Frank Gehry is 81 years old, yet this world-renowned architect isn’t slowing down. His wit, intellect and desire to create are still great, and his keenness to retain a child-like imagination and sense of wonder seems to have stalled the ageing process.

"Architecture and art can transform a person, even save someone. 
It can for children – for anyone. It still does for me," says Gehry, who maintains a hectic travel schedule to oversee his far-flung commissions (Sydney and Abu Dhabi currently) and remains at the helm  of his architecture practice in Los Angeles. 



Since August 2010, when Vanity Fair magazine conducted an extensive peer survey, Gehry has carried, reluctantly, the title of ‘most important living architect’. Such platitudes mean little to Gehry, who deplores the word ‘starchitect’, which he considers a glib moniker contrived by "mean-spirited" journalists. "I see every new project as a challenge. The fame stuff and attention came into my life late, in my 50s," he explains. "By then you’re pretty well formed and your patterns of insecurities are well formed."

This modesty belies Gehry’s influence on the cultural legacy of the last century. Three of his buildings – the 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the 2004 Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Chicago, and his 1977-78 Santa Monica house – were included in the Vanity Fair survey, and his innovative museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim Foundation was voted the ‘most important piece of architecture built since 1980’.

There is little doubt his peers respect him. At 91, Philip Johnson – considered the grandfather of modernism – visited the then just-completed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and famously remarked to Gehry while standing in the atrium: "Architecture is not about words. It’s about tears, I get the same feeling in the Chartres Cathedral." This was a supreme compliment for Gehry, who initially found inspiration not in the great works of modernism, but in the High Gothic churches of Europe, specifically Chartres.

While his peers applauded, the local Bilbao community was initially unconvinced. When he first unveiled the plans for the 265,000-square-foot luminous titanium-clad museum that appeared to buckle and waver like a school of fish fleeing a predator, "there was a threat in the newspaper: ‘Kill the American architect’," Gehry explains. "I was worried for a while. I thought they meant it." But when the museum generated 310 million euros in the first year of opening, a coup after Gehry completed the project three million under budget, the local residents soon warmed to it. "The building paid for itself in the first eight months it was open," Gehry says. 



ARTIST OR ARCHITECT?


Despite his current confidence, Gehry was not always convinced of his design ability. As a young Jewish-Canadian ÈmigrÈ in Los Angeles, Gehry was unable to connect with the august designs of the European-influenced east-coast architects who were setting the pace across the US. At 18, Gehry enrolled in the University of Southern California, and was soon immersed in a pop-culture climate where open-mindedness and creative freedom were championed. He found inspiration in the company of painters and sculptors. "My people around me were painters like [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Jasper] Johns. They were painting using junk and making beauty," he says. "I think I chose my way of working because of my life-long involvement with painters and sculptors."

Despite these friendships, not all artists were so accommodating. American sculptor Richard Serra mocked that Gehry was merely a plumber. "Artists dismiss me as an architect and architects dismiss me as an artist. Richard Serra joked that my work is not about art because I put a toilet in it."

After graduating from USC, Gehry completed two years of military service and one year of postgraduate study in town planning at Harvard University. He then settled in LA intent on developing a practice, but success was a long way off. "I had an encounter for a few years with a superb gentleman, a psychoanalyst, [who] was treating my friends, the painters," says Gehry. "We had sessions in a group of 15. I didn’t talk for two years ... [it was] pointed out to me that I was a judgemental bastard. They were right, I was. Once I understood that, I started listening." Listening to people allowed Gehry to learn to collaborate successfully with clients. "A lot of my colleagues want to go elsewhere [away from the client’s wishes]. But I’ve always thought architecture was a service business."

REVOLUTIONARY DESIGNS


In 1978, when Gehry completed his family home in Santa Monica, his reputation as a serious avant-garde architect was secure. The home was described by The New York Times as "like a Gordon Matta-Clark house-deconstruction sculpture". But it was another decade or so before the critical acclaim translated into commercial success. His revolutionary designs unnerved some of the more conservative philanthropists in LA, and in the 1980s he famously missed out on high-profile commissions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art. But his relationship with the former Guggenheim Foundation director Thomas Kern proved formative; career defining, in fact. After Bilbao, the commissions for large civic and commercial spaces flooded in: the DZ Bank building in Berlin; the Experience Music Project in Seattle; the Gehry Tower in Hanover; and the MarquÈs de Riscal Hotel in Spain, to name but a few. 

With the architecture world now focused on the Middle East, Gehry has committed to working with the Guggenheim Foundation once more to construct an enormous museum (12 times the size of the New York flagship) on the newly developed Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Gehry and others are optimistic about the development. Abu Dhabi offers the possibility of a major realignment, a chance for a Middle Eastern city to become a great cultural centre like Beirut and Cairo were in past ages. "It’s presumptuous to think you can build a museum that would change the world," says Gehry. "But we’re going to find out what power it has." Abu Dhabi will be Gehry’s largest commission to date, yet ask him if this will be his legacy project and he rebuffs the suggestion. "What you aspire to is a building that inspires people. You make do, the building is built and people get used to it," he says.

Gehry’s claim that "since I’m not going to be here I don’t care [how I’ll be remembered]î is endearing, but one suspects from his comments that his greatest achievement has been teaching and mentoring young architects and, long before that, children in grades three to six. He offers the same advice: "I ask the students to write their signatures on pieces or paper and put them on the table. I have them look at them and I point out, ‘They’re all different, aren’t they? That’s you, that’s you, that’s you. That’s what you have to find. You have to find your signature’."

AUSTRALIA’S GEHRY BUILDING

"When I initially met with the clients in Bilbao they actually asked for the Sydney Opera House," said Gehry during his recent trip to Sydney for the unveiling of plans for his latest commission – the $150 million Dr Chau Chak Wing building at UTS. The Faculty of Business at UTS is clearly thrilled to have secured the boasting rights of Australia’s first Frank Gehry building.

Professor Roy Green (dean of the faculty) has enthused that Gehry Partners has delivered an "awe-inspiring building". Gehry is slightly more reserved: "What I’m trying to have is interaction with the buildings. It’s not a Sydney Opera House site but I have no problems with the site. It doesn’t pander to the city or talk down to it." UTS vice-chancellor Professor Ross Milbourne said that while the building will likely garner national attention, the key element for UTS is that the plans reflect the needs of the business faculty. "From the start Gehry Partners has worked closely with the [faculty] ... to develop an environment that fosters ... this openness and collaboration in teaching and research, and engagement with business and the community," Milbourne said.

Based on the concept of a treehouse with limbs, the 11-storey building will stand at the corner of Ultimo Road and Omnibus Lane on a site that once housed the Dairy Farmers Cooperative and is currently being used as a car park. Reflective of Sydney’s history, where sandstone was widely used, with a hint of reverence for the harbour, the structure will feature two distinct external facades, one composed of undulating brick and the other of large, angled sheets of glass.

Due for completion before the 2014 academic year, the Gehry-designed Dr Chau Chak Wing building might give the Sydney Opera House a run for its money in the icon stakes.