Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles, Part Three

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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: You know, public buildings, people weigh in. There’s a lot of emotion, right? There’s a lot of feeling. In the end, I think it’s great because when it’s finished and it’s good, man, the kudos and the wonderful love you get. ’Cause they all feel like they’re part of it I think.

Cuno: In this episode, I speak with the architect Frank Gehry in the third of four conversations we recorded for this podcast.

[classical music fades out]

Cuno: The last time I met Frank in the studio, we talked about his projects from the 1970s and ’80s, including his home in Santa Monica and his work on Los Angeles institutions like the Hollywood Bowl and the Geffen Contemporary. We ended our conversation with his trip to Japan to accept the Pritzker Prize in 1989. I met Frank again to continue our talk, this time focusing on another celebrated Los Angeles landmark, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, as well as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. That museum gave the name to the so-called Bilbao effect, the idea that the creation of a world class cultural institution can put your city on the map, generating tourism and cultural energy. We picked up where we left off, with his trip to Japan.

So Frank, the last time we spoke, we ended with your being awarded the Pritzker Prize. And you were 70 years old then and you’d been a professional architect for more than 30 years. How do you remember receiving that phone call, and what did it mean to you?

Gehry: I’m a weird guy. I don’t really expect things like that. You know, I didn’t really know the Pritzkers at that point. I didn’t have much relationship with them. I went to the event where Hans Hollein got it, and that’s about the only involvement I had.

Cuno: But then you were—the prize itself, was going to be given away in Tōdai-ji, the [Gehry: Yes] temple in Japan. So you flew over. And at that point, you learned that they were expecting of you to give a speech of some kind. Well, in that speech, you said a number of things that were of some importance and some—something provocative. You used it, I think, as an occasion to reflect on your ambitions for architecture. And you said, most memorably—to me, anyway—that you compared architecture to painting. You said, “Painting had an immediacy that I craved for architecture.” Then you distinguished problem-solving architecture from the art of architecture. You said, “The moment of truth, the composition of elements, the selection of form, scale, materials, color—finally, all the same issues facing the painter and the sculptor. Architecture is surely an art, and those who practice the art of architecture are surely architects.” To whom were you speaking in this speech? I mean, was it not just those in the audience, but was it to your critics at that point, your clients, the architecture profession, artists who were your friends, who promoted you?

Gehry: Well, I think I was speaking generally. And that’s a topic that I’ve been, you know, interested in for a long time, because as we’ve discussed before over the years, great architecture was done by artists who’ve graduated to be architects, like Giotto and El Greco.

Cuno: [over Gehry] All the way to Bernini.

Gehry: And Bernini and all of those—

Cuno: Michelangelo.

Gehry: Michelangelo, and you name ’em all. It’s just that at the time I wrote that speech, and even now, the climate to say things like that—there was a lot of competition between the artists and the architects, even my friends, that—who was what? Like Richard Serra on Charlie Rose, called me a plumber. [chuckles] And so for the longest time, and even after that speech and up until much more recently, whenever I’m told, “Well, Frank, you’re an artist,” I always say, “No, I’m an architect.” Because I don’t want to get into the argument. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to discuss it. So what?

Lately, I’ve been more concerned about it, as things have been ramped up and architects—the architectural profession itself seems to have had—and the latest Pritzker Prize, several of them, seem to value low-cost housing, social issue—social architecture, over the art of architecture, as though one excludes the other and one is more important than the other. And I—the answer to that is that every architect I know in my lifetime has always been very involved with social architecture, has been very involved with the climatic issues, energy saving. I mean, you know, I remember talking about it in college. I know many of my colleagues have done free work in the low-cost housing areas and in many parts of the world. You know, I love it, that they’re doing it; but then to make that a value to honor as that kind of award which has been given to the art of architecture. So either you change the premise of the award or you talk about it. [chuckles]

Cuno: Well, if there’s a moment in your career in which the two ideas of architecture, architecture—the art of architecture and the social utility of architecture comes into conflict for you, it’s at just about that time. Because a few months before winning the Pritzker Prize, you were selected to design the new concert hall for the LA Music Center, which is gonna be the home now for the LA Philharmonic. And it had to have been the most consequential commission for your career to date. How did you approach the selection process itself? Because you were invited to compete for it, isn’t—you weren’t invited with the job itself in hand; [Gehry: Right] it was a competition.

Gehry: [over Cuno] I was invited to compete against some formidable competitors like Hollein and Stirling.

Cuno: Siegfried Böhm[?].

Gehry: Siegfried Böhm. [Cuno: Yeah] Those were the four of us. And I knew that I was not a favorite of the Disney family, ’cause the Disney lawyer took me aside and gave me a list of things he was sure I wouldn’t be able to do. And one of them that stood out was brass handrails. And that’s why there’s a lot of brass handrails. [they laugh] And then I called him when it was in. I said, “Is there enough brass handrails for you?” [chuckles] Anyway, people judge you from what—those early works. So they were inexpensive buildings and using raw materials. I was trying to say that you could make—like Rauschenberg showed the way with the Combines, to use cheap materials to make art, and you could make architecture that way, and it would be comfortable and it would be okay. And so that rap followed me, and the Disneys didn’t understand it. They thought I would wanna make a chain link, corrugated concert hall with plywood. [chuckles] When we got down to making the models, Lillian Disney, who was Walt’s widow, picked my model. ’Cause it was blind; she didn’t know it was mine. And so that was interesting.

Cuno: Yeah. Well, two things are always mentioned when stories are told of that selection process. First, that your design called for the audience to surround the stage, which was not a common thing at the time. In fact, it was inspired—I think you even said so—by Hans Scharoun’s Berlin [Gehry: Right] Philharmonie. And then the other was a musician’s garden, which I think must be a nod to both the musician’s delight in and perhaps need for a kind of natural escape or refreshment; but also Lillian Disney—you mentioned her name—Lillian Disney’s love of flowers. So you had in mind that the garden might be some element in this project that would appeal to her. Tell us both about the stage decision, to make that decision about the stage, and then your inclusion of the garden.

Gehry: Well, I’d been to Scharoun’s hall with Ernest Fleischmann, and heard the—heard a performance with the Berlin Philharmonie. And the vineyard was already being copied by many architects, because of the Berlin thing.

Cuno: The vineyard? What do you mean?

Gehry: The vineyard seating.

Cuno: Oh, I see.

Gehry: They call it vineyard seating [Cuno: I see] in the— [chuckles]

Cuno: In the business.

Gehry: In the business.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: Scharoun had the touch. You know, if you went to that building, it was very humane. It was—it felt good. It felt good with the audience, you felt comfortable with the audience, and you felt an incredibly good relationship with the orchestra. So that was—

Cuno: Wherever you sat, whether you sat in front or behind—

Gehry: [over Cuno] Wherever you sat, yeah. At the time I went there, the acoustics weren’t perfect, weren’t working. They were having troubles, and they had to retrofit some of it. I think because the organ was on one side of the stage, stage left, and the—on stage right, there was an indentation of seating, so the volume pushed in. And I suspect that had something to do with the imbalance.

Cuno: But was it your idea of this that it would be a more pleasant experience, visual experience or social experience, or an acoustic experience for the audience?

Gehry: I was working with an acoustician from Japan, so—who had different ideas about what the hall should be than Scharoun. And we met with Scharoun’s acoustician, Dr. Kramer, and with our acoustician, and they were very different in what they proposed to me. In fact, I said, “Okay, you’re two greatest—you each have a different [chuckles] idea; which one should I do?” [chuckle]

Cuno: What about the garden?

Gehry: The garden was Lilly, mostly. I did meet with her several times, and quite liked her and had a great relationship with her. And she used to giggle and show me the Delftware that Walt loved. And I said to her, “But Lilly, this is the cheap stuff and the tourists—” And she’d say, “Ha, ha, isn’t that funny? He loved that stuff.” And so after she died, I made that fountain. And I ordered the cheap stuff and the Delft people knew what it was for and so they sent us the expensive stuff. So we broke 6,000 pots. [they laugh] Anyway, the garden—the seats are colorful, the carpet’s colorful, the garden is accessible from everywhere, and it has beautiful trees and so on. And that was all for Lilly and for the musicians to use while they were there.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: It was also intended for intermission. So that…

Cuno: For the audience.

Gehry: …the audience could go out there and have—we designed rolling carts and bars and they never did it, I don’t know why they never did it.

Cuno: Well, it’s fair to say that the project wasn’t an easy one.

Gehry: No.

Cuno: And just the rehearsing of the sort of constraints on the project is daunting. So the Music Center was going to own the building itself; the LA Philharmonic was going to occupy it. LA County owned the land, and agreed to build a parking garage beneath the concert hall. The Disney family was to be its major benefactor. And then you had multiple contracts with consultants working for and against you. So was it clear from the beginning for whom you were working when you were given the commission? And were you prepared for the complexity of the situation?

Gehry: Well, I’m not afraid of complexity. I’ve never shied away from that kind of thing, because all buildings have reasons for being and particular needs. I loved the challenge. I think what I wanted to focus with—on was more the experience of the building and the acoustics. So I wanted to do a building that was acoustically relevant and was a place that people could interact, and could interact with the musicians. It’s all about that. It’s about the comfort of the audience and the feelings that are generated, that the orchestra feels. When the orchestra feels that the audience is with them, they play better. [Cuno: Mm-hm] And then the audience feels better, and it builds from there. And it’s true. Everybody tells me this thing. You know, the orchestra has told me this over the years, that they really feel the audience, and it has helped them [Cuno: Yeah] a lot. And the audience—I get hugged every time I go there, so—

Cuno: Well, it’s not only because they are surrounded by the audience, but that the vineyard, as you described it, isn’t deep and long; it’s broad and [Gehry: Right] shallow. It’s got a sense of proximity [Gehry: Right] to the orchestra.

Gehry: The trick, I think, is creating a simple room that creates a communal relationship with the orchestra and with each other. The architecture’s not overbearing, that it is background.

Cuno: And there was a lot of pressure on you at the time to move quickly with the project. You were just getting more and more interested in a new kind of design and designing; and that is, with the liberated curving shapes that we know the building to have today. How did you deal with the pressure to proceed quickly, from their point of view, and your—and with construction, and with your rethinking the design at the very same time?

Gehry: I think quickly is not—I mean, there’s absolutely length of time that’s necessary. You can’t just put it together in a few days. But I made many models. I think the secret is to get everything out on the table quickly, all the issues out in the open, so that the client can interact with them. So the client can tell you what they need, but then when they see these models that have a different point of view, a different attitude, a different—they can react. And you can see, for instance, when we were doing the program hall, 2,500 seats, the models were a little bit big. You felt—you felt it a little big. When I said, “Why don’t we do a 2,200-seat hall and crowd in as many seats as we can comfortably?” And so we made a model that did that. And everybody could see that that was more interesting, more communal, did all the things—the scale felt nice in the model. So I think the issue is to vet everything as quickly as possible. Like find out—like we did all the musicians’ interviews, found out what their loves and hates were.

Cuno: But early on, and just as you’re getting started with the design process and you’re also rethinking or—and advancing the way you think about the design process itself and you’re developing the computer-aided technologies and various things, you learn at just that time, that you wouldn’t be doing the working drawings for the project, but another firm would, ultimately, the architect Daniel Dworsky. You must’ve wondered who your client was. I mean, they gave you one job to do, and then all of a sudden they took back a very important part of the job from you.

Gehry: So to get in this and mention names, I get in trouble. I don’t really…There was a person from the board that was assigned to run the project. They brought in a project manager. We had started working before that, because of Bilbao and even before that, with French aircraft computer programming, which made things much clearer. The executive architect that was chosen refused to use that. [chuckles] So we offered to train him, as it got tighter and tighter, we offered to do it all, let him have the money and the credit. I thought it was going to be a disaster. And I said, “We’ll do it for you.” And they all refused. So actually, it blew up, because they started fast-track construction, and the executive architect could never keep up with it. And so when they were ordering steel, there was no place to put the steel ’cause there was nothing there. So it came to a stop. They lost 60, 70 million dollars. I was blamed. Which is normal, I guess. Nobody took—nobody came to my aid and said, “That’s not true.” [chuckles] And for a couple years, I was ready to leave town.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: I couldn’t deal with that. [Cuno: Yeah] Until they hired the Hines people, Gerry Hines, from Houston.

Cuno: Yeah. I’m gonna get to that in a second, [Gehry: Okay] but I’m gonna back up a little bit. Because before then, ground was broken. In 1992, as I understand. And by I say ground was broken, that’s to say that LA County began to build the parking garage, [Gehry: Right] on top of which the concert hall was going to be built. And it was said they did that in order to meet the deadline. And this is Disney’s promised gift. If they hadn’t started the project, they wouldn’t—they wouldn’t have gotten [Gehry: Right] their gift. But it was just gonna be the parking garage. And you were still designing, developing the concert hall.

Cuno: Did that give you a kind of artificial sense of time pressure on this.

Gehry: Well, it was normal time pressure. It got to be abnormal when nobody would listen and follow the rules. And there was some skullduggery going on behind the scenes that I didn’t know about. But it was bad. And when Hines came in and—and it stopped everything. The garage was built and everything was stopped. There was no—there was to be no concert hall, actually. Until Dick Riordan became mayor and decided the city needed that to be built. And he appointed his best friend, Eli Broad, to be the czar, as he called it.

Cuno: Right, right.

Gehry: And Mr. Broad was not a person that liked my work or my process. And so it got—even after it all failed, the years in between—then restarted, we still had complications. [chuckles]

Cuno: Yeah. I read somewhere that you thought at the time, and expressed that you thought at the time, that the so-called LA establishment had conspired against you on the project, and that the project’s complexity was the result of a failed political system, you said, in the city and the county, and that you even thought of moving out of Los Angeles [Gehry: Yes, that’s true] to go to New York or Paris or Newport, Rhode Island, my favorite destination [chuckles] for relocation. But that Berta, your wife, forbade it.

Gehry: Right. [chuckles] Well, the thing that changed our mind was in between the first disaster, and during the hiatus, they hired the Hines people to come in and evaluate what happened the first time. And the Hines people came to me and said, you know, “You’ve been screwed. [chuckles] It’s not your fault. You’re clean, Mr. Gehry.” So I said, “I know.” And I hugged the guy. And so going forward, I had a clean slate. And a new team. And I had the problem of Eli, who tried again to take the project away from me. [Cuno: Yeah] And it would’ve failed again, actually, had he succeeded.

Cuno: Yeah. Now, while all of that was going on and Disney Hall was stalled, your architecture practice was thriving. [Gehry: Yeah] You had—the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota was opened in 1993; the EMT [read: EMR] Communication and Technology Center, in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, which opened in 1995—extraordinary commission; the so-called Fred and Ginger buildings in Prague opened a year later; and of course, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997. So all of that was going on while the politics and the [Gehry: Right] project was stalled here in Los Angeles. These were all major and hugely innovative projects for you and for your architecture practice. And you were using—embracing this new design and new construction technology. It’s almost as if your difficulties with Disney Hall drove you, on these projects, to prove—or I’m making this up now, but I’d love to hear your remarks on this—to prove Los Angeles wrong; to show LA that the world had opened its arms to you and had warmly embraced you, when LA, in your terms, was conspiring against you. Was there any kind of psychological motivation as a result of the difficulties in Los Angeles, with the embrace of these other projects?

Gehry: When Bilbao was finished, they did—that’s when Dick Riordan said, “Well, you could build it there; you can do it here.” And that’s when they—he and Eli, I guess—somebody went to Bilbao and saw it and—and so I was getting support, so to speak, even though some of it wasn’t really support, but—I thought it would never be built. I really assumed it would never be built. But—And it was painful. But I’ve had projects like that, so— [Cuno: Yeah] I still do. I have—I can name some [Cuno chuckles] that take a lot of your life and love and work and effort, and then they don’t happen. But I think when it started up again and—And they wanted it to be metal, ’cause of the metal. It was stone originally, because a stone building in the evening, takes the ambient light and it’s soft, and a concert hall’s somewhere you go in the evening. And I would never have used metal, because metal’s hard to light and it can look like a cheap refrigerator. [chuckles] And so when they insisted it that it be metal, and it saved five million dollars. I used that as a chance to redo some of the parts of the building that I was—didn’t like by then. I mean, if you look—wait long enough, there’s stuff you wanna change, right?

Cuno: Well, let’s go back to Bilbao first, because the project that—in LA stalled at this point. You get the Bilbao project. How did the commission for the Guggenheim Museum come about? Was it the director, Tom Krens, who just came to you with the project?

Gehry: Yeah, it was—

Cuno: Had you ever been to Bilbao before?

Gehry: I had been to Bilbao before. When I was working in France when I was younger, in 1960, I used to drive around, looking at—I was interested in Romanesque churches.

Cuno: And Santiago de Compostela’s not so far away.

Gehry: Yeah, and I could go see all those churches. [Cuno: Yeah] Some of the best ones are on the—

Cuno: Pilgrimage routes, yeah.

Gehry: Yeah. And so I’d passed through for that reason. And it was a sleepy city, I thought. I didn’t pay much attention to it. [Cuno: Yeah] It was—there was something nice about it. [Cuno: Yeah]

Cuno: I think I heard or read somewhere that the original idea the government had for you was to convert an industrial building into a contemporary art museum, much like you had done here in Los Angeles, at the Temporary Contemporary. But that you talked them out of that. That—

Gehry: It wasn’t an industrial building, it was a little different than that. It was a 19th- century brick building. I don’t know what style it was, but it was turrets in the corners and it was brick [Cuno: Sort of Neo-Gothic] and stone. Neo-Gothic, yeah. [Cuno: Yeah] What was left of it was the exterior wall. So it was like a fence. And it was a fairly large site. And it fit perfectly in the neighborhood. The neighborhood houses and everything. If you were standing at ground level, it really worked. You go inside and it’s—they’d built a bunch of stuff in there. They turned it into a kind of motel, I think, with two stories. But you didn’t see any of that from the outside. They wanted me to leave the fence, the exterior fence, and build a building. And I said that they could do that, but if their desire was to make some kind of a statement and build a building that had relevance to the community and became part of the community, that this was kneecapping it, that it wouldn’t—you know, it would lose its strength. It would be hard to do. And that it was much better for them to find a use that was compatible with that existing building, and—which I’m sure they could’ve. And so I said, “You’re—you know, you—you’re tying knots around this thing and making it impossible to do. If what you say is what you want to achieve, you can’t do it on this site.” Tom Krens didn’t tell me [chuckles] anything. Then we went back to dinner that night at the hotel, and all the city fathers were there. And I was sitting next to Krens. They asked me what I thought of the site and I told ’em what I just told you. And I was expecting a big kick in the shins from Tom, but he didn’t. And we then had a few drinks and walked up on a hill and looked back at the city. And they said, “Where should we build it?” If you go to the city, the hills are quite beautiful and they surround the river and—and you look down at the river and there was an old brick factory. And I could see that it had a relationship to the city hall. That even [though] city hall was far on the river, further on the river, there would be a way to talk to each other. And so I said, “There.” And they said, “Well, it’s possible. It’s—the brick factory is going out of business,” and so on and so forth. And nobody yelled at me. The next morning I had a meeting with all of them, and Tom told—said to me that that was the same site he’d picked and talked to them about. So apparently, that had—they’d had some discussion. I’m not sure about that one. [they laugh]

Cuno: Right. But your timing was fortuitous, because it coincided precisely with the more—the greater comfort you had, or a greater understanding you had, of the technology that you were developing [Gehry: Right] out of the Weisman.

Gehry: [over Cuno] And we were able to build that building on—exactly on budget, [Cuno: Yeah?] which in the Basque country is mandatory. If you shake hands and say you’re gonna do something, you’d better do it.

Cuno: Yeah. Well, the—your clients not only shook hands with you and said—they the money to pay for it, at least at that level, and they had the will to do it, and they thrust you into the job and they got it done quickly.

Gehry: And it was 300 bucks a square foot, which is unheard of.

Cuno: And it was a triumph.

Gehry: Yeah. And since then, they told me they’ve earned three and three and a half billion euros.

Cuno: Yeah. And it associated you with something called the Bilbao effect. The idea that a cultural building could provoke a wholesale redevelopment of a city, which we’ve known, which we’ve seen.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Including the politics.

Cuno: Including the politics of it all. Did that reawaken in you or confirm for you your belief?

Gehry: I thought it was a miracle. I didn’t—You know—

Cuno: You thought it was a miracle?

Gehry: [they laugh] I didn’t.

Cuno: But you had had, even at Harvard, as we talked about earlier, in previous podcast episodes, you’d, at Harvard, had an understanding of what urban design would be, [Gehry: Right] that it would coincide with the elegance of architecture, [Gehry: Right] and that it could actually provoke a redevelopment of a city.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: And here you proved it, [Gehry: Right] so many years later, that in fact, it can happen.

Gehry: Yeah. And there’s plenty of examples in the past, right, where it did happen, where it was done. And so it happened again. [chuckles] And it didn’t have to be a Greek temple.

Cuno: [chuckles] Right. And in 1997, the Pritzker Prize ceremony was held in Bilbao, at the museum in Bilbao, [Gehry: Right] at the Guggenheim, 10 years after you had received it. And for many in Los Angeles, it must’ve raised the question of how this small, some might even say—as you described it, small city in Northern Spain could succeed with a triumphant, transformative Gehry building, when Los Angeles seemed that it could not. Did that provoke—you already mentioned Dick Riordan who became mayor in 1993.

Gehry: Yeah. Well, Dick Riordan, I didn’t know him well, but he was a hockey player, a skater. And so he and I used to skate together. And during those skating around, circles around the ice, we would talk about the city. And in fact, when he ran for office, he sought me out to be on a committee for him, and create a group of architects for him, which I did. And I quite liked him and I thought he had some energy, and from a different kind of energy than the normal politician.

Cuno: Well, when you learned that he was going to revive interest and try to succeed with the project, and that he brought Eli—you already mentioned Eli Broad—onto the project, and you had had a history of some difficulty in your relationship with Eli. And the campaign launched then, shortly after Bilbao opened. Did this revive your confidence? Even though you had a history of some difficulty with Eli, were you now confident, with Dick Riordan and Eli together, with this campaign being launched, with the success of Bilbao?

Gehry: [over Cuno] Well, you know, I was worried about my past experiences with Eli, that some of his thinking would come to haunt me. And I tried my best to not have it go there. But inevitably, the issue of who did the working drawings came up. And inevitably, the backlash from his misunderstanding of what I was doing when I was designing his house—because every time I would do—meet him, have discussion on his house, there would be new input. So I’d go back and redo the design. And I did it two or three times. And he read that as my inability to focus or whatever. And it was all about him, trying to please him. But it backfired. So that mentality came in. He was not gonna let that happen. That here the design was done, we just wanna change it to metal. And he thought you could just write metal and it would be metal. And that Gehry, you can get some—I got—he had the Gruen office, my old office, ready to do the working drawings, when—and they were not capable of it. I’m sure they were not. And they would’ve been just as messy as Dworsky, probably. But—

Cuno: And just as this was happening, more than 200 architects from around the world took out an ad in the LA Times newspaper calling for Disney Hall to be built, and you to be the architect of Disney [Gehry: Yeah] Hall, of course, as you proposed it. And the architects included some of the most influential architects in the world. I mean, like Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers, Tadao Ando, Richard Meier. That must’ve felt like you’ve got—now you got some wind in your sails.

Gehry: Right. It was unexpected. And it was started by Thom Mayne, who did that.

Cuno: Pritzker Prize-winning Los Angeles-based architect, yeah.

Gehry: Right. Nice guy.

Cuno: Yeah. Yeah. So that must’ve made you feel good about that.

Gehry: Yeah, it did.

Cuno: Yeah. But nevertheless, the project got stalled again, because you walked away from it. And you wrote a letter to Eli, which got published in the LA Times. [Gehry: I forget] And you said some things in the New York Times that—

Gehry: Well, I forget that.

Cuno: Not so positive, about that relationship. But you’d walked away, so the project died, as far as you were concerned, a second time.

Gehry: Yes. It was a Friday night at the bar. In my neighborhood. He said, “I’m taking the project away from you.” And I looked at him and I said, “Well, I guess it was meant to be.” And I walked out. Three days later, I got a call from Eli saying, “I hope you’re not gonna be a sore winner.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, Diane Disney insists that you do the project. So that’s it.”

Cuno: [chuckles] She got involved and she offered to pay for your doing the drawings now, to restore you to the working drawings. She said, I read somewhere, “We promised Los Angeles the Frank Gehry building, and that’s what we intend to deliver.” And that’s what happened. So you were made the sole architect, at that time, on the project, and construction begins in 1999 10 years after you were selected as its architect. And the hall opened four years later in 2003. So it took, from the moment the gun went off in 1999, it was completed and opened in four years.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: Tell us about Diane Disney and about your relationship with her and her commitment to the project and to the legacy of her father and mother.

Gehry: Well, I had seen her. I’d met her during the process for the first go-round, the second go-round. But I was instructed by her lawyer and our lawyer, not to talk to her. That this was family. They wanted privacy. They didn’t wanna be involved, they would blah-blah-blah. So you know, I shook hands and walked away. I was obedient. After she—the board meeting where Eli went and told ’em that he had dismissed me, apparently she got up and said, “I will give you the remainder of my mother’s bequest,” which at the point, I think was $25 million, “when and if Frank Gehry is reinstalled as the architect.”

And that was it. So that’s when Eli said, “I hope you’re not a sore winner.” Then we proceeded with the work. I called her then. I asked to meet with her. And I asked her why she did that. And she said her father used to come home from the studios beaten by the people in the studios, and it felt like that to her and she didn’t want that to happen.

Cuno: One gets the impression that they respected you, your art, your architecture, and took…

Gehry: Finally, yes.

Cuno: …took a hands-off approach to it, and wanted only for it to be of the highest quality [Gehry: Yes] it could be.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: So once you’re now back on the job, your experience as an architect in the intervening years had been one of great success, and the work that you did had advanced your design understanding of the technology with which you could design and how you wanted to use that technology for new designs [Gehry: Right] and so forth. So when you came back onto the job, it must’ve changed in ways other than changing out the stone and putting in stainless steel. [Gehry: Right] It must’ve been a whole rethink, or a temptation to rethink a lot, because you were a different architect by—at that time.

Gehry: Yeah, but I couldn’t change the forms. I didn’t want to disrupt what we had. So I followed that. I mean, the changing to stainless steel was a revision, but not that complicated.

Cuno: So, what were your biggest design challenges in the restart of the project? Was it the acoustics itself? Because at this point now, you’re working with Yasuhisa Toyota. Who chose him for the job, and how closely did you work with him?

Gehry: Ernest Fleischmann chose them based on Suntory Hall, which at that point, was—

Cuno: In Tokyo.

Gehry: In Tokyo, but it was pretty good acoustics. And the LA Phil played there and they loved it. So he was hired. And they had invented the process of building one-to-10 models of—

Cuno: So very large models.

Gehry: It was a very large model. And acoustically testing each seat. Which was an ominous task, right?

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: And what they did is they built all of the major halls, including the Scharoun hall, and tested it. So they had a comparative number they could go to. And they built a one-10 model and they were able to—they fill it with nitrogen so it reduces the air, so that it it’s one-10th oxygen. And they played music in it, and they could then scale it up, so you could hear it. So they did a Mozart sonata or something. And you could hear it as though it was gonna be played in the hall. I mean, some of that was hocus-pocus, I think. But maybe, who knows? The one-to-10 model resided in my office. And because of Ernest’s contacts with great musicians, I enlisted him to bring them to the office, to sit in the model and look at it. And the greatest one of all was Pierre Boulez, who we all loved, who’s now passed on. Came and he spent the day in it almost. I mean, several hours. And he came out and he gave us the high five. So I think it’s a feeling thing; but it’s also that Toyota’s company figured a way to zero in on a comparative thing, anyway. And—

Cuno: It must’ve been you who decided on the wood, or at least using a wood on the interior, for the kind of informality of it and the warmth of it. But what about the acoustics of it? Was he daunted by that?

Gehry: No. He didn’t care. The requirement is two inches of cement, a wall two inches of cement. It could be cement plaster, so it was a little bit lighter, but—so it could’ve been just the pla—a white plaster. And I made models of it as white plaster and it was beautiful. I’m dying, actually, to—I did a white plaster thing in Miami for Michael Tilson Thomas. But I’d love to do it in a full-blown hall, ’cause it would be like those old churches in Europe. You know, the white ones.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: Austrian churches.

Cuno: So you had Ernest Fleischmann, who was succeeded by Deborah Borda.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: You had Esa-Pekka Salonen—we’ve already mentioned him—who was the musical director at the time. And then you had all the orchestra players. [Gehry: Right] And so you had to work and manage relations with artists, as well as with executives, with the—of the orchestra, with the board, the building contractors. Is this a lot more complicated than building an art museum?

Gehry: A little bit more, yes, [chuckles] it is. An art museum, in the end, is whose opinion of where the art looks good. And you know what the normal opinion is, is white little boxes with—so that’s a preconception, and it pervades the whole culture of art museums, and it’s hard to break out of that. And it doesn’t completely work all the time. But the concert hall had a lot of—lot more freedom. But it had more compelling requirements, too. It had—

Cuno: And a lot more people to please, I assume, [Gehry: Right] who were part of the process. Yeah.

Gehry: And a lot more nay—you know, people that didn’t—not supportive.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: Wanting the same old—I mean, the first violinist, when we won the competition, said, “Mr. Gehry, all you need is a measuring tool to measure the Boston Symphony Hall and replicate it.” And he made violins. He replicated Stradivariuses. That was his hobby. And so I waited a while and I got him and I said, “Hey, tell me. When you replic—you’ve asked me to replicate this building. When you replicate a Stradivarius, does it sound exactly like a Stradivarius?” [they chuckle] And he looked at me. I said, “I gotcha.” [they laugh]

Cuno: Well, the story of the Disney Hall is a story of operatic proportions [Gehry: Right] and narrative of great complexity.

Gehry: But I think they’re—that’s par for—

Cuno: [over Gehry] And now it’s a triumph. Now it’s all—

Gehry: No, but it’s par for the course all over the world. Like, you know, public buildings, people weigh in. There’s a lot of emotion, right? There’s a lot of feeling. In the end, I think it’s great, because when it’s finished and it’s good, man, the kudos and the wonderful love you get and—because they all feel like they’re part of it, I think.

Cuno: Yeah, yeah. Well, you should know that the music for this podcast episode—and indeed, the music for the podcast itself—is taken from John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur…

Gehry: Oh, right.

Cuno: …which John, as you well know, composed for the opening of Disney Hall.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: John has described that music as being inspired by the shock of recognition, of coming upon the California coastline as an outsider. Because as you know, John is from New England, although he’s long lived in Northern California. He described the music as being inspired by “the way the ocean’s current pounds and smashes the littoral in a slow, lazy rhythm of terrifying power,” [Gehry: Mm] in his words.

“For a newcomer,” as he’s written, “the first exposure to the coastline of California produces a visceral effect of great emotional complexity.” And he cites the inspiration of another outsider, Jack Kerouac, whom he says, “comes closest to evoking my own sense of liberation and excitement and ecstasy, that is nevertheless tinged with that melancholy expressed in the first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, all life is sorrowful.” So I wonder if you—

Gehry: John Adams, he’s a poet.

Cuno: Yeah. [Gehry chuckles] I wonder if you remember the orchestra playing John’s composition that night at the opening of Disney Hall, and if that combination of ecstasy and melancholy matched your own early experiences of the California coastline itself, with the experience of opening that concert hall that night.

Gehry: I don’t remember in that detail. I loved the piece, I remember, and it sounded great in the hall.

Cuno: Was there a tinge of melancholy that evening?

Gehry: [over Cuno] Probably. [laughs; Cuno: Yeah?] I don’t remember.

Cuno: Only a sense of triumph?

Gehry: A sense of triumph, maybe.

Cuno: [over Gehry] Well, it is a complicated story, as we have said and tried to describe. But it has resulted in a great triumph for the city. Not only as you anticipated it to be, in terms of a house of music and of art, but as a powerful statement for the redevelopment of the center of the city, in which you’re engaged. So I want to thank you for this, talking with us this afternoon. And as always, it was fun to be with you, and I look forward to our next conversation, at which we’ll discuss your latest interest, which is the LA River.

Gehry: Wow. It’s not just a creek. [they laugh]

Cuno: So thank you, Frank.

Gehry: Thank you.

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Cuno: 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. It is licensed with permission from Hendon Music. 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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