Frank Gehry Interview

What first made you think of being an architect? What attracted you to this field?

Frank Gehry: My grandmother played with me on the floor with blocks when I was eight years old in Canada, and she got cuttings for her wood stove from the shop. They were like bandsaw and jigsaw cuttings, and they were odd shapes, and we used to play, make fantasy cities. Grandmother! So it was like a license from an adult to play, creative play.
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Anyway, I didn't remember that until I was struggling and struggling with what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was a truck driver in L.A., going to City College, and I tried radio announcing, which I wasn't very good at.

I tried chemical engineering, which I wasn't very good at and didn't like, and then I remembered. You know, somehow I just started racking my brain about, "What do I like?" Where was I? What made me excited? And I remembered art, that I loved going to museums and I loved looking at paintings, loved listening to music. Those things came from my mother, who took me to concerts and museums. I remembered Grandma and the blocks, and just on a hunch, I tried some architecture classes.
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Once you tried the architecture classes, did you take to it right away?

Frank Gehry: At first I didn't do great. In fact, I flunked the first class in perspective drawing, and it really got me angry. So I went back the next semester and took it and got an A, and then I had an architecture drafting class, which the teacher and I got along real well. He was an architect. At the same time, I was taking classes at USC, summer classes in ceramics and art, drawing, art design, and the ceramics teacher -- Glen Lukens at the time -- was having a house designed by Raphael Soriano, and Glen somehow looked at me and said, "I just have another hunch." He said, "I would like you to meet Soriano," and I did, and I watched how Soriano -- a guy with a black suit and a black tie and a beret, you know -- I mean, he was a really funny guy. But there was something about it that excited me, maybe the drama of it, maybe the theater of it, and he knew what he was doing. He was very Miesian. He did very stark things, and that all excited me. Based on Glen's recommendation, I took a class at night in architectural design, and I did really well. I was skipped into second year.
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What school was this?

Frank Gehry: USC. That was the only architecture school at that time.

I couldn't afford it, but I made enough scholarships for architect school. Somehow I worked and got through. Then once I got in it, I was off to the races, except the first half of the second year, my teacher came in and called me in and said, "This isn't for you. You're not going to make it," and somehow I worked through that. And that guy works at the airport. I see him every once in a while, the teacher. I mean, he acknowledges his mistake, of course, but it's -- I mean, I just sort of kept going. It was dogged persistence once I got into it.
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What was the turn-on for you? How would you describe it to somebody who doesn't know that much about architecture? What makes it exciting for you?

Frank Gehry: What got me excited in the beginning were the social issues. I come from a very lefty liberal family in Canada, and architecture looked like it was the panacea. You could make housing for the poor and make wonderful cities, city planning in the future and so on. That was the initial turn-on. That lasted me all the way through school, actually.
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When I got out of school I hit the brick wall. You can't do any of that. It doesn't exist. You can't do it. There are no clients for social housing in America. There is no program, no nothing. City planning? Forget it. It's a kind of bureaucratic nonsense. It has nothing to do with ideas. It only has to do with real estate and politics.

I used to say, "I don't want to do houses for rich people." I always said that through school. "I'm just not going to do that." But I started to find some excitement in the forms, the spaces, being able to conceive of something and then see it built. The process of building, the working with the craftsmen -- or lack of craftsmen is more likely -- but trying to. It is an energy, and it is a mind game too, trying to get these people motivated. I guess it's like directing a movie. It's similar, except there's legal implications times jillions. But it's really exciting when you get to the level I am at now, where I have a lot of freedom.
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I don't get a lot of projects, but I get enough, and when I do get them, usually people want what I am doing and egg me on to explore things, and that's exciting. Then the social thing comes to the back door. At the end, you get some power because of the work to then address the social issues, not in a global sense, but in your own environment, your own immediacy. So that is gratifying. It did come. You do get a little bit of power to say things and do things.

To make a difference in the world?

Frank Gehry: Make a difference in a microcosm, but in the world, we don't know yet.

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