on your freedoms! Reveal your imprisoning logic and submit it for review!")
Many of the people who would be at the conference a few days later--manning
panels on "Politics and Material" or "Detail and Identity"
("Is the detail the place where architecture confronts its cyclical
identity crisis?")--were there that night, ranging up behind their
dean on the podium side of the hall. They were gathered in one of those
worrisome state-of-the-union densities that make you hope at least one trendy
thinker has been exiled to spend the evening elsewhere, prepared, if necessary,
to reconstitute the academy and ensure another decade of weightless bloviation.
Of course, there was also an elephant in the room: the new dean, or rather
his or her specter, as no one had been selected at the time of that gathering
(or this writing). The committee was reportedly deadlocked last spring,
but the rumor mill was running free, mostly churning through the same three
names--Lynn, Zaha, Libeskind; Zaha, Libeskind, Lynn--as if some privileged
recitation of those five syllables might, like rubbing hands on the
genie's bottle, summon an agent to deliver the school from uncertainty.
Taking pity, it would grant three wishes, one for each: a limitless supply
of disposable logic for the idle generation of form (Lynn), a probe to uncloak
the mysteries of taste (Zaha), and a path through geometry to the unspeakable
name of God (Libeskind).
Meanwhile, there before them Gehry stood as the object lesson: the architect
who took for his muse the limits of the marketplace, the star who came in
from the cold. He ran through his recent projects, perhaps just a little
bored; he had thought too late to bring slides for a new lecture he's been
giving--one image for every building built, from the pre-glamorous years
to the present.
The last question of the night--picking up on Tschumi's line and revealing
a similar discomfort with an approach to design centered proudly in the
right brain--was a perfectly incomprehensible attack leveraged on Gehry's
lack of "cohesion." The petitioner was cocksure, and the tone
was confrontational. But translated from the Columbianese it might have
sounded like this: "How do you make decisions in the absence of a theory?
(Help me.) How do you cope with the vertigo of form? (Save me from myself.)"
"You're making it very complicated," Gehry said in that same slow
way. "When you're a kid, you say, 'Step on a crack, you break your
mother's back.' So when you're a kid, you don't step on a crack because
you don't want to break your mother's back. It's a childlike notion of power.
And I think we've turned that into, 'If you stand at a certain place with
a fulcrum, you can move the universe.' If you go at design that way, it
becomes so important and so powerful that you can't do anything. You go
into gridlock. I had a kid that came out of Eisenman's class once. He couldn't
do anything. He had gotten into something with Peter about line and
wall . He had a whole thing about line and wall . And
he had made them so precious that he could neither draw a line nor make
a wall. It was such a striving for perfection that he could never get to.
So he gridlocked.
"It's wonderful that you're interested in logic. And you're asking
more than it is even possible to tell. And you're not going to get out of
line because there is gravity that's gonna hold you down. And the culture
around us is gonna hold you down. The building department is going to hold
you down. The client, economics--everything is going to keep you in line.
So you're not going to destroy the world. You're not going to break your
mother's back if you step on a crack. You can do things. You've got to free
yourself to let those things happen." |
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