Frank Gehry Interview (page: 5 / 6) Award-Winning Architect	Print Interview

What can you predict about the future of architecture?

Frank Gehry: I hang on to democracy, sort of, even though it's not perfectly practiced, that this has changed the game a lot. And you see a lot of architects, a lot of ideas being more accepted. There are more all-star architects today than there were when I was a kid. There are many different kinds of work, signatures in work, and we do co-exist. I like Bob Stern's work a lot. So we can be different, we can co-exist. We're going to have to find ways to make cities that express that. They can't be the historical, idyllic 19th century model anymore, because we're not living like that anymore, and our world isn't like that. We're finding ways to move forward, while learning from the past. You don't ignore it, you don't destroy it, but you build from it.
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I think pluralism is the most optimistic. There are now many ideas, many possibilities. How do you bring that together into a new city form?

What role do you see yourself playing in that?

Frank Gehry: You just do your work, and if somebody likes it, they like it, and if they don't, you don't try to sell them on it. I think that most of the world wants to live in the past, and I think it is going to catch up with us at some point, and I don't know when that's going to happen. Maybe it's my fantasy. Maybe I want it to happen because I'm tired of it. I think we should start living in the present in trying to deal with it. It seems like it would be much more positive.

I think the blurring of the lines between art and architecture has got to happen. I don't think these categories are working very well. I am finding the crossover much more exhilarating and much more interesting, and the collaboration much more interesting. In architecture, I don't think you can build Rockefeller Center today. It represents a different politic, a different ethic, a different idea.

The grand monument kind of thing?

Frank Gehry: It just represents the power of the Rockefellers, and I see it breaking down and becoming much more pluralistic, which leads me to collaboration. I think that our politics suggest that many ideas could coexist, and the richness of ideas coexisting interests me, and it's led me to collaborating with other architects, with other artists, and I find that exhilarating and very fruitful. Things happen. I just collaborated with Philip Johnson and Claes Oldenburg and his wife and Richard Serra and Larry Bell.

On what project?

Frank Gehry: On a house, which the guy isn't building.

He's not building it after all that?

Frank Gehry: No. No. It's very painful when these things happen, but when you do houses, you are dealing with emotion at some kind of high pitch. So I never expect much, but this one got pretty good. It was like a chess game. I had the biggest piece of it. It was my project. I brought them all in, and Philip had a little guest house, and he made his move on the guest house, and then I would play against him. It was like a chess game, and he is so brilliant, this guy! He could preempt my trajectory. He would get me just before I made the move. And then Claes had done stuff before that had seeped into my head through the binoculars and stuff like that. So some of the shapes, after the fact, I could recognize were coming from way back somewhere. Those shapes turned on Richard Serra to do a new kind of piece, which came out of the house. So there was this play happening. When you see the whole package, you can see the energy. If it was built, it would be really clear. We all can feel it. We can see it, and that's kept us going. That's pretty exciting. That's really taking the best people you can get and upping the ante a lot.

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