Right Hand Man

When Canadian American architect Frank Gehry received the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, he said: “In trying to find the essence of my own expression, I fantasized the artist standing before the white canvas deciding what was the first move. I called it the moment of truth.” Gehry, who died in December 2025 at the age of 96, designed buildings that appear alive with movement, a dazzling effect said to originate in the single, uninterrupted line of the sketches he made before engineers were ever involved.

Echoing that idea of “the moment of truth,” a group of works in the Getty Research Institute shows how the architect thought on paper.

Weeks after Gehry’s death, Maristella Casciato, senior curator and head of Architecture Special Collections at the Research Institute, and Julian Brooks, senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings at the Getty Museum, met at the Institute to study a limited-edition portfolio of prints made from sketches selected by Gehry himself.

Housed in a Gehry-designed wood and stainless-steel box, the portfolio includes 10 signed mixed-media prints of his sketches for Downtown LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, which was inaugurated in 2003. In each drawing reproduced, an assemblage of S-forms conveys the gesture and freedom that became Gehry hallmarks. Together, Casciato and Brooks considered how such freehand works catalyzed some of the world’s most iconic buildings.

Why did you select these sketches to discuss today?

Maristella Casciato: In the 2004 book Gehry Draws there are many reproductions of sketches like these for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. That Gehry selected these 10 means he felt at that moment they were significant for a portfolio. This collection represents one of the dimensions of working through sketches.

Gehry himself put it this way: “For me, my sketches are about capturing the spontaneity of the original idea. I have to be careful about it because if I think too hard about it then I have lost it. So it’s a careful dance: I have to capture it without smothering it, and once I’ve got it, the sketch becomes a sort of record; in a way, it becomes the ideal that I struggle and fight to maintain throughout the whole process.”

Gehry sketched nonstop. It was no uncommon habit for him to have on his desk white or yellow sketch paper. I recall meeting Renzo Piano, who also has a practice of sketching, but does so because he’s in the middle of a project and needs to come to a solution. Gehry thinks and sketches. There’s a big difference. Gehry has written very little compared to other 20th-century architects, but he has sketched more than any of them. More than Le Corbusier, much more than Erich Mendelsohn. World renowned architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, was never a skilled draftsman. The practice is very specific to Gehry.

How do you react to the idea of the looseness and the creativity of the lines, capturing something that’s spontaneous and ephemeral, but done so intentionally as to use a pen?

Julian Brooks: They’re so quick and relatively brief. You can see in many cases that Gehry doesn’t take the pen up off the paper. He’s just resting his elbow, and the whole thing naturally flows.

Casciato: Julian makes an important point. These sketches are all generated by quick movement, but from a very stable situation and setting. Gehry never goes back on his steps. That’s what’s striking to me about the fact that he drew with a pen—he’s that confident and wants to capture that fugitive moment. There is no cancellation.

In some of these sketches, he includes people who stand on a line that grounds the sketch; otherwise everything would be floating. He’s adding context.

Julian, does this make you think of other artists in the way they think or draw a line so fluidly?

Brooks: They’re similar to sketches I see because they’re the first stage of having something in your mind that you need to let flow, get out quickly, and later work up. There are a lot of Renaissance and post-Renaissance drawings that look like this. They might represent an idea of someone like Leonardo da Vinci, who has a sort of brainstorm sheet where he’ll put down lots of different ideas about, say, a pose, or he’ll move figures around and it’s him thinking on paper. And then the artist moves to the next stage—another drawing or a painting.

What is different is the media. Gehry’s using modern pens that could draw a straight line from here to the ocean. Whereas in the Renaissance, they were using a quill from a sharpened bird’s feather, dipping it in ink, and drawing, so there was a limit to how long the ink would last. Eventually, it would run out, and they’d have to dip and try again. So you’d get a fluidity, but you couldn’t really draw it with one line like Gehry.

Also, Gehry is right-handed and he’s leaning, so we can presume he could start anywhere without the risk of smudging, because modern ink dries pretty quickly. In the 16th and 17th centuries, artists worked from the left of the sheet to the right because of smudging—ink took longer to dry.

Casciato: The exception to the “one fluid line” is Gehry’s signature, which is usually on the right. It sometimes anchors the whole drawing. One example is the New Zollhof complex in Düsseldorf. This project comprises three different buildings that face the water. To anchor this, he needed something else—his signature, which became part of the composition. Sometimes the signature is on the left because he wants to emphasize some other aspects.

Gehry’s office has assumed a totally in-studio modus operandi. The design process is constantly iterative. Gehry drew and helped modeling, and then the team responded on what was feasible or suitable. His sketches were a toolkit. He would also say they were his dreams. Once expressed, somebody then had to figure out how to make them work.

This makes me think of Michelangelo sometimes. In his sculptures, he fights with the material—Bernini too. You can see a similar struggle in these drawings, but how much of that struggle does one want to share with the outside world? It’s very private. Michelangelo didn’t want people to see his drawings. Firstly, he didn’t want people to see the struggle in the way he worked through it, but also he jealously guarded his designs. He didn’t want people to steal his ideas.

Was Gehry private about his drawings?

Casciato: It’s hard to say. Architects and painters of that caliber—they do struggle, but they also solve things. The struggle is not the end of the process—it’s a part of it that you accept. At the end of a built project, Gehry was very proud of the process. The fact that he selected the 10 sketches shown in these prints and made a portfolio—he was obviously happy. Then it’s fun to look back on.

The drawings represent his thinking, and Gehry had a large private library. He often looked at paintings from the Renaissance, especially those by Vittore Carpaccio. Gehry’s imagination captured essences of different disciplines.

How important is the fluidity and playfulness of a sketch to a finished piece of work, especially in the digital age, where fewer artists begin with paper?

Brooks: If you’re working in one medium, it can be very freeing to go somewhere else, find another creative outlet, and then come back. It can give you a different approach to a work. David Bowie talks about this—how when he reached an impasse musically, he would explore drawing or painting and then he’d go back. I remember a quote from him about Frank Auerbach, the 20th-century German British artist. Of his paintings, Bowie said, “I want to sound like that looks.”

These creative activities are all interlinked in many ways in the brain, and we don’t understand most of it. But if you’re blocked, you can get out of your brain, make a drawing, and you’re in a different reality. Or try gesture drawings, or close your eyes and draw. It’s all valid.

Paul Klee was also inspired by music, and at times his lines echoed the movements of a conductor’s baton, like musical beats as lines. Gehry once said: “I love classical music, and somehow I wanted to create musical buildings, lyrical buildings with a lot of delight. But, because I was a paid-up Modernist, I didn’t want to do this with decoration; it had to be with essential form.” Were Gehry’s sketches always musical?

Brooks: It comes back to Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and to works that look like musical scores come alive. Or you’re stacking notes on top of each other, making a column, and that is your art. These all became very interlinked in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s.

Casciato: That’s why Gehry also loved contemporary music—John Cage and so on—because of the lines and points. Disciplines are always all connected. Gehry’s sketches belong to a subjective experience that transcends architectural skill; therefore, the metaphor of the musical expression is suitable.

The S-line, explicitly named the serpentine line, has what Klee called a motoric energy. Music is movement in its essence. I suggest that Klee’s quote about the “active line” applies to Gehry’s sketches for Walt Disney Concert Hall and well beyond. For Klee, that inspiration came from “an active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward.”

In your opinion, are these drawings works of art in their own right?

Brooks: To us, they’re works of art. They’re exquisite objects. They’re interesting because they show us how he got to where he ended up.

Casciato: When I consider the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the DZ bank in Berlin, how could Gehry’s sketches produced before the building be separate from the final iteration? They are part of the same process, so they are art. They are the DNA of his ideas.