Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Architecture
Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry Details
Review “Goldberger’s big, colorful biography is a tale of moxie and success in the New World . . . an encounter with an architect who is ambitious, cocky and clever—and [a guide who] will present him with a wry and trenchant perspective . . . An informative, startling journey into the inner sanctums of modern architecture’s power structure.”—Nicholas Fox Weber, The New York Times Book Review"If you're interested in Frank Gehry, the creative force who has conjured up everything from the ebullient billows of the Bilbao Guggenheim to the strong lines of our very own Concord Pavilon from 1975, I can't recommend this expansive survey of his life and work too highly."--John King, San Fransisco Chronicle"An enthralling story . . . more gripping than any novel . . . Gives a deep insight into the life of a revolutionary architect and modern architecture. Both architects and lay people who are itnerested in arts and architecture will benefit from it."--The Washington Post Book Review "Excellent, comprehensive [and] undeniably fascinating . . . Mirroring the rise of contemporary architecture, Gehry emerges from the constraints of mid-century modernism, grapples with questions of urban development and human scale . . . To a remarkable extent, he seems to have found a language of his own, which he can finally and fully articulate."--James Tarmy, Bloomberg Business"Fascinating . . . Agilely balances the disparate subjects of art and biography. Goldberger's critical assessments of Gehry's designs are insightful and often riveting, but he does not neglect the prosaic details of the man's personal life."--Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch"A big biography . . . penetrating . . . revealing"-Susan Stamberg, NPR"A critically fluent, socially and psychologically acute, and well-constructed comprehensive biography, the first of the 'most famous architect in the world.' . . . With avid precision and invaluable insight, Goldberger charts the complicated, punishing battles Gehry waged to construct his ambitious, dreamworld buildings, from private homes to Guggenheim, Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Facebook headquarters, and beyond. The result is an involving work of significant architectural history and a discerning and affecting portrait of a daring and original master builder."--Donna Seaman, Booklist "A riveting storyteller and accomplished reporter . . . [Paul Goldberger] offers a comprehensive look at not only the stories behind Frank Gehry's acclaimed buildings but also the experiences and influences that shaped his life and work. His book is full of little-known facts about the Pritzker Prize-winner that will surprise the most knowledgable Gehry-philes."--Architectural Digest "Terrifically readable . . . satisfying detail on Gehry's career path and hugely complex personality."--Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times "[Goldberger] paints the architect as a down-to-earth sort who designs eminently functional buildings that respond to their surroundings, exhibit continuity with the past, and embrace Earthlings despite looking like crashed spaceships. He contextualizes Gehry's work with smart discussions of trends in modernism and the Los Angeles art scene that inspired such trends, and offers his usual shrewd, evocative insights."--Publishers Weekly"This is a proper biography, being as much about the personal life of Gehry as it is about his buildings. It reads well, mostly avoiding archi-speak and technicalities, preferring the clarity of plain English."--Architectural Record"Goldberger interrogates the peculiar psyche and restless contradictions of the man to shed light on the motivations behind the architecture."--Samuel Medina, Metropolis"Wonderfully detailed . . . gregariously fascinating . . . invaluable . . . All future biographies will be indebted to Goldberger's groundbreaking, affectionate work."--Steve Donohghue, Open Letters Monthly "Richly researched, intelligent, and graceful."--Kirkus Reviews Read more About the Author PAUL GOLDBERGER, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, spent fifteen years as the architecture critic for The New Yorker and began his career at The New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism for his writing on architecture. He is the author of many books, most recently Why Architecture Matters, Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, and Up From Zero. He teaches at The New School and lectures widely around the country on architecture, design, historic preservation, and cities. He and his wife, Susan Solomon, live in New York City. Read more
Reviews
Frank Gehry is today's most famous American architect, now comparable to that other Frank -- Frank Lloyd Wright. So it is high time there was an authoritative Gehry chronicle. As a biography the new Goldberger book is as important and insightful about an architect’s motivations and evolving frame of mind as Le Corbusier: A Life, by Nicholas Fox Weber.The author takes us from Gehry’s difficult childhood in Toronto in the 1930s, through the move to Los Angeles in 1947, architecture school at USC, a stint in the army, city planning at Harvard, work for shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, time in Paris and then back to LA where he launched his practice in 1962. There he found friendship with, and inspiration from, a circle of up-and-coming modern painters who incorporated ordinary found objects in their work. Subsequent chapters cover the building of his and second wife Berta’s famous cyclone fence house in Santa Monica, his fish sculptures and cardboard furniture, the commissions for Bilbao and Disney, the range of New York work, the Dwight Eisenhower Memorial in Washington D. C., and the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, which opened last year.The author is adept at drawing Gehry out and getting at the thinking, and the contexts and stories, behind the designs. In a way Goldberger acts as kind of architectural therapist, helping Gehry unravel and make sense of a lifetime of anxiety about his own work and, in effect, complementing the actual psychotherapy Gehry received from his friend the psychologist Milton Wexler. So I guess you could say that this book is the architect’s ultimate “psychiatry couch session.”One theme that’s especially strong throughout Building Art is the sense of contradiction, both within Gehry’s nature and his art. For example, Goldberger writes: “Frank’s work represented emotion as much as intellect and emerged out of intuition far more than theory; like all of his architecture, Bilbao was at once pragmatic and idealistic.” He makes the point that Gehry was heavily influenced, in a push-pull sort of way, by the mid-century California modernism of his early milieu. Describing the billowing shapes of Disney Hall, he writes: “The great sails were a symbol of the new, but they were also a way of creating decoration, or giving the building an element that existed solely for visual pleasure. Frank was consciously going against the puritanical strain that had always run through modernist architecture, the belief that a building needed to be ‘honest,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘rational’ — that ornamentation was not just a self-indulgent frill and a useless return to historical copying, but an ethical transgression, a violation of modernist principles.”A related theme is Gehry’s desire to express movement in architecture, leading to his manipulation of fish shapes and compound curves, which drew inspiration from Japanese carp and Greek sculpture. Expressive movement would become his way of providing the third ingredient in the classical Vitruvian definition of architecture as “commodity, firmness, and delight.” Goldberger explains: “The architecture of Bilbao would articulate his larger goals more clearly than ever before: he wanted less to shock than to find a fresh and different way of using architecture to produce the sensations of satisfaction, comfort, and pleasure that more traditional buildings did.”I have experienced a concert at Disney Hall and there Frank Gehry made not only a new symbol for LA on the outside, but also a space that lifts the audience, reshapes and recombines it with the orchestra, and transports both into a sensual new reality. It’s a room that does more than reverberate — it resonates. So does this book.
