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February 28, 2009
Frank Gehry considers an accomplished past and uncertain future
Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
This article salutes Frank Gehry as he turns 80, and makes note of his accomplishments. But all is not well in Gehry's psyche as the worsening economic crisis has created a world that seems to have little need of starchitects.
And yet if Gehry now stands atop a mountain he spent much of his career trying to ascend -- driven by a fierce ambition he has often tried to conceal beneath what he calls an "aw, shucks" persona -- he does so at a moment when the mountain is beginning to crumble beneath his feet. After a decade in which a handful of leading architects became global stars -- with Gehry leading the charge -- and private and government clients alike were willing to finance jaw-dropping feats of architectural innovation, funding for new construction has suddenly vanished.
Most distressing of all for Gehry, two projects that he saw as capstones to his career, gigantic mixed-use developments on L.A.'s Grand Avenue and at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, have both been put on hold.
"I've had a disappointing year, couple of years, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," he said in a wide-ranging conversation in his office last week in which he was by turns ruminative, weary and hopeful. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."
This article has also been noticed by Develop Don't Destroy:
Frank Gehry, The "Little Guy" With the Big Buildings, Says Atlantic Yards Has "Stopped"
DDDB observes that Gehry seems to be off the Atlantic Yards project, despite denials by developer Forest City Ratner. There's also the question of why the architect wants to portray himself as allied with the "little guy" when he sides with the powerful clients like Bruce Ratner.
If Mr. Gehry wants to think of himself as "the little guy," that is quaint. But then, speaking about Atlantic Yards, for example, he shouldn't say things such as this:
...There are some buildings that are background, some that are foreground. Miss Brooklyn (the tallest building), I call my ego trip...
or this:
This is an extraordinary opportunity for an architect like me, I’ve been doing these iconic buildings, like Disney Hall and the Bilbao museum, but not an opportunity like this, to do housing, to do a mixed project and build a whole neighborhood practically from scratch and fit it into an existing fabric and make something special out of it.
Now we're not sure if he is just "the little guy" or also a self-styled "liberal do-gooder" like his boss (former boss?) Bruce Ratner.
Posted by steve at February 28, 2009 5:07 PM