It's a documentary about Frank's architecture, models and sketches, directed by Sydney Pollack. Pollack, whose work I've not had much direct experience with, except for my tryst with "The Interpreter" a few years ago, seems to be a genuine guy, and portrays Gehry as such.
The individuals he chose to portray Gehry through included Gehry's therapist, several artists (and friends of Gehry), clients, AND critics. The critics appeared a bit ridiculous in comparison to the overwhelming positive response from the other individuals, but that's to be expected, since Pollack is a friend of Gehry's himself.
I've always wanted to see images of Gehry's own home, with the corrugated steel and chain link fence, and I have to say, it's not pretty. Parts of it are elegant (the juxtaposition of angles in the large window above the kitchen, and the corner at the end of the home, right below the roof's spine), but the chain link fence is, at the end of the day, a chain link fence. A kind of novelty, which I sometimes feel is reflective of other Gehry buildings. The film notes this, that sometimes Gehry himself thinks that his work is experimental at its core, and that sometimes results in "not so pretty" buildings. And he's ok with that. But the rest of the world lives in them, so is that an appropriate response?
In general, we live in ugly "architecture." My dorm building is a collegiate Gothic, crumbling to the ground, with "fresh" cream walls and linoleum floors. My house is typical suburban "architecture," with two more gables than necessary, a maximization of 'function,' with an obnoxious garage and a false brick facade. But as an architect, are you not obligated to create beautiful buildings?
Chiew-Hong, a friend of mine studying architecture at Yale, and I had a brief dialogue about this topic while walking through the woods of Fontainebleau, France. What, I asked her, do you think is the most important duty of an architect today? "Make beautiful buildings." That was her response. And with technology that is available today, that shouldn't be so hard, right? We can do almost anything. Have a concept, and run with it. Which is what Gehry's doing, don't get me wrong, and "pretty" is a subjective word (and one that is often the bane of many an architectural treatise) - but if the real function of an architect is to create beautiful environments, (NOT at the expense of a functioning environment), then who's to decide what's beautiful, and who's to say one architect is better or worse than another?
Doesn't architecture, then, become a simple extension of sculpture? Serra is currently creating sculptures that can be inhabited - is that architecture? If you can walk through something, stand under it, crawl around it, is it architecture? What if it's ugly? Then is it sculpture? Because sculpture is allowed to be ugly, as long as the artist is has intent, right?
Another thing that struck me about the Gehry film was his acknowledgment that he most envies painters, and would never dare to paint, or imagine himself as a painter. Pollack does this cool montage after he says that, and shows how some surfaces on Gehry's buildings reflect light in a "painterly" fashion, but that's something different. I guess, I too, am envious of painters. I pretend to paint, I throw some pigment onto a canvas, push it around, think about it, leave it alone, come back, hate it, and give it away. In the last 12 months, I've decided I need to think, and I haven't done much thinking in my lifetime. 20 years, and not a valid thought. So I seem to be under the impression that painters think, and that's something I need to do to validate my quest for thought. We'll see what comes of it.
Both Pollack and Gehry (though mostly Pollack) spoke about "pretending" to be a(n) director(architect). Feeling like it's a role, that at some point, you stop feeling like you're pretending to be someone else, and you ARE a director/an architect. They didn't come to any conclusions, but I'm going to sign off with that as a question. Is there a moment, not so much an "aha" moment, but a "mhmmmm" moment, where things slide into place and you realize that you're no longer pretending to be a designer, pretending to know something about something, and you actually do? Do you ever really know? Are you ever really being?
