sketches of frank gehry

While I’m on summer break, I’m trying to see as many movies as humanly possible. In addition to summer blockbusters, such as Sex and the City 2, documentaries about art, architecture, and design rank high on my list of must-sees. I saw Sketches of Frank Gehry back in June and have been thinking about it ever since.

The documentary was directed and produced by Sydney Pollack. He interviewed Gehry but also made himself present in the movie. Sketches is Pollack’s first documentary, though you wouldn’t know it. The film is competent, well-shot, and structured like most documentaries of the past 20 years—conversations with Gehry are augmented by interviews with clients (including a very healthy-looking Dennis Hopper), other architects and artists, architecture critics, and friends.

Gehry is a genius, and there is simply no debating this point. It could be easy to dismiss his architecture out of hand because it is complex with unusual angles and projections. But I think that’s his genius. He’s not satisfied with 90 degree angles and straight lines. His architecture challenges the viewer’s comfort level. He’s also very competitive and struggles with self-doubt. Here is the opening scene, “What’s This Fuss About?”:

SP: is starting hard?

FG: you know it is. I don’t know what you do when you start, but I clean my desk. I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important. Avoidance, delay, denial. I’m always scared that I’m not going to know what to do. It’s a terrifying moment. And then when I start, I’m always amazed. So, that wasn’t so bad.

I love that Frank Gehry has his moments of doubt. Makes me feel more human, but also lets me know that I can allow a certain amount of organization to come into the design process.

These random facts about Frank Gehry sum up the movie for me:

~huge hockey fan (he designed the Anaheim Mighty Ducks facility, the interior of which was  inspired by Ontario rinks)

~likes boats

~competitive, but struggles with self-doubt

~fascinated by the design process (from trademark “squiggle” sketches to models and finished work)

~use of models (Barry Diller compares it the molding of claywork)

~likes awkwardness, elements that are so weird they’re interesting

~the fish sculpture was an accident. Gehry’s colleagues were “replaying” the Greek temple in their work, which gave him pause. He thought temples were anthropomorphic (which I don’t see but will follow for the sake of his argument) and took back 300 million years to the fish. He started drawing fish in a sketchbook, then realized there was something in it. Next, in a separate event, Gehry was looking at a piece of formica*, which he was using in a project. He threw the formica on the ground; the broken pieces looked like fishscales, which gave Gehry had an “aha” moment and he married the two. The fish has since appeared as sculpture, lighting, and even a building exterior. It has been done in glass (Walker) and in metal (Spain).

~the moment of truth: when a painter has a blank canvas, a brush, and a palette of colors…what do you do? “what’s that first move? I love that dangerous place.”

*The architectural critic Charles Jenkins calls formica a pristine, uptight material.