Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles, Part Four

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[classical music introduction]

James Cuno: Hello, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Welcome to Art + Ideas, a podcast in which I speak to artists, conservators, authors, and scholars about their work.

Frank Gehry: This river, it has its own mandate. And if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re gonna get clobbered.

Cuno: In this episode, I speak with architect Frank Gehry in our final conversation in this series.

[classical music fades out]

The last time we met, Frank and I talked about the long and complex history of the development of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In this episode, we touch on several unrealized projects in New York, and more recent initiatives, including another concert hall—this one in Europe—and the so-called LA River Plan. Once again, we picked up our conversation in Frank’s West Los Angeles studio.

So Frank, the last time we met, we ended with you discussing your long and sometimes difficult history, and ultimate triumph, with Disney Hall. And now as we speak, the Getty Research Institute is organizing an exhibition exploring the relations between Disney Hall and Berlin’s Philharmonie Hall, which was designed by Hans Scharoun, which opened in 1963. It’s said that your design for Disney Hall was heavily influenced or was at least influenced by Scharoun’s design. Tell me if that’s true, and if so, what about the Philharmonie that inspired you. What is it about that building?

Gehry: So Scharoun did the first vineyard, they call it, seating.

Cuno: Seating, yeah. Explain that. A sort of terraced seating?

Gehry: Terraced around. Instead of a shoebox, like Symphony Hall in Boston which is straight on, the walls are 70 feet, 80 feet apart and it’s a long space that—the orchestra’s onstage, contained within the same walls so there’s no seating at orchestra on either side or behind. Scharoun opened it up and pulled the orchestra forward and put seating around the orchestra and behind the orchestra, and brought an intimacy between the audience and the orchestra that hadn’t been done. He was first and foremost a humanist. He was very conscious of the people-to-building feeling, the people-to-people, all of those things that are really important in building any building, and he understood that. I don’t think he had a great budget for Philharmonie because he used painted pipes and concrete floors and a funny exterior skin that was probably cheap. But he did—when you go there, you feel a relationship to each other, the audience. You feel a relationship to the orchestra, the conductor. I mean, it feels like you’re part of it.

Cuno: And it’s not just that. The sound, I gather, is exceptional, not just the feeling of how you feel.

Gehry: The sound wasn’t exceptional when he started. He didn’t—he had problems. And I never got to the bottom of that. But they had to redo it a couple times. His most successful thing was the intimacy, the feeling of being in it, the comfortable relationship with the orchestra. The orchestra could feel the audience, the audience could feel the or—you know, it really works that way. [Cuno: Yeah] Acoustically, they had problems and they had to redo it.

Cuno: So was it in the very beginning of the process of your design that you started thinking about this, or was it as you developed the design? Because there was [Gehry: No, no, I—] such a long history of the development of the design.

Gehry: Ernest Fleischmann was head of the Philharmonic, and he and knew each other. I did work for him at the Bowl. I talked to him endlessly about halls and how do you do ’em and who’s good and who’s not good. And we used to yammer about acousticians and architects and God knows what. The competition was—had another acoustician; it didn’t have Toyota-san or Nagata Acoustics. It had Cummins, the acoustician from France, who asked for bigger volume, bigger space. And if you look at the first models, you’ll see they had quite different than the vineyard thing. [Cuno: Mm-hm] When I won, Ernest and I went traveling to look at halls together. And we went to Berlin and spent time with—listening to concerts there. And I think I’d been there two or three times before that. Just when we entered the competition, probably, I went, because I was looking for that. But the acoustician we had for the competition wouldn’t let us go there. And we, Ernest and I, had some funny stories about meeting with Scharoun’s acoustician, Lothar Kramer. Lothar Kramer was in his 80s when I met him, and Ernest and I had lunch with him with Dr. Nagata. And I innocently asked them what their ideal shape for a hall was, and Kramer gave me—I can’t show it, but this shape, with the orchestra here. And Nagata said, “This shape, with the orchestra here.” So they were two different shapes. And they’d all professed their love of each other’s—as professionals and this. Kramer was Nagata’s ultimate teacher and Nagata was Kramer’s ultimate student and they loved each other until this point where I asked that question and I got the double—the two things. And I looked at ’em, I said, “Okay, which one?” [chuckles] And that started a little yammering in [Cuno: Yeah?] Japanese and German. [they laugh] I don’t know what they were saying but it was anger.

Cuno: Does every piece of music sound equally well in a situation like that? Were people in Berlin beginning to compose differently because of the setting of the hall?

Gehry: I think that if the room acoustics works for sound, for music, then it works for any music. The setting doesn’t always work for every music, because like Pierre Boulez did a great piece called Répons. He used the UCLA basketball arena and spread out and did it there. And that’s, I think, the only time he did it. I’m doing a little hall in Berlin for Barenboim that’s 700 seats. And it’s being called Pierre Boulez Hall. And when I took the model to Pierre to show it to him, which was just three months before he died, I said, “Could you imagine Répons being done here? It’s a tiny hall.” And he looked at me. He was kind of like, are-you-out-of-your-mind look. And I said, “Well, Berlioz created Troyens for a small opera house and it’s always presented in a big opera house. So why not take a piece that’s created in a big space and see if it works in a small space?” And he smiled. He said, “Try it.” So Daniel Barenboim and I are gonna try it. [Cuno: Yeah?] So there are differences, I think, the way a conductor conducts in a hall can change the room acoustics.

Cuno: Well, what about the hall itself. That is, the exterior and the kind of scalloped shape of the roof and the kind of dynamic appearance of it. Was that all of interest to you, anything on the exterior, even the—

Gehry: From Scharoun, you mean?

Cuno: Yeah, from Scharoun. Even the skin of it, I know, which was—it looks metallic when you see it from a distance with the sun on it, but I gather it’s not metal. It’s a [Gehry: No] kind of—

Gehry: It’s—it looks cheap [Cuno: Like a tile or—] and cheesy sometimes and [Cuno: Yeah] people don’t like it, I think. But—

Cuno: But did that appeal to you? Was there anything about that was of interest to you?

Gehry: Well, I’m open, more open to that kind of thing than most people, so I didn’t find it that agreeable, you know, but it was kind of grating, a little bit. But you get used to it. [Cuno chuckles] I was just there and it was—now I just pass by. There’s Scharoun, yeah, great. I don’t think I was inspired by that for Disney Hall, even though Disney Hall has curves—I was—Disney Hall’s curves are—started with just blocks, and I just peeled the edge to give it some form and it looked like a curve. And then I started making the front look like sails, because when you go wing on wing with the—with the wind behind you, two sails out, it’s kind of a beautiful architectural space. And I’d taken Esa-Pekka sailing with me and showed him that space. And he composed a piece called “Wing on Wing” [Cuno: Right] for that. I don’t know, I think that after we dealt with the issue with Scharoun’s acoustician and our acoustician, Ernest and I went to Concertgebouw.

Cuno: Yeah, Amsterdam.

Gehry: Amsterdam. [Cuno: Yeah] And that was an epiphany for me, because I’d been there before, but I’d never experienced it like I did the night I went with Ernest. And it’s a modified shoebox. So it’s wider than a shoebox, and there’s 700 people behind the orchestra. And it’s like a mound of people sitting behind. It’s more than you usually get in a—but that was done long before Scharoun. [Cuno: Mm-hm] So that was a precursor to vineyard, probably. The conductor enters through the backdoor and comes down the aisle through the seats. So if you’re late for the concert, you come down the aisle to your seat, you’re—you might get applause, [Cuno laughs] thinking you’re the conductor. That’s happened to a friend of mine, and it was weird. They came late and they got—[they laugh] The sound is great, the humanity, the feeling is great. It’s got the traditional balconies. It looks like Boston, except it’s wider and it’s a different shape box.

Cuno: Yeah, yeah.

Gehry: And so I became enamored with that and I made like 40 or 50 models of different varieties. But that was the one I liked a lot. And so the Disney Hall is a box and it is a wide box, and it’s more like Concertgebouw. [Cuno: Mm-hm] And it’s a hybrid of the Concertgebouw but putting in the seating like the vineyard.

Cuno: Yeah. [Gehry: So it’s a kind of—] Whenever you look into a list of people’s favorite concert halls, the three you’ve mentioned—your own, Scharoun’s, and the Concertgebouw—are always among the top five, [Gehry: Yeah] always included. And now you’ve been given this project also in Berlin—you mentioned it already—for Daniel Barenboim, for the Divan Orchestra. And it’s gonna be much smaller, as you indicated. What about the—

Gehry: It’s 700 seats, yeah.

Cuno: What about the commitment, the sort of cultural-slash-political commitment of the orchestra that inspires you? How do you wanna respond to that? Because this is an orchestra that brings, we should say, musicians, young musicians from the West and from the Palestinian Authority and from the East together, to create a kind of cultural mix. Is that something that moves you with a special sense of responsibility?

Gehry: Oh, boy. It does move me because, you know, I was a kid and lived in a small mining town in northern Ontario. There were only 30 Jewish families and I remember vividly an event they had to celebrate the State of Israel was becoming a state back then. I forget just what point it was. But there was some event related to it and the Jewish community got together and had a dinner to celebrate it. My father, who was not well educated at all, grew up in the streets in New York City very poor, and he got up that night and made a speech that I didn’t know was in him. And it brought tears to my eyes, and it still almost does, about what it meant.

Now, here’s a guy that didn’t care about religion. I mean, my house, when we were growing up, had people from all races, cultures, everything. He—he was really open. The family was really—we were—my babysitter was a black boxer that was retired, [chuckles] something. So I grew up with that. But this meant something to him at that point, ’cause in Timmons, there was a lot of—the town we lived in—was a lot of anti-Semitism. I was getting beat up constantly for killing Christ. [chuckles] And I kept coming home and saying, “I didn’t do it, I didn’t—”

That moved me, so—and then my grandfather, when I was with him, would teach me Talmud, and that moved me. And he would talk about the Wailing Wall. And so I finally got to Israel and saw the Wailing Wall and it was very emotional, blah-blah-blah. So then I got involved with Israel in a project, and it turned out that it wasn’t something I really was in—The politics of it weren’t consistent with mine, and so we amicably departed. But I was feeling guilty about all that and wondering—I still couldn’t detach myself from that place because it meant—you know, those emotional bonds were there.

And I didn’t like going there. Especially. they started building walls all over the place and separating themselves from everybody, and the character of the people was changing, the feeling. I mean, the Hassidics would treat you like dirt. When I went to the Wall, they just acted like I was a Martian. I was watching television one night and there was Daniel Barenboim talking about the—I had never met Daniel, at that point. [Cuno: Hm] He was talking about the Divan Orchestra and Edward Said and what they had tried to accomplish by opening the discussion between Palestinians and Israelis.

Cuno: Barenboim being Jewish and Said being Palestinian.

Gehry: Right. [Cuno: Right] Said was Lebanese and Barenboim was actually born in Buenos Aires, [Cuno: Right] but since his fifth birthday or so, he lived in Jerusalem or Israel. And so I got excited about that, that there was somebody doing something. And I really believe that people talk to each other through the arts. That’s one of the thing—reasons I was working with Tom Krens in Abu Dhabi, because it—that museum, the way Tom presented it, it was gonna be open to artists from the Arab states and—and he meant it and he pulled people in together and—

Cuno: Yeah. This is the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi.

Gehry: The Guggenheim, yeah. Tom Krens, who is a major genius of some sort. Anyway, so I called my friend at Juilliard, Ara Guzelimian, who used to be with the LA Phil. And I was teaching at Yale and I always give a project related to music and Ara helps me with it. So I said, “Ara, could we do a project around the Divan? Could you ask Daniel if he would mind if we used them, and could he maybe meet with the students or at least send us a program or something?” All of that happened. Daniel met with the students for two hours, and the next time I saw the students, they just thought they’d gone to heaven. I still didn’t meet him. [laughter] The project was for—he selected Istanbul and we did a student scheme for the Divan Orchestra in Istanbul. And it was a four-month study. And during that period, I did meet Daniel, and during that period, I found—they were doing this little hall in Berlin and the architect he had was a local Berlin guy who was begging Daniel to get me to design the interior. And so I met with the guy and I said, “Come on, you can do your own.” He said, “No, no, this would be very special,” blah-blah-blah. So I ended up—this was the beginning of that kind of philanthropy. [Cuno: Yeah, yeah] I ended up designing [Cuno: Yeah] the interior.

Cuno: What’s it gonna look like? Is it gonna be terrace-like? Or is it too small of a hall to be—or vineyard-like. Too small of a hall for that?

Gehry: Yeah, it’s a—it’s an oval. And the interesting thing about it is we took the drawing of the oval and placed it over a San Carlino ceiling oval, [Cuno: Oh, right] and it fits. [Cuno: Oh, right] So then I talked to our friend Irving Lavin. ’Course, I called immediately. He said, “What’s going on?”

Cuno: And Lavin, the great art historian in baroque sculpture and architecture.

Gehry: Yeah. And so Irving said, “Well, Borromini, when he did San Carlino, had a tight site. There was a monastery behind him, he had streets on the other side, he couldn’t move.” And his solution was an oval church.

Cuno: Kind of an elliptical oval [Gehry: Elliptical, yeah], a compressed oval, yeah.

Cuno: So will the orchestra be in the round? Will the orchestra be—

Gehry: The orchestra sits in the middle.

Cuno: Oh, in the middle and the audience is around them, huh?

Gehry: Around them. And then you can take out sections of the audience and have a orchestra on one side.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: Anyway, it opens March 4th, and the first concert is all Pierre Boulez, because it’s named after Pierre, which made me happy and I didn’t realize that Daniel was that close to Pierre, and it turns out he was, so—

Cuno: And you’ve also designed a opera production for Barenboim for the Berlin State Opera, the Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: So, you’ve got three projects in Berlin, musical projects. You’ve got the tallest skyscraper in Berlin, I think it is, in Alexanderplatz. You’ve got the bank. So Berlin’s been good to you.

Gehry: I love Berlin. [chuckles]

Cuno: Well, take us to New York, because you’ve had your trials and triumphs there. You were seen as the favorite for the New York Times Corporation headquarters until you walked away from that project. What was that all about? What took you away from that project?

Gehry: Well, I probably shouldn’t have walked away, but—and I’m not sure I can really talk about who did what to whom, because I’m not sure who did what to whom. All I know is we brought in David Childs and SOM as a partner, which was precarious, ’cause it meant we were designing one building, and David’s a designer and he likes to design his own building. We had a meeting where we presented the model, and the model we presented was mostly designed by my office. David wasn’t that involved with it. A little bit, but not to his satisfaction, certainly. And he was very awkward about it. Mr. Punch Sulzberger, [Cuno: Mm-hm] the elder guy, came down and hugged me and thought it was incredible. It was a competition, so we were against others. I can’t remember who the others were, but we were told that they loved our scheme. I left the room [chuckles] happy, thinking everybody was happy. And I was called to a meeting with the client group, and David didn’t come. So I knew there was trouble in the—in the halls. I think David thought, look, you designed it, you should do it. He was trying to tell them, get him out so I could do it myself. I mean, I think it was—everybody was well-intentioned. And the feelings are normal, right? If I was him, I would probably have the same feeling. But everybody was happy. We were going ahead. I was then called to a meeting with the construction people, the people from Ratner, [Cuno: Mm-hm] who I didn’t know. I’d never worked with them. And they were partners on it with the New York Times and—the construction guy, at the meeting, said, “Mr. Gehry, are you prepared to be here every Monday at two o’clock for a meeting?” And I said, “Hey, I live in LA. I can’t be here every Monday.” He said, “Well, that’s what it’s gonna take.” I said, “Well, that’s why we have a partnership with SOM. Their people are gonna represent me and they’re gonna be here. And I will certainly be here for the crucial meetings and I’ll certainly be involved with the”—but, “No, you have to be here every—” So I called David Childs and told him that. And I got the sense that he was hoping I would drop out. And it just felt funny, so I dropped out. Should I have worked it? Maybe. I’m sure David would’ve worked it out with me somehow, I don’t—anyway.

Cuno: But it was a big design commission for you to walk away from.

Gehry: It was, yes. [Cuno: Uh-huh] And Renzo got it.

Cuno: And Renzo got it, yeah. Ultimately, stepped in at the end.

Gehry: And he thanked me.

Cuno: I bet. [chuckles] I bet he did. And then you reintroduce yourself, or got involved again in a project with Bruce Ratner, and that was Atlantic Yards, in Brooklyn, right?

Gehry: Well, two years after the New York Times thing, I got a call from him saying that he wanted to meet with me. He had this city building project and he realized that I was interested in that kinda stuff in the first go-round, so—he offered me the whole project.

Cuno: Yeah. I mean, we think of it now as a home for basketball, but it was gonna be developing that whole big project, with lots of [Gehry: Right] mixed use and housing and everything.

Gehry: Yeah, it was a basketball arena, as well as a hockey arena.

Cuno: Dear to your heart?

Gehry: Huh? [Cuno: Dear to your heart, yeah] Dear to my heart, yeah. And then it had housing at part of it, and it was building a beautiful corner in Brooklyn. There’s a intersection there that could really have become a center. It had to deal with the railroad tracks and it had park land and housing, so it was open space, housing. It was a quasi-socialist architect-type dream.

Cuno: [chuckles] And he took you down the road a while on that project.

Gehry: We went quite far down the road with that until the recession happened, the 2008 bust. And ’course, he was—Bruce was running the New York branch of a big family company from Cleveland. And so the family had always been suspicious of anything that looked new or different. There was a certain kind of product and building they’d done and they’d been successful over the years, and Bruce was a renegade for them. So there was always—I always felt this skepticism, and poor Bruce was caught in it. The recession hit and so the skeptics rose over and took over, right? ’Cause—so no longer was the arena gonna be for hockey and the arena was not gonna be built with housing around it. It was gonna be on a clear site. They were gonna clean it up, make it a standard arena. They were gonna buy the plans from Indiana, from the arena that had been done there. I forget the name of it—which they did, they bought those plans. And they decided to build that, and then they hired a New York—young New York architect to put the lipstick on the pig. They said this—it’s not my words at that point. The housing was difficult because they were getting a lot of blowback from the community and—on all kinds of things.

Cuno: The gentrification?

Gehry: I don’t know. Anything they wanted to do was bad. [Cuno: Yeah] They ended up getting the short end of the stick, probably, compared to what they would’ve gotten [Cuno: Yeah] if they’d just played partners with them.

Cuno: Yeah. But now, these are thr—

Gehry: That was a blow. That was a hard one for me.

Cuno: Yeah, I’m sure. Because it was the design at the end—not the design of the whole project, but the kind of veneer of the building—had a kinda look that was acknowledging your original design [Gehry: Yeah] as I recall.

Gehry: I have not been able to go there to look at it. [chuckles; Cuno: Mm-hm, mm-hm]

Cuno: Did it feel different when Barry Diller came to you with a project?

Gehry: Barry personally didn’t come to me. It was Marshall Rose. Marshall Rose is a developer in New York or was; I think he’s retired now. And I didn’t know him. And he asked me to do the building. And then I found out it was for Barry Diller. And as we were designing it, we had meetings with Barry Diller. And he did have input on—he wanted a white building, a glass building that’s white. [Cuno: Right, right] And I said, “You can’t do it.” It’s always black. [Cuno chuckles] So we struggled with that. We got special glass, we got everything, and we did the frit thing and—

Cuno: Did it feel like a breakthrough building in New York for you, or just another building?

Gehry: I don’t know that I ever think anything’s a breakthrough. I mean, like Bilbao, I guess you would say, was a major breakthrough of some kind, on 20 different levels. I love going there, people like me and they like the building and it did all kinds’a nice things for the community. The only thing I always wanna say about it to anybody is, I was on budget. [they laugh] So I never talk about the [Cuno: Uh-huh] other parts of it.

Cuno: Did 8 Spruce Street, a Bruce Ratner project, did that come along about the same time, or that come along after?

Gehry: [over Cuno] Yeah, Bruce Ratner asked me to do 8 Spruce Street while I was in the middle of doing the Brooklyn project. And when—it was designed and it was under construction when the recession hit. And we had dinner at a café across the river, looking at the site. And Bruce said, “We’re gonna have to stop at the 40th floor. Will that be okay?” And I said, “No.”

Cuno: What was it designed—how many floors was it designed for or did you think—?

Gehry: [over Cuno] I think 76. So it was close to halfway up. And I think it was already close to that height when we were having dinner, looking. And his chief of staff sat there with him and she said, “No, no, no, no, we can’t do that. We can’t do that.” He said, “I don’t wanna do that, but we may have to do that.” And MaryAnne Gilmartin, who worked for Bruce—I don’t know how she did it. She worked her butt off. But this uncertainty lasted three or four months, so they stopped construction for three or four months. And so I was prepared for a bad outcome. And then she got it through and got it built, because she went through and studied the numbers and it was cheaper to finish it. [Cuno chuckles] And she could prove that. Now, all of us knew that, but nobody would listen. And she proved it. And so they got it built.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: It was really close to budget, I don’t think there was any problems on budget, and they always were happy with it. And so we were pretty close to budget, I think within 3 or 4 percent. [Cuno: Yeah] When it was finished, they put it out to rent. It was rented in a few months. They were able to refinance it. It’s been a wonderful financial project for them.

Cuno: Yeah. And it’s a signature building in the city.

Gehry: Plus they get that, yeah.

Cuno: Yeah. So that’s Berlin, that’s New York, now come back to Los Angeles. You’ve got a lotta projects underway in Los Angeles. You’ve got the Sunset Boulevard development project, which couldn’t be more romantically sited if you wanted to build a building in Los Angeles. [Gehry laughs] I gather it’s across—

Gehry: [over Cuno] It’s the Garden of Allah.

Cuno: It’s the garden. It’s where it was, F. Scott Fitzgerald used to go there—

Gehry: And I—you know, when I came here as a kid, I used to go there. [Cuno: Yeah] Not to live there or anything, but I used to go on Sunset Strip.

Cuno: Looking for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall?

Gehry: Yeah, my parents, they didn’t have any money, so they used to go looking at these places for movie stars. It’s true, yeah. [Cuno: Yeah, yeah] And so I remember the Garden of Allah.

Cuno: Well, this would be, then, a very different kind of project, you did multiple-use, mixed-use projects early in your career in Los Angeles, [Gehry: Right] and now in your triumphant years in Los Angeles, coming back and doing this kind of project with the design confidence that you’ve built up over the course of decades. It’s a big project for you, I should think, in Los Angeles. A statement, a signature statement. I mean—

Gehry: Yeah, I guess I don’t look at it that way, but—I never presume. I can’t help it. The nice thing is, the two young guys got to know me, ’cause they work for Related. In the first go-round on Grand Avenue, they were working on it. Tyler Siegel and John Irwin were the young guys that left Related to start their own development company. And they called us and said they wanted to work with us. They wanted to do something special, it was a special site. They were prepared to spend the money appropriately for it and do it right and—we started working on it, there was community pushback, like every place in LA, everywhere in the world now. And somehow, we’ve gotten mostly through it and we’re going ahead with the design. [Cuno: Yeah] And it’s residential and commercial. And the residential has a mixture of low-income and middle-income and higher-income condos at the top. And there’s an element in the middle that has some of the services for the building, and a market, I think, in the base—and a couple apartments on top. And we started playing with them. I don’t know if unconsciously we were rebuilding the Garden of Allah, but it looks like white tents. [chuckles; Cuno: Mm-hm] So I don’t know where that’s gonna go.

It’s a great site, because it’s an entrance into the Sunset Strip from the east side. And the buildings that have been built on the Sunset Strip east of these, especially La Cienega, I think, are pretty horrible. I think we got approval probably because of architecture. [Cuno: Yeah] Which is nice.

Cuno: Well, you’ve got in Los Angeles, the different kinds of work that you’ve done—housing work, you’ve got public cultural buildings work, with the Disney Hall, with the Museum of Science. You’ve got now this big mixed-use project on one of the great arteries of Los Angeles. But you’re now undertaking something that is even on the greater scale and probably of even greater importance to Los Angeles, and that’s the LA River. [Gehry laughs] We started, before we began taping, talking about the LA River project. You’ve learned a great deal about rivers, and about this river in particular, and you’ve put all that into something called the LA River Index.

Gehry: Yes.

Cuno: But tell us about the importance of the river and what your ambitions are for it.

Gehry: Well, living here all these years, I never had much encounter with the river, personally.

Cuno: I think most people won’t even know there is an LA River.

Gehry: Right. Once I got into it—and of course, people generally think the LA River—they have this romantic notion it should be habitats for hummingbirds and plant life and animals and kayaking and bike trails and all of that. And that’s all possible, except some of it’s impossible. The LA River gathers all the water from that basin coming from north, and puts 90 billion gallons a year into the ocean. Waste.

Cuno: Just runoff.

Gehry: Just that. The heaviest times of flow are 2 percent of the time when it fills up. So those concrete walls are designed by the Corps of Engineers for exactly when it—high point of the river, and it fills up right to that edge, almost.

Cuno: It must be six or 10 or 12 feet or so deep, huh?

Gehry: Oh, it’s more than that, I think. [Cuno: Really?] Yeah. And it’s 300 feet wide and it’s rushing. And when you see it, you know, if you get caught in it, you can’t get out. And that’s only a very short period of time, just for a few days. And the water’s lost. So if you wanna think of it as a romantic habitat and all that, it’s all fine, except for those two days. [chuckles] Now, if you put the plants in the river the way it is, that makes the river overflow. And if it overflows, it overflows into the adjoining neighborhoods, and then flood insurance goes up and everybody’s paying for a mess.

The river is not that easy. You’ve gotta look at what’s real. The other thing we found is the public health issues, especially south of LA City to Long Beach, are enormous. And if you could clean that up, you’d save billions of dollars. So you could save on—if you could reclaim water, put it in the aquifer and use it, you could save, say, a third of the water requirements of the city. That’s money. So if you think of it just as a pure business thing, you save that money. and then you save on the public health money, and then there’s 10 other things you save money on because of you’re harnessing this thing and looking at it that way. It pays off. And it’s just how do you get all these entities and people together to join hands and to make it happen, kumbaya together? There have been groups working on it for a number of years.

Cuno: Before you got involved.

Gehry: Before I got involved. And they haven’t made much progress. But they did develop an Alternate [read: Alternative] 20 program that’s gone through the Corps of Engineers and received government funding, and significant government funding. It’s gotta be matched by local governments and it’s gonna be complicated to get it, and it’ll be a slow process. And it’s gotta go through Corps of Engineers and blah-blah-blah. That’s more focused on trying to make these romantic habitats. So we’re not sure how they’re gonna do it because that two days a year when Godzilla comes—when we got in, nobody working on the river at that point had gone south of LA and talked to these towns—South Gate, Cudahy, Vernon, Long Beach. And they’re mostly Latino populations, and they are suffering from lack of open space and the kids are suffering from diabetes B and—you name it, they got it. And so if you solve the river, it doesn’t necessarily solve all those problems. But because it’s contiguous, it’s an opportunity to make solutions that do both. And to connect all those communities and join them across the river. You know, the river separates communities, just like the freeways do. The river and the Long Beach Freeway cut through Long Beach and the town’s cut in half and there’s no connection between this side and that side. So there’s different popula—[chuckles] It’s weird. [Cuno: Hm] And there are resources on the other side of the river that could be used by the other side of the river, and vice versa. And they could get funding if they joined together. It’s gotta be a series of interventions, which are more realistic, probably, if we can find the opportunities along the river. And I think that model would work for having other talented people in the city participate. There’s a broader spectrum, and we should work on it together.

Cuno: Yeah. You know, I’m struck, in the first time we talked on this podcast, the first episode of this podcast interview, we talked about your interest in urban design, [Gehry: Right] and then you’re going to Harvard and the misunderstanding that what you were going to get when you went to Harvard graduate school, the GSD, was gonna be urban design, which turned out to be urban planning, which turned out to be economics, then turned out to be design and so forth. You know, since you’ve come back to that now at this point in your career, [Gehry: Yeah] that this project isn’t so much about building buildings but it’s about addressing large urban issues.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: That must—

Gehry: It’s exciting.

Cuno: Must be. Yeah, it must be [Gehry: Yeah, it’s exciting] an opportunity missed long ago and now revived.

Gehry: [over Cuno] It’s exciting and it’s got a potential of creating a network of colleagues and people to work together, which I love the idea of, which a lot of people think I’m going to take all their work away from them, which I’m not. I’m too old to take their work away from them. [chuckles; Cuno: Yeah] I don’t have time to take their work away from them. I just would like their work to comply with the standards of the requirements of this asset, this river. It has its own mandate. And if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re gonna get clobbered.

Cuno: You know, I have to think that you’re a perennial optimist.

Gehry: [chuckles]

Cuno: Now, I wanna ask you one last question. You brought up your father before on this episode. And in Paul Goldberger’s biography of you, he cites and describes a moment in which you’re at this 8 Spruce Street tower, just completed or nearly completed. You’re having a birthday party there. [Gehry chuckles] Bruce Ratner is giving it for you. You know, it’s finally got this building built, after all these many years. And you said at the time, you said, “This is not far from where my father was born. It’s hard not to think of him here. I really wish he could be here and see what I’ve built in the city where he grew up. My father never saw my buildings, and he thought I was just a dreamer. I think he would be proud of me. I would like to think that he would see this building and feel that I’d amounted to something.”

Now, given all that you’ve done in and for Los Angeles, and given the fact that your father lived the last 15 years of his life in Los Angeles, and he saw you become an architect here, do you think he would’ve been proud of what you’ve done here?

Gehry: He would’ve been proud that I was making a living. [chuckles] He didn’t think that was gonna happen. He had a hard time himself, but—you know, I discovered evidence after he passed away, over the last 10 years, which is a long time since he’s gone, there’s evidence that he was an artist of some kind. He was not a businessman; that’s why he failed as a businessman. He was drawing, he was doing things. He was doing window dressings for stores, he was—whatever he could do. But the things that he was doing that he got positive reaction to had to do with artistic talent. And so it’s become clear to me that whatever DNA he passed on—’cause I was wondering, where the hell did this come from? And now I got it. So too late, but—for him, but anyway. Maybe I’ll see him again sometime.

Cuno: Yeah. Well, thank you, Frank.

Gehry: Okay.

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Cuno: Over the past six months, I met four times with Frank Gehry to talk about his life, career, regard for the architectural profession, and passion for his adopted city of Los Angeles. I don’t think anyone is more honest than Frank. He never hesitated to answer my questions, well maybe once, when I asked him to give me the details about the rough-and-tumble politics of the on-again-off-again history of his Disney Hall project, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and one of his, and of architecture’s, greatest triumphs. And then he paused for only a second or two, before answering my question with exacting detail and seemingly total recall. Architecture is alive for Frank, and his place in its history is alive to him as well. He seems to remember everything, even the per-square-foot cost of projects long completed, and of course the complicated character of his clients and colleagues in the sometimes tortured history of his best loved projects. And he loves architecture; he loves it for the potential it holds for improving the lives of his clients and its impact on the social life of our cities. But perhaps above all, he loves it for the beautiful and complex forms it has contributed to our world. Frank insists architecture is an art, and he is unapologetic about this. He believes in architecture’s social utility, but he never sees that as an end in itself. Or, that beauty and social benefit are mutually exclusive. For Frank, the two aspects of architecture are intimately intertwined. As President Obama said of Frank when recently awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “His buildings demonstrate architecture’s power to induce wonder and revitalize communities.” I hope you have enjoyed these interviews. I’ve never enjoyed talking with anyone more.

Our theme music comes from “The Dharma at Big Sur,” composed by John Adams for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003. Look for new episodes of Art + Ideas every other Wednesday. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud or visit getty.edu/podcasts for more resources. Thanks for listening.

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