Frank Gehry loves to sketch. It is the beginning of his architectural process. From Gehry’s sketches flow the models, one after another, each a refinement, that will eventually become finished buildings unlike any others in the architectural world.
It is this sketch quality, what he calls the “tentativeness, the messiness,” that Gehry clings to as a way of guarding against formula or repetition.
Working closely with his colleagues, Gehry takes his sketch ideas and, as quickly as possible, makes them three-dimensional, the better to see how his buildings work, how they fit with their neighbors, how they function in the most essential way. Model after model is scanned into a sophisticated computer and rendered into working drawings.
Gehry’s designs dramatically blur the line between art and architecture, yet the strong appeal of his sculptural designs does not obscure the role of function. He follows a painstaking process of subtle vision and revision both in his sketches and in his model shop.
It is a common misconception that Gehry’s buildings are constructed as mere containers, built for the sake of their form. In truth, the buildings are built from the inside out. Wooden block massing studies are constructed and reconstructed in step with Gehry’s own evolving sketches. Gestural models of cardboard, wood, and cloth act as intermediaries, keeping Gehry conscious of the three-dimensional implications. The process, as Gehry admits in the film, forces him to “work in two or three scales at once.” This forces him to forget about the model as an “object of desire” and instead to concentrate on how the building works.
Based in Santa Monica, Gehry works with a formidable team of architects and model makers to bring his sketches to life. The resulting structures are imbued with the dynamic energy of Gehry’s original sketches and with the improbable nature of his study models. The interiors are both grand and unpredictable at once. This process is perhaps best illustrated by his two seminal works: the 1978 renovation of his own house, what has since come to be known as the Gehry Residence.
Gehry and his wife, Berta, raised a family in this house, where they still live, a thirty-year testament to the fact that, for all the artistic flourishes of his ideas, Gehry’s architecture works, in the most practical and fundamental way.
Gehry’s concern for the people who live and work in his buildings, and how his buildings function as spaces for people: how they embrace and envelop the people in and around them, and how that embrace is returned.
This is a unique quality of Gehry’s works, and just one reason his fame is so widespread and universal. People feel welcome in his buildings; they feel, as artist Julian Schnabel says in the film, encouraged. Sydney Pollack’s shots of visitors ambling in and around the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall are reminders of how connected people feel to Gehry’s architecture. This, for an architect, is the most welcome validation of all. (pbs- Sketches of Frank Gehry)
