Name: How I Got Started: Frank Gehry
Uploaded: 2018-10-26
Duration: 6 min 54 s
Description: The legendary architect talks about his beginnings in ceramics, his love for music, and his next project.

How do you create feeling with inert materials? Now the Greeks knew how to do it. I've got a picture of the Charioteer 500 B. C. When I saw it when I was 40 years old, I started crying. And I thought, that's what I wanna do. I wanna Be able to build a building that makes people, moves them 500 years from now. [ MUSIC ] What is it that made me want to commit to this profession? In high school, I Took shop and built things and I did well in that and loved it. Making things with your hands. I looked at the professions one could go into and I remember looking at architecture at that time and architecture curriculum was to build a Cape Cod house or some Thing, it was not very interesting, so I closed the book on that, and didn't even pay attention. But I did go to the lecture series on Friday nights at the University of Toronto. And there was a guy from Finland showing his buildings and furniture. And that guy turned out to be Alva [ UNKNOWN ]. So I was kind of peripherally interested. I didn't why I was interested. I was intrigued by the way things were built. When I got to LA, I went to night school LA City College. I took ceramics class. Glass, with Glenn Lukens who was a well known ceramicist. And he's the one who after a year told me not to stay in ceramics, he said you're not going to like this, I think you should look at architecture [ MUSIC ] He was building a house by Rafael Soriano. I visited the site. Rafael Soriano was telling people to move beams around. It was kind of exciting. I guess my eyes lit up. My first buildings I designed looked like Rafael Soriano. He got to me. [ MUSIC ] My mother took me to concerts when I was a kid in Toronto. And I'm still to this day very interested in the topic. Building for musics because you get relationship between the orchestrators members so they hear each other. And is comfortably they hear each other in way that is substantial and uplifting. You create a relationship between orchestrate and audience That's palpable, that they both feel. And if you do it right, they both feel it. So music stuff is really exciting, and my belief that people talk to each other through the arts led me to the Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim. He and Edward Said created an orchestra where Palestinians Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians play in an orchestra with Israelis. And so I designed their 700- seat concert hall in Berlin as a gift to the orchestra, and it really works. [ MUSIC ] So that's the music stuff. The art stuff is also there. Bilbao was a working relationship with a genius museum director, Tom Krantz. And it's that collaboration that lead to the Project that we built. Which was a very inexpensive building compared to museum buildings. Bildbau was built for 300 dollars a square foot. And it came in slightly under budget. And it's return on investment has been Beyond everybody's wildest dreams. If you start to use curves, you think it's more expensive than a box, right? But we've developed with our French friends who build airplanes, with their software we were able to demystify Shapes, so you could build them cheaply. And we've built it like a warehouse, a big warehouse. Every contract has a 15 % layaway for change orders. If you show people exactly what to do, demistify the way you build something They don't get the 15 %. So we did a 76 storey tower in Manhattan. The exterior skin is all wiggly, wobbly, everybody would say that's too expensive. We built it with zero change orders. So the amount of money that you saved actually went into the building instead of Waste. [ MUSIC ] So we experiment with the feelings generated by materials. In Bilbao, since it was a museum and not a lot of windows, the exterior skin became. The building. It's a rainy climate. And so, stainless steel went dead. Stainless steel is exciting in California because you got a lot of sunlight. By accident, I had a piece of titanium And I looked at it, and I put it out on a post and it rained, and it turned golden, and it felt right. And so then I said that's what we gotta use. When you to go [ UNKNOWN ] it's cloudy skies the thing turns gold and it's really beautiful. In [ UNKNOWN ] France we're just completing a building for Special lady Maia Hoffman, and it's where Vangeau did Starry Night, and I've always wanted to paint on a facade with natural light. So built blocks that are covered with stainless steel, and they're set at slightly different Angles and when you go there, with the Sun it changes all day long. So it's like a watercolor, and it was beautiful. [ MUSIC ]

How I Got Started: Frank Gehry

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The legendary architect talks about his beginnings in ceramics, his love for music, and his next project.