Peter Aspden profiles the famed architect:
Gehry’s spectacular buildings – the most famous being the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles – are said by his critics to overwhelm the environment in which they appear. His signature style – call it “metallic-sensual” for short – is, they say, repetitive and disrespectful of local context. He designs buildings by scrunching up pieces of paper. He enjoys his celebrity, and his patrons enjoy the association with what has become one of the world’s leading cultural brands. Need a new museum? Call Frank Owen Gehry on the Starchitect Hotline. Colour supplement coverage and urban regeneration guaranteed, cultural credibility cemented.
All of those criticisms have always struck me as misguided, or malicious, or just plain daft.
(The scrunching of the paper appeared as a joke in Gehry’s cameo on The Simpsons.) But that loaded epithet “starchitect” evidently stings. “You know, journalists invented it, and now they use it to damn us,” he continues in his defensive overture to our talk. I love his architecture, I say with honesty, and in the hope that the discordant theme will blow over. … Mention of the Guggenheim has a mellowing effect. “Somebody told me, a political type, that that building helped to change the political climate in the Basque country,” says Gehry. “They wanted me to do the same for their country!” he says with a little laugh. (He won’t reveal which country.) “Once it was built, this separatist movement that was trying to find its own identity suddenly had its own icon. There was something to be positive about that wasn’t there before. That’s what I was told.” He sounds slightly embarrassed by the magnitude of the claim. “I never thought of it like that.”
(Photo of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain via Flickr user ahisgett)
The Dish 