Frank Gehry’s Los Angeles, Part Two

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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: I was looking for that Zen moment that did knock your socks off, like the Rembrandt self-portrait moment. It’s so powerful, the feeling you get from it.

Cuno: In this episode, I speak with architect Frank Gehry in the second of several conversations we recorded together.

[classical music fades out]

In my last conversation with Frank Gehry, we spoke about his earliest years in Los Angeles, beginning in 1947, from his early education at USC to his experience at a large and established LA architectural firm, Gruen Associates, to his time doing design work with the US Army. Over the years, he started a family and established a close network of artists and architecture colleagues. In 1964 Frank designed a residence and studio for graphic artist Lou Danziger. The Danziger Studio, as it came to be known, is often considered his first original design and marks his break from traditional architecture.

We picked up our conversation over lunch in his office where we talked about the next period in Frank’s career, including the design of his 1978 house, the so-called Gehry house, the project that brought him widespread notice and some not altogether positive attention from his neighbors in Santa Monica.

All right. So in 1969, five years after the Danziger Studio project, you published a commentary in Designers West magazine. It was characteristically blunt, and it opened with the following statement: “Architects mostly practice in fear of clients, and thereby compromise the quality of their service.” And then you went on to say, “Our architectural vocabulary is better than our clients. Our visual intellect is more highly evolved. We are the experts, and that is why we are hired. I want to provide services at my highest possible level, and to do so, I have to deal with the real issues. I have to question every facet of the client’s problem to be solved, and finally, assume responsibility for my solutions.” And then you gave your views about transportation and housing and the values of the architectural profession. It may not have been a manifesto, but it was a bold pronouncement for an architect with only a few independent projects to show for himself.

Gehry: Some of those things I talked about became true.

Cuno: [chuckles]

Gehry: [over Cuno] Like the car. I think in there I said, there will be pools of cars and you’d just go to the pool and get in the car. Like the bicycles now are. The other thing I talked about in there was the powerpack. ’Cause it was right at that time we were working with Irwin and Rauschenberg at LACMA, with Garrett AiResearch, on Skylab. It was arts and technology.

Cuno: Technology, right, with Maurice Tuchman, yeah.

Gehry: With Maurice, right. And so it occurred to me that the biggest problem in building a still at the level of single houses or apartments, built on a wood frame. And you built a house, you built a building, and then the wood frame’s all up, and then in comes the plumber and cuts holes in it. And then in comes the electrician and drills holes in it and puts metal tape holding the thing together. And somehow, it seemed like a waste of human energy to be building something and then cut it all up and then having to hold it together with tape and stuff. And it occurred to me that if we could separate the shelter part of the building, as a unique, self-sustaining piece that you don’t tear apart, and that—it created the opportunity for it to be almost anything. It could’ve been plastic, it could be wood, it could be chop suey. It could be anything. And it would allow more aesthetic freedom. And then you have a powerpack, which is separate, which isn’t made by the contractor, which you buy from Hewlett-Packard or, at that time, or somebody who created this powerpack. It stored the power, had the lighting. You could connect with fiber optics. At the time, that was being thought, talked about, that you could use the sanitation systems that were being developed for space travel in the Skylab for toilets and reclamation of water and all that. So I thought that all of that could be taken out of the hands of the carpenter-contractor type, and built by NASA [chuckles] or somebody. [Cuno chuckles] And that you could buy that separately. And that piece could change every five years; you’d buy a new one as the technology got better and better and better, and those things would get smaller and smaller and smaller and become more micro. That you would have a lot more flexibility in building your dream house, your spaces, aesthetically. And so that was the idea. And at that time, I tried to figure out what a powerpack would be. And I worked it out. It would be the size of one of those containers from the container shop. [Cuno: Wow] At that time. [Cuno: Wow] So if you bought one of those, you’ll put all the stuff in it, and that could be set on the lot beside this new frame, this wonderful thing. You would have everything you needed. With time, that would get to be half of that, [Cuno: Right] and then a quarter of that. Well, right now, it could be, you know, 10 percent of that.

Cuno: Right, right.

Gehry: So that seemed like the right way to go with and so now that we’re working with JPL, we’re starting to look with them at some of those kind of ideas. But—

Cuno: What was the reaction at the time?

Gehry: Nobody paid—Craig Ellwood called me when he read it and he said, “What the hell are you talking about? I don’t get it.” [they laugh]

Cuno: Did you prototype it?

Gehry: No. [chuckles]

Cuno: It was impossible?

Gehry: No, we just—and it was in that period that the cardboard furniture then became part of it. That it was throw-away, that it was—I still think it makes sense, you know? ’Cause we get caught by all the mechanical stuff; you get stuck with it at a certain time in history and it’s embedded into this shelter, and it’s pretty hard to retrofit.

Cuno: Yeah. But what gave you, at that time, the courage to make such a pronouncement?

Gehry: I have no idea. [they laugh]

Cuno: I mean, you hadn’t many projects to date to show for yourself, independent projects, least of all, any that was experimental like that, or any that was as it were, condemning of the client and promoting of the position of the architect as a kind of independent voice in the process of—

Gehry: I wasn’t trying to condemn the client, actually. I was saying to be a true partner to the client, you had to bring to the table the expertise and the experience and the—all of that, that made your value, made yourself valuable to the client. I presumed it was of value.

Cuno: Right. [chuckles]

Gehry: I found out later, not many clients cared about that.

Cuno: It was about this time that you got the commissioned studio for Ron Davis, an artist friend, on a former ranch house in Malibu. A house, as I look at it anyway, is a smart and seemingly simple, but in fact, a dramatic, largely open loft-like space that provided Ron Davis with rooms for studio, art storage, and living quarters. The building, for those who haven’t seen it, is made of corrugated steel, and it sits on a high hill above the Pacific Ocean. And it looks as if it’s slicing through the landscape like a knife. How important was that commission for you at that time? Was that part of your growing confidence?

Gehry: Well, I knew Ron Davis as part of the art scene. He was an outsider to most of it. He was kind of a lone ranger, off in a corner. But he did reach out to me a few times. And as I got to know him, I figured out that he played with perspective, but he didn’t know how to build it in 3-D, that he could do these beautiful drawings, with vanishing points and all that, but to build the object with—he didn’t get it. And he was trying to make three-dimensional objects. I don’t know if you remember, some of those plastic early things had lips on them, had side—and they were trying to be perspective. But he didn’t know how to do it. And it was a strange blind spot. I couldn’t figure it out, just what was going on. And so when he asked me to do the house, I made a maquette of the land. And I had a room in the office at the time. I put the maquette in the room. And then I took strings and pins and we made these—this string diagram over the site. And I was training him how to make a three-dimensional object. [Cuno chuckles] And it was interesting. And I mean, I was consciously training him how to make it. And it was that that led to the design. So the site has a crook in it, as it goes toward the oceans, comes down the hill and then it bends toward the ocean. And when we start playing with these string lines, we found that that was the sweet spot, where you could connect the perspective and be all on his land. I forget what we were trying. I mean I’m a little bit fuzzy on how it was. But I remember it was the sweet spot and we loved that, and that’s why we put the house there, and that’s how we did it. And we designed a second house up the hill, again with the strings, but that never got built. When the house was built and our friend Philip Johnson came to visit it one day, he listened to my story and he said, “Well, where are the vanishing points?” And I said, “Well, they’re in outer space.” And he said, “Well, how did you—” [they laugh]

Cuno: How did you—?

Gehry: He was trying to find the flaw in my stuff. But—

Cuno: What about the corrugated steel?

Gehry: The corrugated steel was—it was cheap, industrial buildings. Ron wanted to build a studio. Artists were working in industrial buildings. I think that was kinda a no-brainer.

Cuno: But it wasn’t just cheap. You must’ve liked the effect of the surface, [Gehry: Right, yeah] the rippled surface on it.

Gehry: We did.

Cuno: It gives one the impression, looking at the geometry of the house, the Ron Davis house, that it takes the principles or the precedent of mid-century modernism and makes it tougher, stronger, more forceful, with kind of a greater abstraction, enforced by this industrial material. Were you consciously, as it were, critiquing the elegance of mid-century modernism?

Gehry: Yeah. So I was dealing with my socialist tendencies, my of-the-people, my Bernie what’s his name? [Cuno: Sanders (chuckles)]—Sanders period. And making everything cheap and industrial and saying it could be humane and beautiful. It didn’t have to be marble and fancy. And that the fussy detailing, at that time, of the architects that were practicing, like I. M. Pei, at the time, was—And a lot of people. I forget. Breuer. You know, everybody. There was a lot of God-is-in-the-details talk. And I found that if you went for the bigger picture, if you went for the broader brushstrokes, the bigger elements, you would still have­—the details wouldn’t be fussy. They would be matter of fact, but they would be stronger in the—and I did that on my own house, too, the early house. And Bilbao does that. Bilbao’s a really cheap building, 300 bucks a square foot. It’s only because I didn’t do fussy details. I just went with the texture of the technology and used it. And you don’t miss—I don’t miss the fussy details, you know. At the same time as I was doing Bilbao, I did the thing in—building in Berlin, with the fussy details, so I proved I could do the fussy details [Cuno chuckles] if I had to.

Cuno: Well, let’s go back to the Ron Davis house, because that’s a big step from Danziger. You know, that’s a kind of bold step, both in the design and in the use of materials. At about the same time, you were making furniture, as we already mentioned, with corrugated cardboard. And you first were making them with Bob Irwin, which seems kind of an unexpected partnership in this enterprise. But it was creative businessman Richard Solomon who saw the work, as I recall, and convinced you to go commercial with it, under the name something that sounded great, Easy Edges. And in 1972, in fact, you applied for and received a patent for the construction process. And that all seemed very promising, like you were going in a certain direction, but you pulled out of it, out of the deal, with both Irwin and Solomon, and they were upset over all this money.

Gehry: [over Cuno] That’s true.

Cuno: What made you pull out of that deal?

Gehry: I had a very over-protective lawyer that was doing the thing for me. And I didn’t realize it. Maybe you’ve had that happen in your life, where somebody you love dearly overprotects you to your disadvantage?

Cuno: No.

Gehry: You haven’t had that? [chuckles]

Cuno: Maybe my parents. [chuckles]

Gehry: And the reason he could get me into it was that the furniture stuff generated so much publicity. There were a couple of weeks that every newspaper in the United States had a picture of me with one of those chairs. And it freaked me out. Going through Bloomingdale’s and having people oh and ah and all that freaked me out. ’Cause I wasn’t secure enough as an architect. And I thought, God, I don’t wanna be this—I don’t wanna get sidetracked here into something. I’m sure it’ll make money and I’m sure I’ll get rich on it. I’m not ready for that. And the lawyer was pushing at me on the other side, to say, why are you sharing it with Irwin and Brogan? This is your idea, it’s your patent, blah-blah-blah, the lawyers of Mr. Solomon were trying to cut a tough deal. So they wanted to be able to use my name as part of the deal, and he was trying to protect me from that. And since I was insecure about that topic, it was easy to convince me. So I kept trying to talk to them. Brogan, who works for a lot of artists, the rap on him over the years from others is that he thinks he’s the artist at the end. He forgets.

Cuno: Well, your biographer, Paul Goldberger, describes your pulling out of this deal as another indication of your tendency, when even against your best financial interests, you turn away from such opportunities, opportunities over which you don’t have full control, that you wanted full control. And in the last interview, we talked about a number of times—your not taking the job with Gruen, for example, was a moment, again, where you had the courage to go independent, even though it was against your best interests.

Gehry: Yeah. Well, it seemed against my best interest—turned out I was right, probably.

Cuno: [laughs] Yeah. So this decade later, you’re designing chairs for Vitra, the European furniture company, for which you also designed the museum and headquarters. And was it the particular relationship with Vitra that was important? Or was it just simply your identity as an architect?

Gehry: Well, Rolf Fehlbaum, who owns Vitra and at that time, had just taken it over from his family, he had a PhD in philosophy from some fancy Swiss university, was working with the Oldenburgs on the tool gate. And somewhere in there, I don’t know, I started getting letters from Rolf Fehlbaum about designing furniture. And I put ’em in a little hold box and I never looked at ’em again. This went on for a year, I think. And he was working with the Oldenburgs; he knew they knew me. So finally, he contrived that he would be at dinner at the Oldenburgs’ in New York when I was there. And I’m sitting across from this guy and he said, “You don’t answer my letters.” And I said, “You know, I don’t know who you are.” [they laugh]

Cuno: So nothing personal, you simply didn’t know who he was.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Yeah. And I said, “You know, designing a chair is the hardest thing possible to do. And I wouldn’t wanna do it with somebody I didn’t know.” You know, I couldn’t imagine that we would serendipitously be able to work together and have the same values about a chair. And I said, “So I’m busy working with architecture. It’s not my primary goal in life, is to design a chair. Although it’s an exciting them for me. I like the idea of it. I just haven’t found the right venue or time or place.” And he said, “Well, I’m the right place.” And so I said, “Well, show me.” [laughs] So I went to Switzerland with the boys when they were little. And we went to the factory and they were placing the tool gate, and I helped ’em locate it. And I got to know Rolf a little and spent some time with him, and liked him. I agreed, “Okay, let’s talk about it.” At [a] subsequent time, I’m not sure about this sequence of events, but subsequently I met in his factory with him and Herr Bruening or something like that. And Herr Bruening—I’m not saying the right name, but—would look at any sketch I made and, “Can’t—can’t do that. Can’t do that.” Nothing you could do.

Cuno: These were sketches made on the spot at Vitra?

Gehry: Probably.

Cuno: As a kind of example of what you were thinking about?

Gehry: Yeah. There was never anything we could do. It was always impossible.

Cuno: And this guy didn’t know he was up against a Talmudic scholar like yourself. [they laugh]

Gehry: So we would have these frustrating meetings. And I got to know Rolf. And finally, he said, “Well, maybe you should just do the building.” So then I did the building. And we kept trying to do furniture, but never worked. Herr Bruening always was in the way. I always laughed with him. I would do it—if we had a meeting now, he’d say the same thing.

Cuno: So you went other directions. Well, let’s get back to LA. In the late ’70s, you designed the print publishing studio for Gemini G.E.L., run by your friends Stanley Grinstein and Sidney Felsen. It was another artist project, where—at their place, where Ed Ruscha, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Richard Serra, and so many other artists made artist prints. But stylistically, in terms of shapes and volumes and the materials, it was radically different than the Danziger and Davis studios that were a decade earlier.

Gehry: It was plywood.

Cuno: It was plywood and it was breaking out of forms, [Gehry: Yeah] it was constructed. It was this idea of an assemblage of different shapes and sizes.

Gehry: But it was forced perspective. So it came out of the Ron Davis house. It was ’cause I was playing with perspective with Ron, too. I don’t know what the date is that—with the Ron Davis house.

Cuno: That’s early ’70s. That’s a six years earlier, I think.

Gehry: Ron Davis was ’72.

Cuno: Or ’72, yeah. So this is in the later ’70 s. Right. Was this in any way—was the Gemini G.E.L. a breakthrough project? Or did you just see it coming naturally out of the Ron Davis?

Gehry: Just came naturally.

Cuno: ’Cause it looks radically different. [Gehry: Yeah] It looks bolder, it looks more—the materials are, you know, coarser. [Gehry: Yeah] Or more vulnerable, even.

Gehry: Yeah. And they are. And they’ve had trouble with it. [Cuno chuckles] They’ve had to replace the plywood a few times. But the one piece looks like the Danziger, the entrance [Cuno: Yeah, right on the street, right, right] galleries. And then I took off from there.

Cuno: Yeah. I mean, the fact that you referred to it as one piece of it brings to mind what one museum critic called, at this juncture in your work, a composition by assemblage. And I know that you were looking at Robert Rauschenberg and assemblages, you were looking at Jasper Johns and various others. So was this consciously derived from artistic predecessors or principles?

Gehry: Probably, but I don’t—

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: I don’t remember. I mean, I was looking at a lot of stuff. I was looking at Morandi, too.

Cuno: So about the same time, early ’70s, you’re with Ernest Fleischmann, then executive director of the LA Philharmonic. And he hired you to work with an acoustician, to improve the sound of the Hollywood Bowl, which, for those who don’t know it, is the Art Deco outdoor summer home for the orchestra. And you came up with a group of cardboard Sonotubes. What was that conversation like with Fleischmann?

Gehry: [laughs] Do you want the whole story?

Cuno: [laughs] Yeah, I do.

Gehry: Well, I didn’t know Ernest Fleischmann. He’d just arrived from London. Did you ever meet him?

Cuno: No, never.

Gehry: Okay. So he was—

Cuno: Famous name, however.

Gehry: He was a harrumph kind of guy. He was [makes noise] gruff German, [makes noise] rough. Sometimes he could be roughshod over people. Lovable and great friend, in the end, to me and to Esa-Pekka and even to Dudamel and to a lot of people before that, Simon Rattle, et cetera. He invited me to dinner at his house. And I’d just done the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, and it got a rave review by the music critic of the New York Times. It called it the best-sounding outdoor hall, something. So he invites me to dinner, and he starts talking about the Hollywood Bowl and they’re trying to fix it. Now, this was September, and the Bowl opens in May. So he said, “We gotta get on with it. It doesn’t work. The people onstage can’t hear each other.” I said, “Well, you know why. It’s—the shell focuses the sound as if—so of course, they can’t hear each other. And so I don’t think you can do much to it. You can neutralize the focusing effect. And there’s a lotta ways to do that. I don’t know how I would go about it or—but there’s 100 ways to do that.” And the budget was tight and the time was timeline. And he said, “Fine. Can you start right away?” And I said, “Sure. I’d love to do it. It’s a great opportunity. Thank you. By the way, how am I gonna get paid? Shouldn’t we talk about that?” And he looks at me and harrumphs a little bit. He says, “This is your big chance for the big time that—You’re not gonna get paid. This is your opportunity to become well known for something.” And I looked at him and I said, “That’s not gonna work.” [laughs] I said, “You know, Ernest, Becket has done the Music Center and they have a big firm. And Peirera has worked on museums and they’ve got a big firm. And this is nothing for them to do as a freebie for you, and if I were you—” I said, “I’d pick Peirera, if I were you. But thank you for the opportunity.” And I left. And he was really pissed. [chuckles] But I—you know, that fits my MO, right?

Cuno: Right. [they laugh]

Gehry: And man, I wanted to do it. So that was September. I was disappointed. Went on about my life. Toward the end of November, I get a call from him. “All right, you win,” he said. “I’ve talked to Peirera and I’ve talked to Becket. I don’t think they can do what I want. They may be free, but they can’t do what I want. I need you.” He said, “I’ll pay you.” [they laugh] I said, “Okay.” So we started. But it was—it still had to be done by May. Now, we’d lost some time. That means construction had to be done by May. So I got Chris Jaffe, who is an acoustician who worked with me on the one in Maryland. And he and I started talking about how to do this thing. I was using Sonotube on a building. Sonotube is where you pour concrete in it and then you strip it, [Cuno: Right] throw away the cardboard. So I knew how strong they were. I’d had experience with the material, and I knew it could span.

Cuno: ’Cause you worked with it both vertically and horizontally.

Gehry: Yeah. So I started talking to Chris Jaffe about that, and we did some experiments with it, and found that it could work. And we even found that if we capped the ends of it, the volume got a bass response, which was a glorious thing to find out. So now we were gonna use the tubes to neutralize the focusing effect of the rainbow, which it could do. And we were gonna get this extra little pump with the bass response, which is—

Cuno: [over Gehry] Just to go back to the rounded form of the tubes. Rather than bouncing directly off the sound, the sound would actually slide off the tube somehow and mix with other sound coming off?

Gehry: This is the rainbow effect.

Cuno: The rainbow effect, for the listeners, ought to be clear that this is the actual structure of the Hollywood Bowl, this [Gehry: Right] art deco structure that [inaudible] in sound file, but crossed off in printed transcript

Gehry: [over Cuno] So the sound comes up and bounces.

Cuno: To the center of the stage.

Gehry: But somebody here and here can’t hear; if this is a violin and this is a bass fiddle, they can’t hear each other.

Cuno: ’Cause they’re left and right of the center, so that you can’t hear sound going across the stage.

Gehry: No. In fact, if you got within five feet of each other onstage, you couldn’t hear each other talking. This was so powerful a focusing effect. So what we needed was to neutralize that, just cut across it. If you put a floor across it, that would’ve done it, because then the sound is bouncing in many directions. It’s simple. So then we just kept piling the tubes up.

Cuno: But the fact that the tubes are curved, does that make any difference? I mean, if it were just a floor and it was flat—

Gehry: Yeah, probably a nuance that you could measure, I don’t know. In interior hall, it would help to have the curve. So I don’t know outside, whether—’cause it just reflects out into the ether. Inside, it reflects in. You’re in the box and it reflects all over. And so then we made the verticals like that. And then there was a young artist gal I was hanging out with that made big vertical soldiers. [chuckles]

Cuno: Big vertical elements left and right of the stage itself, [Gehry: Yeah] outside the stage or beyond the stage.

Gehry: That looked like soldiers. And they were high. And we had them marching up the side of the hill. We used the whole aesthetic of the tubes as a décor and as a functional thing. And it worked. And the thing I didn’t tell you, my fee going in was $10,000. [laughs] That was what we were arguing about, [Cuno laughs] $10,000. Before they hired me, I had to go to the board meeting and meet the board. And the builder on the board, Zuckerman, said, “Mr. Gehry, I have a question.” Because the tubes cost $10,000. The installation costs $10,000 and my fee was $10,000. Which was cheap, right? [Cuno: Right] And this character says to me, “Isn’t it unusual for an architect to be paid the same amount as the construction cost?” [Cuno laughs] You know, I wasn’t fast with the finger at that time, but—And he was a nice man, I found out later. But he meant well. So it was really cheap. We got it done, and it worked. And that was the first year. By then, I was getting to be very friendly with Ernest and he would invite me to all the concerts, which I loved. And I would sit in his box. And he had a telephone in the box. And here’s the bowl. Going up.

Cuno: Going up the hill.

Gehry: And his box is here.

Cuno: Uh-huh. In the second tier, as it were.

Gehry: Yeah, and he had a telephone line to the sound guys that were here. And I would sit there during the concert and he would get angry about something and he’d call these guys. “You got [grumbles] the sound and [grumbles].” And then you’d hear the sound system changing. And then Olive Barrett, who was the board chairwoman, when she heard all this going on, she walked all the way back to here.

Cuno: To the very back of the audience.

Gehry: And it wasn’t balanced. And so she’d come here and tell Ernest, “Nobody can hear anything back here.” So Ernest would call these guys, they change the thing again. [Cuno chuckles] It was Keystone Cops. And Olive was in it and Ernest was in it, and I witnessed that for several years. It was hilarious. And they never got it right. [Cuno chuckles] You could never get it right. And I remember once [chuckles] there was a guy from England, from London Decca or something like that, a sound engineer that they’d brought over for one summer. And he was a pothead. And so Ernest thought this guy really knew how to do it, ’cause he was the engineer that worked for Ernest’s best friend in the recording business in London. So he had a lotta creds. [chuckles] And so when this thing was going on, I walked back here and sat in here for a half hour. And he was smoking dope [they laugh] and Ernest was calling him and he was pushing the dial. And I said, “What are you doing?” he said, “I don’t know.” [they laugh]

Cuno: It works in the recording studio.

Gehry: Yeah, it was—

Cuno: But did every summer, you have to replace the Sonotubes, every season?

Gehry: No. They lasted for a few years. Then we got a new acoustician, Abe Melzer came from Israel. And Abe had worked on Carnegie Hall. He’s the one that put the concrete under the stage to get rid of the get rid of the subway sound.

Cuno: Oh, right.

Gehry: And in doing so, he killed the acoustic in Carnegie Hall. [chuckles]

Cuno: So he came with high recommendations?

Gehry: Yeah. And a great guy. He was just— [chuckles]

Cuno: Is that when you changed it to those fiberglass spheres?

Gehry: Yeah. So he said, “We need fiberglass spheres of different sizes,” which gave more nuance to the sound, as it bounced it. I don’t think it really made a big difference, but maybe.

Cuno: Yeah. Well, let’s get back to your house. So in 1967, as you were working on the studio, the Davis studio, you struck up a relationship with a young, beautiful, and confident Panamanian woman named Berta Aguilera. Berta was interested in an opening you had as an office manager in your small firm. And after some initial confusion, you offered her the job and she took it. And eight years later, the two of you were married, and a year later you had a son, Alejandro. There was now a practical reason to look for a new place to live. And it was Berta, ’cause you were busy, you didn’t care, Berta went out to look. And you were busy still with the Rouse Company, at that time, with projects, right?

Gehry: Yeah, probably.

Cuno: And they had you working on the Santa Monica Place—a big commercial place, project and it was important for your career, because you used on that parking garage chain link fencing with great two-story-high letters that pronounced Santa Monica Place. [Gehry: Right]. Kind of an Ed Ruscha look to it, in a certain way, right? [Gehry: Yeah] So that was going on, but there were compromises on the Rouse project, Santa Monica Place project, the commercial project. Berta was looking for a house. She finds a Dutch colonial house painted pink. And she said when she went through it the first time, she said, “Frank can do things to this house.” So you bought this house for $160,000 in Santa Monica.

Gehry: Exactly that.

Cuno: That was a lot of money at the time. I figured it out. It’s $650,000 today’s dollars.

Gehry: Really?

Cuno: And you had to put $40,000 down on the house, and you borrowed it from Fred Weisman.

Gehry: Exactly. [chuckles]

Cuno: The whole money. So you were in the house without putting any of your own money it, but you were in debt to Fred and to the bank, for lots of money.

Gehry: And then we put $50,000 into the house before we moved in. We had to do stuff. ’Cause I didn’t move in till we did the house around the house.

Cuno: Right.

Gehry: My mother was alive at the time, and she took Bert—Berta was pregnant—and she took Berta aside and said, “Honey, you-know-who,” and she meant my ex-wife, “when she wanted something done, she would just go do it, and then he’ll live with it. So my advice is, get a Realtor and get the house.” [Cuno chuckles] So that was my mother’s doing, ’cause Berta isn’t the type that would’ve done that on her own. I looked at the house and it didn’t have a normal kitchen. There was stuff about it and I—so we designed the house around the house, which I’d done once before, in the house in Hollywood that’s for sale now, by the way. The office was at a turning point. We were out of work. And there were six of us in the office, and we decided to pool our money and we bought a house in Hollywood together and we remodeled it and sold it. And that’s how we got through the year. And it was the same. I built a new shell around the old house, and the space between in Hollywood turned out to be the vertical circulation. In Santa Monica, it was to build a real kitchen. When I looked at it, I could build 14 feet on the Washington Avenue side. There was left of setback. I could come out another 14 feet. In front, I could come out, I think, five or six feet. And then in back, I could’ve built as much as I wanted. So I came to the max in the front, came to the max on the side, and then just enough to create a passage behind. And made a kitchen and a dining space, and then opened up a bedroom in the back—made it a little bit bigger, so that there were two bedrooms. Alejandro was the only one born at that time, so we only needed—and he was two years old, I think. And then upstairs, we took one of the bedroom upstairs—the little one, and made it a nursery. And did some slight remodeling up there, and opened it all up to the ceiling. I spent $50,000. That was it.

Cuno: You called it, I think, sketching with wood.

Gehry: Did I? [chuckles] That’s probably what it was. All I remember is there was a Museum of Modern Art event in LA. I was out of town. And they decided they wanted to hold a dinner in my house. And Arthur Drexler was hosting it, in my house, and Berta was allowing that to happen. And I got a call from Philip Johnson the following week and said, “Arthur is howling with laughter.” He said, “He’s just been to your house.” He wanted to know if the footprint on the wood was on purpose. [they laugh]

Cuno: Wait, this house must’ve been—if it attracted a crowd from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Philip Johnson called you about the house itself, you must’ve realized in designing the house and building the house, that it was going to attract attention. I mean, after all, you couldn’t—

Gehry: I didn’t.

Cuno: You couldn’t complain about the client, ’cause you were now the client.

Gehry: Yeah, right.

Cuno: So this was going to be a kind of physical manifesto.

Gehry: I didn’t—I was naïve about the attention. Honestly, I didn’t. I wasn’t expecting that. I was doing my Bernie Sanders cheap, cheap, cheap, how do I live in a house in Santa Monica, in a nice middle-class neighborhood, where people had cars up on blocks in their front lawn, had chain link fences, had corrugated metal garden walls, and—I thought that was great. That’s my thing. [Cuno laughs] I love it.

Cuno: Those are your people.

Gehry: Those are my people. [Cuno chuckles] And I didn’t realize once you do it intentionally, they didn’t like it. [chuckles] And they were upset about it. The lady two doors down was a lawyer. And she called the mayor, the mayor who was a First Nation lady, who was on the board of the Santa Monica Bank, Donna Swink. And she called Donna up and started yelling at her about this house. So Donna called me and said, “Can I come by?” And this big lady, you know, like a real squaw from the Indian tribe, [chuckles] comes by and is standing in front of it. And she’s belly laughing. She’s having so much fun. She says, “I love it. What’s she complaining about?” She said, “This is great!” [chuckles] The other one that came to see it was Jim Stirling, who came. He was doing something, probably with the Getty.

Cuno: The architect.

Gehry: Yeah. He and I became friends, and he wanted to see it. So we had a dinner for him at the house. And I picked him up at the hotel and brought him over and stopped the car in front. And he got out and stood in front of it and he couldn’t stop laughing. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen in his life. And I think for many years after that, Jim put me in some kind of a wacko box that he had decided I must be.

Cuno: Well, tell us about Matt DeVito, the CEO of the Rouse Company. He comes over [Gehry chuckles] to your house. You worked with him on Santa Monica Place.

Gehry: I worked with him on the Rouse Company headquarters. We became friends when I was doing work for the Rouse Company, back years. He was the house counsel. And he lived through the cardboard furniture days with me and was a friend, kind of. He was fascinated by my creativity or whatever. And nice guy. A lawyer. Came to the opening of Santa Monica Place, which I had designed, and came to dinner to the house, the first house on 22nd Street, the next night after the opening. And he said, “Do you like this house?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Then you can’t possibly like that,” pointing toward Santa Monica Place. And I said, “Well, you know, Matt, it’s been compromised a lot by a lot of people, so it isn’t the real dream that we started out to do.” So he said, “Well, you got—just stop doing that.” ’Cause at that point, they were just hiring me to do another big project. And I’d had meetings with them, with their staff, about it, and told ’em I didn’t wanna go down that road again. I said, “If you really want me to do it, we’ve gotta collaborate. And I’m a good listener and all—” You know, all the stuff you tell ’em. And he said to me, “Why are you wasting your time? Why are doing that? It’s not gonna turn out the way you want it.” And I looked at him. I said, “I guess you’re right. I got it. Okay.” That was on a Friday night. Monday, I went in and we stopped all the Rouse work. We had about 40 people working on the Rouse project. And I said, “I talked to Devito, and he agrees we should wrap it up. And so I can’t afford to keep all you guys, so—” And so we started over again. We were down to three.

Cuno: So once again, you turned away from something that would, for most people, seem to be in your best interest and moved forward in another direction.

Gehry: Yeah, yeah. But it wouldn’t have been—wouldn’t have been honest and right.

Cuno: But because of that house attracting the attention that it did attract, Christophe de Menil came and talked to you about building a house for her.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: Is that right?

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: And you had this idea—it seemed like a reasonable idea, given what one thinks of when one thinks of when one looks at your house—that maybe Gordon Matta-Clark, the artist, would work with you to demolish the interior of the carriage house, [Gehry: Yes] in this kind of site-specific art piece. Did you really think that she was going to—?

Gehry: Well, she was hanging out with Michael Heizer and Mapplethorpe and I forget. People like that were coming to dinner, and I was there and these were all people I liked. And you know, she knew everybody in the art world. Her mother had done—they had a great collection. They had a museum in Houston.

Cuno: Which is now the Menil Collection, right.

Gehry: Yeah. Before Renzo.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: And she was kind of open and wacky and artsy. I think she was dating Tony Berlant, when I met her. So Tony was her boyfriend [Cuno: Los Angeles artist, yeah] for a while. And Tony would talk about her and bring her around. She was brought into the club and I was part of the club. So—and she was curious about stuff. I mean, like, she would go to a concert at Carnegie Hall and she would talk to the music critic and find out when the best 20 minutes were, and she would get a limo, arrive at that point, have it all worked out with the doorman. She could come in. She’d have a seat for that 20 minutes, and she could leave. And she did that with theater, with all kinds of stuff. And I was part of some of that, and it was really weird.

Cuno: Did the project go very far? Did you get anything down on paper or—?

Gehry: Yeah, we built a swimming pool and we did the kitchen stuff, but it wasn’t satisfactory. She was always changing it, nitpicking it, doing something about it. It was never satisfying. And she’d always—at the end, I was doing the two buildings.

Cuno: This is out in the Hamptons?

Gehry: No, it’s on 69th Street.

Cuno: Oh, it was. So this was her house [Gehry: Yeah, so—] in the city.

Gehry: Yeah. So you came into this big room, there were these two structures. There were like two separate things. Her daughter had one, she had one. I mean, there’s some great drawings and plans of it. And it just never seemed to go anywhere. And one day I came in and she told me she’d hired Turrell to do the skylight in this building. And I said, “I guess you don’t need me anymore.” And she said, “I don’t.” [they chuckle]

Cuno: Well, that’s—

Gehry: [over Cuno] And I got up and walked out. And it all happened in about three minutes. Paul Lewicki, who was a young architect then, who’s a good friend—he used to work here—was with me, and we went out. We got into a cab. I started crying. I just broke down. It was so powerful a thing. I was really invested in it. One thing that happened that is a curious thing. Just before all that happened, she asked for the drawings for all the cardboard furniture, all the original drawings. She wanted to show them to the lady from France, the furniture designer. What’s her name? She just died. And I said, “Well, I can’t send you all the orig—” She said, “No, no, just send them to me. I’ll send ’em back to you on Monday.” So I did and I’ve never seen ’em again since. And there were some beautiful drawings. And according to her, they were—she doesn’t remember any of that, so you know what I’m thinking.

Cuno: [chuckles] The blessing and the curse of working with artist and artist types, huh?

Gehry: Well, where are the drawings? [chuckles]

Cuno: Yeah. Yeah. So you come back and you’re working with Chuck Arnoldi and Laddie Dill, so your artist friends, on various kinds of projects, including some studios, one of which was purchased by Dennis Hopper, who goes on to purchase a second and a third such studio. And you downsized your office to a size that’ll allow you to concentrate on individual residence projects. [Gehry: Right] And then you get some great commissions for houses: the Wosk residence, the Winton Guest House, the Sirmai-Peterson residence, the Schnabel residence. There’s a kind of blossoming of work, residential work. Maybe isn’t entirely what you want. You want something maybe larger and more complicated, maybe more public than a private residence. But there is a recognized Frank Gehry talent that people are investing in at that time.

Gehry: Right.

Cuno: And then you get some big projects. You get the master plan for Loyola Campus, you get the California Aerospace Museum and theater, the Edgemar Development in Santa Monica. Now it’s more than the houses. Now there’s bigger projects. How are you feeling at this time? Because now it’s about 10 years into the—or it’s a 10-year period in which you’re doing this work. It’s a busy time for you, on your projects that you want to take on.

Gehry: Right. It was hard work. It was hard to manage it. I wasn’t rich. I didn’t have a bank account. And architectural fees, when you’re at that stage of your life, are not livable. [chuckles] But I learned to make it work. I created some ground rules. I think I created the ground rules earlier, and I said I would never borrow money. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. And I would never have people work for me for free. I could never do that. And that those would be the rules. So if we ran outta money, I would have to work longer and harder, which is what I did most of the time. I had Greg Walsh, became part of it. And so he helped me a lot. He would—he didn’t care about the money either, so he worked hard with me as a partner in it. And so between the two of us, we’d get things done within the fees that we got.

Cuno: Yeah. I mean, this is the ’70s. This is a decade in which you really identify—or are identified as an important architect. Commissions are coming your way. But you’re building a practice, you’re learning how to do it, how to manage the affairs and so forth.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: And then a big project comes along that you thought of as likely to be your project, and it’s the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. You were involved with a number of the artists who were involved in the planning of the project. You were invited to meetings at Marshall Weisman’s house. [Gehry: Yes] You have every expectation to think that this is gonna be your project, and then they give it to Isozaki, Arata Isozaki. It must’ve seemed like you were on a trajectory that was moving forward rapidly and upward rapidly, and then this disappointment hits.

Gehry: Well, it wasn’t exactly like that, ’cause that suggests that I was devastated and the thing you should know is I was never presumptuous about that I would have that project. I knew Max Poleski pretty well, and I knew he didn’t like my work.

Cuno: Was he chair of the board?

Gehry: Yeah. And he and Eli, who didn’t—at that point, I knew slightly, I had no relationship with him. And my only relationship was with Marcia and Fred, where I did all the front-end work for them. I studied the Pan-Pacific site. I did a lotta free work for them when they were gearing up for this, of where they should put the museum. So it seemed like that was inevitable. Then there was an artist meeting that Marcia convened at DeWain Valentine’s studio on Market Street. And I wasn’t invited. And I asked Marcia why I wasn’t invited. She says, “Well, you’re an architect. This is an artist meeting.” I said, “Okay, I got it.” So at that meeting—and I had many squealers that called me up the next day and told me who said what about me. And so it was Moses and Graham and Irwin and they all said, “Well, we don’t want Gehry. He’s trying to be an artist, and we wanna design it. It’s our turn.” And they were gonna design it. The strongest spokesman was probably Graham, because I’d had a Graham knockout before.

Cuno: The sculptor.

Gehry: Sculptor. He kicked me out of a job before. And so I knew he didn’t really want me on that. Even though we were really good friends. So I’m talking about something that was—a strange kind of dance was going on, ’cause I was friends with all these people. And then it got reported to me the next day. And three people emerged from that as my friends: Peter Alexander, Chuck Arnoldi, and Laddie Dill. And I stayed friends with them all these years. And they were loyal to me in this crisis. And I’ve maintained that kinda loyalty and I’ve maintained that feeling of be on guard with the other people, all these years. Even with Ed. Even though I love him and Graham, I loved him to the end. I went to the funeral and, you know, I was—supported him and all. Yeah, it changed the climate for me, with the art scene. I felt very comfortable after that, becoming friends with Chamberlain and Rauschenberg and all those people.

Cuno: New York-based artists.

Gehry: Yeah. I—

Cuno: Farther from home.

Gehry: Huh? Farther from home. They didn’t have that baggage. They treated me equal.

Cuno: So they came to you, though, as that—when that project was, you know, being designed by Isozaki and maybe being constructed by Isozaki, with an idea for something they then called the Temporary Contemporary, now called the Geffen Contemporary, [Gehry: Yeah] which was a renovation of an industrial space, which you said, or at least it’s reported that you said you thought of as a consolation prize. You asked them if it was a consolation prize.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Well, yeah. Pontus Holten, Bridget Kashelik called me to go to a rest. I went to a Japanese restaurant near my house on Wilshire and 23rd Street. And they sprung this thing on me. And I looked at ’em, I said, “You know, I don’t need a consolation prize. Don’t—don’t do that.” You know, “Stop it. I’m okay. You don’t have to do that.” “Oh, well, come on, Frank, we think you can do this and this is important, and it could very well end up more important than the final building.” Now, why they thought maybe that could happen and they were hiring Isozaki, I don’t know. Maybe they had a premonition. Sam was pretty smart. And Sam was pushing the Isozaki thing because of his relationship—

Cuno: Sam Francis.

Gehry: Yeah, Sam Francis. Because of his relationship to the—his wife was Japanese at the time. Do I think there was that hook for Sam. I don’t know about Pontus. Pontus didn’t know much about me. And I said—I turned them down. I said, “I don’t wanna do this. You’re all screwed up, you guys. Stop it.” They—so they went on and on about it. And they said, “Look, we really want you to do this. This is important to us. It’s not—it’s not a game, blah-blah-blah,” you know. So I remember saying to them, “Well, you got Coy Howard. He’s on your committee, the artist committee.” ’Cause Coy was going with Alexis Smith at the time, and he was an Irwin acolyte. And he and Irwin became close friends during that period. And he was the only architect invited to that meeting at—

Cuno: Marcia’s house?

Gehry: No, at—

Cuno: Oh, at the gallery.

Gehry: At the gallery, at the studio. So I said, “Well, he’s your architect. Let him do it.” “No, no, he—he can’t do it. We won’t—that’s not—that’s not gonna happen. You gotta do it.” So I said, “Well, let me sleep on it.” So I went home. I was convinced I wasn’t gonna do it. I left convinced I wasn’t gonna do it. Went to bed. The phone rings at 7:30 in the morning. It’s Coy Howard. He says, “Frank, were you offered the Temporary Contemporary?” I said, “Why? What—what’s—why do you wanna know?” He said, “Well, that’s my job. That’s supposed to be my job.” I said, “Really? Have you told ’em?” [they laugh] And I hung up. And I called Sam Francis and said, “I got this call and I’m tellin’—I told you, he’s your guy. Do it. Leave me alone. I don’t wanna get involved with all this bullshit.” And Sam said, “He ain’t gonna get it. You’re the only one that’s gonna get it, so you better shut up and get—and agree and get to work with us.” And somehow, the way he talked about it, and having the Coy Howard phone call, made me turn around and said, “Okay, Coy Howard.” [laughs] ’Cause Coy had been critical of my work when I did the interview, they had a bogus interview. Max Poleski called me.

Cuno: For the new building?

Gehry: For the new building. And he said, “I need a favor.” This was before all this stuff with the—He said, “We need to have a Los Angeles architect interview on the record. We’re gonna give it to Isozaki, but we need—we need a decoy,” or something. And he said, “It would help us a lot if you would do it.” [chuckles] So I thought, well, I’m gonna have fun with this, so I agreed. And I went and did it, and I predicted all the problems they would have with Iso. I said, “He’s not gonna understand the developer.” All that stuff, “So you better get him a local partner.” And I told ’em how to do everything. And Coy was on the jury that was doing the interviews—which was funny, ’cause he’s not somebody I had huge respect for. I mean, he’s okay. He’s a graphic guy, a nice guy. And I went to lunch—after that, Coy invited me to lunch after that interview in Westwood, and I went to lunch with him. And he said some very unflattering things about my work. He said, “Well, your work has really gone downhill,” and blah-blah-blah. So he was being a little bit—playing loosey-goosey with me. So I think it’s because of all that, that when he called me, added insult to injury and I thought, screw you, asshole. [they chuckle]

Cuno: And the irony is, the Temporary Contemporary became a great success.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: And people still think of it as the great space in Los Angeles for contemporary art. It has the kind of rigor that one needs for contemporary art. And they’ve had fantastic exhibitions whether the great big, single artist exhibitions, like the Richard Serra exhibition, or whether it’s group exhibitions. It is a building that people hold fondly in Los Angeles, as a venue for contemporary art, so—

Gehry: [over Cuno] But it shows you that preciousness in designing museums is not necessary. I mean there’s a lotta flexibility in designing museums.

Cuno: Yeah. So at about that time, as that all gets resolved and Temporary Contemporary is built and opened, MOCA is built and opened, as well, you have an exhibition at the Walker, of your work, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, 1986. Characteristically for you, it wasn’t only a show of models, drawings and photographs of your work, but it was, in effect, one of your projects. I mean, you made a group of structures in it that actually shaped the experience of the exhibition itself, the way people moved through the exhibition. That must’ve been a big turning point for you. Maybe a risk, also, but a turning point.

Gehry: Yeah, that was Mickey Friedman, who curated that, who I kind of knew from the art scene, ’cause I used to go to Minneapolis. But I didn’t really know her personally. I mean, I’d met her, but—I knew what she was doing and knew about the Walker. So it was a big deal when she called and asked me to do it. It was very special. I can remember I was very moved by it. And I went back and met with her and she came out and met with me and we had a lotta meetings. Martin was not involved. And I knew—

Cuno: Her husband Martin, who was the director of the museum.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Yeah, who was director of the museum. He didn’t seem to be involved. Which seemed right to me, because he was—he’s a tough guy. He was—he’s very outspoken and in the few encounters I’d had with him before, he didn’t seem to be that interested in architecture. He was more involved with the Oldenburgs and people like that. She opened the door to making those structures. She asked me to do it.

Cuno: Yeah, the—those that were part of the installation of the exhibition.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Yeah. It was her idea to take the exhibit a little further. She had a good sense of stuff, because you cou—just looking at the models that were around at the time, and the drawings, and the photographs of buildings, there wasn’t enough there to give anybody a—that hadn’t been to one of the buildings, a feeling. And she wanted somebody to be able to sense what it was like to be up against or near—near it, I guess. And so it was obvious to play with the cardboard and to make that anechoic room, so to speak. And I—I actually think that little room was one of the best things I’ve ever done, that cardboard room. It just flowed effortlessly out of what I was doing. And then I’d already started talking about the fish and had made the one for the Italian fashion house for a show at the Pitti Palace, the wooden fish. It’s 35 feet long, that Cinecittà made, that has fins and eyes and all kinds of kitsch parts to it, but that when you stood beside it, it moved. You felt it was moving. And there was an art director at the time that came to the show. It was in Turino, at the Castello di Rivoli. It was the first show in the reopening of the Castello di Rivoli. And I had a room with this fish in it. And Rudy Fuchs was standing beside me and—

Cuno: From Amsterdam.

Gehry: Yeah. I knew he was a very judgmental guy and—’cause Coosje and Claes had talked about him. But he was standing beside me. And he said, “Did you see that?” And I said, “What?” He said, “Can we have a coffee?” And so we went downstairs. And he said, “It moved. How—” He said, I said, “Well, I’m searching for a sense of movement in architecture. I’ve turned to the fish as that, because the fish is 300 million years before man. And I thought that postmodernism was looking back to the Greeks, and they could look further back, if they wanted to—you know, why stop at the Greeks? If you’re gonna go backwards, let’s roll it back.” And I got into that discussion with him. He said, “Well, but you know, it really does work.” And I said, “I got it myself, yeah.” I was standing there and I said, “That’s what I’ve been looking for, and I didn’t know how to do it. But then accidentally, we did it. And so now—” I never saw the guy again after that, [they laugh] but I was getting complimented by one tough hombre in the art world, right? Which is—

Cuno: All about the fish.

Gehry: Was worth something.

Cuno: Yeah.

Gehry: Anyway.

Cuno: ’Cause that was a big part of the Walker exhibition, was—

Gehry: So the Walker exhibition, I cut the tail off, the head off. I was trying to see how much I could cut of the kitsch parts off and still have the movement. And so the piece that was made with lead copper for the Walker was the kitschless fish. And it still worked. And so I was experimenting with that sense of movement that I was looking for.

Cuno: So that exhibition’s a big thing. And then you get a call from Philip Johnson. He’s gonna do an exhibition with seven new architects. Must’ve been new to you that you were a new architect, but nevertheless, it was described as such. At MoMA. And they would include, among others, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman and so forth. And you were represented by models and drawings of your house. And the exhibition was called Deconstructivist Architecture. How did you feel being exhibited in an exhibition called Deconstructivist Architecture?

Gehry: I told them that I thought that the word decon, as applied to my work, was onomatopoetic and it wasn’t real. And that I wasn’t a philosopher and I hadn’t talked to Derrida about it. But I think they’re abusing Derrida’s term when they put me in it, and some of the others they put in. But anyway, Philip was Philip and you did what he said. And so you went in. I then met Derrida and I asked him about it and he said, “You’re absolutely right.” [they laugh] So—

Cuno: This was your first show in New York, I would guess, ’cause it’s only your second exhibition.

Gehry: [over Cuno] Probably, yeah.

Cuno: So that was—that was an important moment.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: Even though the Walker, which was a solo exhibition, was more important, in those terms. But sometime shortly thereafter, you’re with Ernest Fleischmann again, from the LA Philharmonic. And you are in Europe. I mean, you might be in Denmark or somewhere in Northern Europe. And you get a phone call. You pick up the phone and the person on the other end of the phone tells you you’ve just won the Pritzker Prize.

Gehry: I was in Amsterdam. We’d been to a concert at the Concertgebouw. And it was when we were—I had already won the commission for Disney Hall, and we were going around looking at his favorite halls, and he wanted me to experience them the way he did. And so we went to Concertgebouw. We had a few drinks, I went back to the hotel and went to bed. Fallen asleep and the phone rings. And it’s Bill Lacy, from the Pritzker Prize. Now, Bill and I were friends, ’cause he was one of the first people that, when I did the first Magnin store—and he called me and came to see me. And he’s the first guy from outside my little environment that said, “You’re doing something interesting.” And so we’ve stayed friends. And so he called me. And I was groggy, and he said, “Frank, you’ve won the Pritzker Prize.” And I knew he was the head of the jury, you know, and all that. And I said, “Stop it, Bill! Don’t play games with me. I’m tired. Venturi hasn’t won it yet.” And I hung up. [they laugh] Then he called back again and he said, “Well, you did win it, but don’t tell anybody.” So now I’m awake and I’m convinced I did win it. And so I—first thing I did was I called Berta. So I’m not supposed to tell anybody; I figured I could tell her. And I got all excited, and of course, I never fell asleep that night. But— [Cuno chuckles]

Cuno: But that was [Gehry: That was—] 30 years into your career.

Gehry: Yeah.

Cuno: I mean, that was— that was three decades of long, hard work [inaudible]

Gehry: [over Cuno] What was it? ’89, I think.

Cuno: ’86, maybe?

Gehry: Yeah, maybe.

Cuno: ’86, I think. Well, that was—the exhibition was ’86; it could be ’89 was the Pritzker Prize, yeah, exactly. And then in your acceptance speech, when you took—when you received the prize, you said, “I explored the processes of raw construction materials to try giving feeling and spirit to form. In trying to find the essence of my expression, I fantasized the artist standing before the white canvas, deciding what was the first move. I called it the moment of truth.”

Gehry: So I think I was trying to find the—I mean, I realized it was about feeling. I was trying to find the way to express it and the way to conceptuali—How do you—how do you do it? I didn’t necessarily wanna talk about it. I just wanted to make it a part of my gut, that’s what I was doing, that I was looking for that Zen moment that did knock your socks off, like the Rembrandt self-portrait moment, it’s so powerful, the feeling you get from it. And I was looking for that. And I was talking about it at that time, in the Pritzker. Because the day I won—I got the Pritzker Prize, we were at Tōdai-ji, in Japan. And I arrived for the event, and it was just before lunch. It was like 11 in the morning and it was gonna be a lunch after the event. And standing out in the front of Tōdai-ji Temple were two microphones, about a hundred feet apart. And one of them had Kenzō Tange doing an interview, and one of—

Cuno: The architect.

Gehry: One of them had Frank Gehry doing an interview, and we weren’t talking to each other and it was about the same prize. And then we got inside, and we sat down. There was a long room as part of the temple. It was narrow. It was about this wide, and with seats. It was like a church. And I was sitting next to Kenzō Tange and Jay Pritzker. And of course, the Pritzkers wouldn’t pay for a simultaneous translation. [laughs] When you know them. [chuckles] So Kenzō’s talking and the translator’s whispering in my ear. But I hear him. Tōdai-ji, Tōdai-ji, Tōdai-ji, Tōdai-ji. And the girl’s telling me he’s saying Tōdai-ji is the greatest this, the greatest that, and this has nothing to do with Frank Gehry. He ended it. Then he said, Pritzker Prize, Pritzker Prize, Pritzker. I could hear him talking. And she’s translating. And he finishes that diatribe and it’s, this has nothing to do with Frank Gehry. And then they give me the microphone. It’s my turn. [laughs] And I turn to him, Tange, and I said, “I guess I’m gonna have to work harder.” [they laugh] Now, how I managed to be that calm and collected about it, I don’t know. But sometimes it works. And I then gave that little speech that I prepared and didn’t prepare. I didn’t prepare it. But on the flight over, Bill Lacy and Carter Brown were on the same plane with me, and they started—There’s a whole process that the Pritzker guys started that—of harassing the laureate the same day. And then Renzo and I were in recent years, were given the job to harass the people, but—So I’m on the plane and Carter says, “Have you got your speech ready?” I said, “No.” I said, “I just have to say thank you, right?” [they chuckle] He says, “No.” He says, “This is an important speech. Probably the most important speech of your life.” And I said, “Well, you know, I’m not very good at writing speeches. I’ll do some kind of an outline and—” Then Lacy starts in on me about how important the speech is. By the time I got to Tokyo, [Cuno laughs] it was the evening and we had a little dinner the night before. And then I went back to the ryokan. And by then, I was getting scared about this speech. So I got up at six in the morning [they chuckle] and wrote a speech. And that’s what came out, I don’t know how.

Cuno: Well, it must’ve been a confirmation of all that you had wanted of your architecture practice, that it be close to an artist’s practice. It was a vindication of the sacrifices you’d made, the decisions you’d made. [background noise] And you were on the verge—and we’ll get to this in the next podcast—you’re on the verge of the building that would be the greatest triumph for you to date, the building that would transform your career, even, perhaps, your life. And that is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I knew that there are buildings before and buildings after, but we’ll look at that next time.

Gehry: Okay.

Cuno: So, thanks again.

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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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