Creating Art from Absence: How Frank Gehry’s Outsider Status Shaped His Legacy

Frank Gehry, who passed away on Friday at the age of 96, always started as an outsider. He was a newcomer in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles, moving from his birthplace of Toronto before age 20. Initially studying ceramics at the University of Southern California, he graduated with a degree in architecture, eventually buying a colonial-style bungalow in Santa Monica in 1977. Gehry couldn’t stand its conventionality. So, over the next two years, he wrapped its exterior in a jarring, uneven surround of working-class materials: corrugated steel that intersected at unusual angles, punctuated by wood-framed glass cubes and dwarfed by soaring chain-link fencing. The aesthetic made him an outsider among his neighbours, who loathed the intrusion into their palm tree-lined streets. It also catapulted him into stardom.

Among his early commissions, the Santa Monica house was a decisive factor to his winning the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1989, where the judges compared him to Picasso: “iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent” were the words used to describe his forms. Seeing the “Dancing House” in Prague, or the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center, one could draw comparisons to Cubism in its discordance and otherworldliness.

Yet, Gehry always believed that architecture was — like the ceramic art he once dabbled in — inherently sculptural. To achieve the complex curves and juxtapositions, Gehry embraced computer-aided design with aplomb, just as it was becoming indispensable in the 1990s. All the while, he continued to embrace steel, titanium, and wooden structures, putting the rawness of the materials on display — much like the Brutalists who preceded him. At the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 1998, its foremost practitioner Phillip Johnson lauded Gehry as “the greatest architect we have today.”

Bilbao was the fulfilment of Gehry’s ideas. It was a dying industrial city in northern Spain when the Guggenheim Foundation commissioned him to design a contemporary art museum as daring as the works inside. Clad in titanium, the building’s curves were designed to seem random; yet their unique shapes fit into the city’s landscape. The building itself gave rise to the “Bilbao Effect,” where a single visionary building had the ability to reverse a city’s fortunes, even its destiny. It’s a notion that seems obvious today, but in the 1990s, the notion of a “starchitect” wasn’t as clear, even if it had been defined by Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright. It took Gehry and Bilbao to redefine it.

Gehry’s next great commission came in 2003, when Los Angeles’s architect to the world made a return home with the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Similar, seemingly chaotic and undulating forms soared from one of downtown LA’s tallest hills, this time combined with stunning acoustics, which Gehry himself tested at 1:10^th scale. The LA Philharmonic loved it. So precise was its sound design that, when directors found that their sheet music for a 1912 Maurice Ravel ballet had been misprinted, nobody had been able to hear the difference. Again, here was the Bilbao Effect: the Disney Concert Hall helped towards rehabilitating the image of downtown LA, even ushering in new cultural institutions like The Broad right next door.

Gehry’s star status opened new doors outside the field of grandiose buildings. His body of work includes Knoll furniture (drawing from his earliest jobs creating “Easy Edges” furniture from corrugated cardboard), jewellery and a chess set for Tiffany, and trophies for the World Cup of Hockey — a nod to his Toronto roots. For Louis Vuitton, he placed the same attention to detail into a line of 11 handbags, all diverse in their shapes and details, with designs that captured the folded arcs of Bilbao. It wasn’t the first work he did for the Maison: more than a few bags in the lineup bear a resemblance to the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a glass-lined building rising out of a reflecting pool that Gehry first designed in 2006. The structure was inspired by the Grand Palais, but looked nothing like it (or anything else, for that matter).

“I was rebelling against everything,” Mr. Gehry said in a 2012 interview with The New York Times, in context with the dominance of minimalist modernism. A life surrounded by colourful neon, Googie architecture, and hobnobbing with populist artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns would do that to anyone. “Life is chaotic, dangerous, and surprising,” he once said, one of the most famous quotes about his life’s work. “Buildings should reflect that.”

FEATURE PHOTO CREDITS: INTERIOR VIEW: WALKER COURT, ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO. ARTWORK © ROBERT HOULE, SEVEN GRANDFATHERS , 2014. PHOTO © AGO, COURTESY OF THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO.