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MD: What you're describing would require that the design architect is the same body that produces the drawings, and does the rest of that, and certainly in this country in the last 15 years we've seen a kind of separation of design architect and construction documents architect. Well, that's going on now with Disney Hall. They want to divide and conquer because the clients can take control better that way. And it works for standard commercial buildings, there's no expectation of architecture. MD: But this process that you're talking about, with the computer being able to model it to that level of exactness, and then to basically offer that value back into the body of the project - that seems like it would be a very valuable tool for the architect to pursue. We're exploring that with MIT. We've got a link up with Harvard and Dessault Catia Systems in France; this is probably the only office doing it, because we're using current forms, so nobody needs to do that. But I think that once that system is developed... Bill Mitchell, who started at UCLA, then went to Harvard, and is now at MIT, he's been pioneering the use of the computer in architecture. But in the last six years, up until last year, he's been using it as a presentation tool. And that's the worst use of it, as far as I'm concerned! It takes all the juice out of it, it dehumanizes everything. The whole process has been to add more megabytes, more colors, more shades of color, more information, so you can get closer and closer to the "real" and we never use it as that. We only use it, I take those shapes and we digitize them with that gadget over there, so I can take those kind of shapes and in an afternoon I can get an estimate of the skin surface to within seven decimal points of accuracy, and I know how much it costs per square foot to do skin surface like that. So I've got an exterior skin budget. And I know very quickly what the structural requirements are. I use the computer to rationalize the shapes. Like on Disney Hall, we could have 5% double-curved stone, and 50-50 flat and single-curved stone. That gave us a budget for the exterior skin of Disney Hall. All those shapes that look a lot more cantankerous than 5% and 50-50, are well within those parameters. I do the models, I get the shapes, and then I rationalize them. So I know if I just move something a fragment of an inch, and you barely notice it. I use the computer to refine those shapes. I've also used it to design on, and one of the best shapes I've ever done is that gleaming metal thing, the conference room for the German project, that whole thing was done on the computer. But for me it was like putting my hand in the fire - how long could I keep it in? And it was 4 _ minutes. What throws you off is that when you're designing, you have a dream of something, an image, and it's often better than what you can get to the paper or get to the model. But at least it's there. The computer is antithetical to that. Any great idea that you put in the computer looks like shit. So it takes 4 _ minutes for the computer to win - and I've lost my image. And that's when I pull my hand out of the fire. If you're willing to play with it - now I'm intrigued by it - it could cut a lot of time out of what I'm doing. Probably just about the time I figure it out, I'll go back to making square buildings. |
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MD: Do you use the computer to animate the construction process at all? To help the contractors? Right now we use it for shop drawing, so after I'm finished, if you look at these models they've got tape and all kinds of stuff on them, they're rough. We then put it in the computer, we smooth all that out, and we play it back, and the computer will cut a model. It will cut the forms out for you. You can look at that and then you can go back to the computer and play with the forms, and slowly modify it. If the first go-around comes to within 10% of the end, then the last 10% you change in the computer, you rationalize the shapes for budget reasons, it's very fast. Now there's a new scanner that preempts this one - the equipment becomes obsolete every six months - with a laser beam. You just go right over it and in twenty minutes you can the thing. The gadget is amazing. I don't know how to turn it on. I don't have one on my desk, but they're getting all the equipment for me. I'm going to take it home, I'm afraid to have it here. I mean, I've just learned to use my little Casio for the phone numbers and addresses. But the first time I was out with it I erased everything. JM: Taking that form within the building in Berlin as an example, where did you actually start with that form? Did you start with a three-dimensional idea and make a two-dimensional sketch of it and then move to the computer modeling? Where does it begin and how does it evolve? I bought a bunch of red velvet at a fabric store, because it was stiff, and we started playing with that. We got shapes, and we sprayed wax on it to harden it. Then we digitized it. And it looked weird. That was the starting point. I mean you have to invent ways of getting into it. If you wander around you'll see they have a lot of... BZ: By the way, Frank, you mentioned about the AIA but you didn't mention your idea for change. Do you want to mention it? JM: Well, we're in the middle of another subject here - Yeah, I said it - the computer, and - I forget what it was. BZ: You wanted to form an alternative to the AIA and call it "borscht". Oh, yeah - (laughs) When Bernard Zimmerman and I get to talking to each other we invent things. Maybe someday. You know, were old radicals. We used to belong to a thing called the Architectural Panel, with Greg Ian and Garret Eckbo, and I don't remember who else, all kinds of funny people. BZ: You're talking from the heart. This is good. Where else do you talk from? BZ: I talk from a political point of view. Oh - well, you're always trying to get jobs. BZ: I've got to stay in school. I found out I'm an embarrassment to the school. I asked (Michael) Folonis why I was having so much trouble there, and he says he got it from the higher-ups that I'm an embarrassment to Cal Poly. Well, you've got to do what I did and go to Canyon Ranch and lose some weight. Just do what I did. And then you've got to get a picture of that guy with the muscles - I put that on my bathroom mirror, and then I think I'm that guy. BZ: You think it's because I'm fat that I'm an embarrassment? Yeah. BZ: I hope so! I think you're an embarrassment because you talk a lot about ideas. You're in the wrong pew. You should have been me. We started out together, and you were supposed to be like me. You were there, but you somehow got kicked out of the - BZ: No, I didn't get kicked out. The race isn't over for a lot of things. MD: Do you think that being a university professor is stifling? For Bernard it is. Bernard is a sensitive, thoughtful, talented architect. It's the roll of the dice. He was outspoken way before anybody was. He always bled all over the page. He loves architecture, he loves architects. It's just not acceptable behavior! Listen, Bernard, you know I went to USC, right? How many people that have gone to school at USC have gotten along as far as I have? BZ: There's nobody in the history of USC. OK. So last year, Harry Hufford, who took over the Committee to Build Disney Hall, had lunch with a man named Sample, who's the president of USC. And Sample said to him, Harry, the problem you're having with Disney Hall is that your architect Gehry doesn't know how to build buildings. So two weeks later, the new dean Bob Timme calls and says, hey, I'm the new dean, I want to get you involved with the school, you're one of our illustrious graduates... And I said, Timme, call Mr. Sample and tell him that. And have him call me. So that's what they say! There's been a whole group of them that have kept me out of there. They've never invited me to lecture. Ray Eames told me that. About six months before she died, she went down there one day to give a talk. On the way back she stopped by my office, and she was livid. I've just experienced something disgusting. I was down there giving a talk, and two or three of the professors got up in this forum and talked against you. And I know who they are: DeBretville, Panos Koulermos. So I'm disgusting to them like you are to these other guys. So don't be alone in that. You're OK. BZ: But I'm in the Little League, and you're in the Major League! I think you're in the Major League. BZ: Listen, I have one thing to say to you. I asked Bob Cramer who the best architects of the 20th century are. He's a very good architect, an experimenter, worked with Lautner and all that. And he said, Le Corbusier, and Frank Gehry." And forgive me, but I said, 'Frank Gehry?' Bernard, you're not ready to let me in the club! I'm letting you in, but you won't let me in! BZ: So listen to this! You call yourself a modernist, but you've done something beyond it. You've made a shift in architecture. And that's how you recognize an architect of greatness in the 20th century. What shift did you make? Do any of you know the shift? Anybody? MD: Well, you're asking a very sort of personal question. For me, Frank Gehry has revisited many of those doors that architects like Le Corbusier opened up. If I may, Le Corbusier's Salvation Army building in Paris and the Loyola Law School are comparable ordering structures, and revisit an idea about architecture. They're not the same - but there's something there which touches one's heart in the way that they work. The Mill Owners Association in Ahmadabad and the DG Bank in Berlin (Pariserplatz 3), I mean, when you stand and see the theater in the Mill Owners Association inside that huge, enormous space. Revisiting is a bad way of saying it, but there's something there - you must be a wonderful student of architecture to be able to know where all those doors are that no one since then has passed back through. The one thing that is misunderstood about me is that whatever scholarly thing - I don't look like a scholar, right? And I don't parler that language of all those guys. But I have studied architecture. I know more than they think I know. A few years ago I gave a talk at Princeton. It was for Michael Graves being 25 years at Princeton, so they invited everybody in the world to come and talk for 5 minutes about Michael Graves. But then they realized no one wanted to talk about Michael Graves, so they let everybody talk about their own work. After my five minutes, Bob Maxwell, who was the dean of Princeton, got up and says, "Mr. Gehry, do you have nightmares? Is that how you concoct this stuff?" And I didn't answer, I just figured he was an idiot. Then after everybody finished their talk there was a panel, and I was on the panel with Irving Lavin, who has the chair at Princeton in the Institute for Advanced Studies that Einstein had. He's in 17th century architecture. So we were talking on the panel together, and we're really close friends, we've traveled together and talked together and been up one side and down the other together. We've been to all the monuments in Rome, and throughout Italy. So we're really close friends, and we started reminiscing, and we started getting into some pretty heavy discussions about Borromini. And the same hand came up, from Bob Maxwell. And I thought, 'what the hell's he going to say now?' He said, 'Mr. Gehry, I just want to apologize.' Now because I could banter with a scholar on architectural history, I was acceptable. Now all of a sudden he understood. Well, OK, maybe there's some logic to that. And I do play, 'aw, shucks.' I'm good at that, I'm a good aw, shucks-er. JM: How do you think that history will see you? How do you see what people write about you? I try not to read it, because it usually doesn't make much sense to me. JM: Where do you think people usually divert from what you really think is there? Well, usually, good writers bring themselves to it, right? And I'm like a voyeur when I do read it. I sort of get excited about it, how funny they are. You know, one of the best writers about me is Kurt Forester. He talks about dance and other things. I get a lot of guys who hate what I do, too. The Prague building got terrible reviews from Czechs, because they didn't like what I was doing. The architecture school there. The city liked it, and the president, but if you read the good stuff you have to read the bad stuff, and I don't want to read the good stuff. So I just avoid it all. Every once in a while someone will tell me that somebody got it right, and I'll read it. I've done this for more than an hour now, and you said 45 minutes. Can I go back to work? Would you make a general comment about what has generated what we see in Los Angeles today, and how you see it developing? Well, LA is sort of the front lines. It was the front lines after the war. The wide open spaces and so the automobile culture could construct the city in its own image, and it did. It gave young architects, and I was a young architect back then, a certain freedom that you don't have in a nineteenth-century context, where you've got to be respectful of so many things. In LA you didn't have it. It allowed a certain freedom a certain growth, I think that's why a lot of work here has become interesting to people in Europe. I think that when they come here - when they see the pictures, they don't realize that the architects are doing the same kind of thing they're doing, except the context is different, it allows a different kind of response. But I think that freedom has been good here. I think where it's going, where it's gone, it's still the same kind of business-oriented power structure. And they're caught up with 19th century models. They just can't seem to give it up. But LA developed a linear downtown, Wilshire Boulevard, which connects the most diverse economic and ethnic populations you can imagine in the world. And most of that population lives within three blocks of Wilshire Boulevard, they can walk to it. It's a very high-density corridor, and very diverse. But it's been rejected in favor of a 19th century downtown model that probably ain't ever going to work. If the cathedral were built at McArthur Park, and if MOCA moved to near LACMA. And Disney Hall were built at the Wadsworth, that would reinforce the city we have. And it would work better.
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Citizens Committee Rallies in Support of Walt Disney Concert Hall Committee Invites Involvement in Events, Public-Awareness Campaign LOS ANGELES--Citizens Committee for Walt Disney Concert Hall has been created to gather grass-roots support for the construction of the future home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with conductor Esa Pekka Salonen in Downtown LA. The Committee believes the construction of this building is important to Southern California, contributing to Los Angelesí cultural community, its architectural heritage, its public image, and indeed, its very soul. An independent gathering of concerned citizens, the Committee is staging programs and events to educate the public on the worth and value of such an institution.
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