Frank Gehry: Lunatic, Lover, Poet

It seems that the only way for me to find time and blog is to be stopped dead in my tracks by the flu. Oh well. While I'm catching up on my readings, and some administrative stuff that I've put off for too long, allow me to share an article I wrote for Condo Living:



Frank Gehry: Lunatic, Lover, Poet

In the Shakespearean play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the Duke observes that “…the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.” One could focus, and rightly so, on how lunatics, lovers, and poets are composed largely of imagination. Upon greater scrutiny however, one could also argue that lunatics, lovers and poets reflect different, equally valid uses of the imagination. Lunatics see things that aren’t there. Lovers see things that they want to be there. And poets make what is unreal, real.

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Frank Gehry is lunatic, lover, and more importantly, poet. And the key to understanding the phenomenal critical and commercial success of Frank Gehry is to recognize how he has failed.

During his formative experiences in the art, as he was exploring the dazzling possibilities in the redefinition of the dynamic between form and function, Frank Gehry, prior to his acceptance in the University of Southern California, was held back by his relative lack of skill as a draftsman. Now, in terms of a profession, to be deficient in a certain skill could limit the possibilities of gainful employment. But for visionaries such as Gehry, this paucity only encouraged him to develop new ways of seeing.

Gehry recalls, fondly, the liberating creative joy that lies at the heart of accepting limits:

“I was trained early in my career by a Viennese master to make perfection, but in my first projects, I was not able to find the craft to achieve that perfection…I chose to use the craft available, and to work with the craftsmen and make a virtue out of their limitations.”

It is this capacity to find joy in the midst of what ordinary men would classify as moments of despair that lend joie de vivre to Gehry’s works. To understand the exuberance at the heart of Gehry’s art, we have to understand the different ways in which people can find delight. There are some forms of self-amusement that generate fun at the expense of another’s dignity. This is the staple of Filipino noontime variety shows, and a constant reminder of our need as a people to celebrate the many instances of true artistry where a distinctly Filipino comic sensibility allows us to laugh with one another, and not at one another. There are other forms of entertainment that require an almost total immersion in the minutiae essential to forming a worldview that allows you to appreciate the sophistication behind the humor. This is the staple of many situational comedies and, oddly enough, bulletin board threads that debate the faster than lightspeed science used in the Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars universe. The joy implicit in Gehry’s works is neither shallow nor (and I would like to apologize in advance to the nerds with whom I share both an unhealthy love of speculative fiction and an inclination towards hermitage anywhere there is an internet connection) self-involved. As one critic pointed out:

“…there are no gloomy Gehry buildings. One cannot think of anything he has done that does not make one smile…There is wit, but no fashionable in-jokes or one-liners; these are light and lively designs and buildings that lift the spirit with revelations of how the seemingly ordinary can become extraordinary by acts of imagination that turn the known into new configurations that engage the mind and eye…”

Gehry doesn’t do cute for cuteness’ sake. Though Gehry’s designs for a number of products outside the field of architecture such as the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey, the Wyborovka Vodka bottle, and a wristwatch for Fossil, certainly speak of an effortless facility for wit and charm even in otherwise less monumental work. He does not need to engage in ostentatious displays of sheer artistic brio just because he can. Again, this is true, notwithstanding the sheer audacity of Gehry's design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, whose sweeping irregular paeans to asymmetrical grace and playful exploration of how light can be used to add transform the irregular into the sublime is a testament to his unbridled innovation. Gehry creates wonderful buildings that celebrate the astonishing capacity that all true art has to bring joy and cultivate wonder. This is nowhere more apparent than in Gehry’s home.

Gehry converted what he called “a dumb little house with charm” into a showcase for what modern day domestic bliss should be sheltered in. He took common materials such as chain link fencing, corrugated aluminum, unfinished plywood, and used them as accents to highlight the structural elements of the house, creating a radically comfortable vision of re-imagined coziness. This is, for those who were weaned on belabored acoustic versions of songs originally recorded with full bands, what was originally meant by MTV’s Unplugged. At its best, songs bereft of gratuitous adornment are a lot like Gehry’s house: oddly familiar, just a hair’s breadth short of being simultaneously over and underwhelming, but with great, lean lines. If you can imagine Sting performing material from his album Dream of the Blue Turtles with both Marsalis brothers in a hole in the wall speakeasy somewhere in New Orleans, then you can imagine the understated creative elegance of Gehry’s home in Santa Monica. Home improvement, indeed.

It is easy to dismiss Gehry’s attempts to re-conceive structure and space as an exercise in aesthetic self-gratification. Some critics are disquieted by Gehry’s inclination to view all architectural challenges as intense, personal explorations of what can be done with his unique vision, that he produces his buildings largely to serve his own purposes. To subscribe to this view is to subscribe to the view that Gehry is, in some way, architecture’s Kevin Costner: an otherwise skilled, but flawed visionary who insists that all stories can be told through interminably self-serving three hour epics. Nothing can be further from the truth.

Truth be told, Gehry is not content to re-imagine what buildings and homes could be. He seeks to convince the earnest, unseeing majority to reconsider what their buildings and homes should be. In the same way that Will Ferrell came along and convinced an entire generation of moviegoers into accepting the fact that the skillful use of unbearable silences elevates the amusing to the irredeemably funny, Gehry wants us to realize how our homes can be, through the inspired juxtaposition of the comfortably familiar and the breathtakingly radical can be an opportunity to not just see, but feel and live in the joy one can only experience in the presence of timeless art.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy…

It takes lunatics, lovers, and poets to help us realize that whenever we understand what brings us joy, that realization brings us closer to the experience of a source of joy. Frank Gehry, lunatic, lover and poet makes it easier to think of a life changed, for the better, by living in a place one could truly call home.