Book Review: Building Art

Building Art: The Life and Works of Frank Gehry

by Paul Goldberger

Knopf, 2015

Paul Goldberger's big new biography of Canadian-born stunt architect Frank Gehry is the product of many decades of friendship between the two men, and it's a friendly work: long and wonderfully detailed, but unfailingly sympathetic to its subject. In neither sense of the word is Building Art a critical work, but it's invaluable nonetheless and gregariously fascinating reading.

Goldberger had unprecedented access not only to Gehry's records and friends but to the man himself, and he's transformed these sources into a full and involving story – from Gehry's boyhood in Toronto to his undergraduate days in California and his unhappy graduate days at Harvard to his return to California to set up his own architectural practice, and finally to the steadily-escalating successes of his career.

Goldberger dramatizes the behind-the-scenes struggles and triumphs in the construction of such iconic Gehry buildings as MIT's Stata Center, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and, most famously of all, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. We're made privy to Gehry's mood swings, as during the work on the Disney Hall, where frustrations with backers, community members, and the Disney family itself exacerbated what Goldberger refers to as Gehry's “history of walking away from uncomfortable situations”:

Frank was angry, and he could not take refuge solely in his work, as he was accustomed to doing, because the largest and most ambitious project he ha ever attempted was precisely the source of his black mood. So he turned away from Los Angeles, which was making him so uncomfortable that he took advantage of every opportunity he had to travel out of town. For the first tie since he had gotten off the train at Union Station in 1947, he thought seriously about living somewhere else.

Gehry is nearly 90, so necessarily a portion of Goldberger's book is dutifully – though one senses reluctantly – concerned with the architect's legacy. In 2014 Gehry himself commented that “In this world we are living in, 98 percent of everything that is built and constructed today is pure shit … There's no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.” But such comments, like many of Goldberger's own comments on Gehry's long-term impact on his discipline, have one ear cocked toward the criticisms that have always been leveled in the architect's direction. Goldberger has a bit of winking fun playing with reader expectations on this point, writing “Gehry is as old-fashioned an architect as Stravinsky was an old-fashioned composer, or Rauschenberg an old-fashioned artist,” all such seemingly radical figures involved in “the crafting of real physical materials to make real physical spaces that are one-of-a-kind.” And his summation is naturally kind:

That new way has always been his own, and he never envisioned it as a system, or as a model for what all architecture should be: he would be the first to agree that the solution to the problems of contemporary architecture is not for everyone to start designing as he does. The most commonly heart criticism of the distinctive, one-of-a-kind buildings Gehry generally designs is that they make poor models, and that a city made up of Gehryesque architecture would be chaos. It would indeed, because it was never conceived as a prescription for what all architecture should be. The success of Gehry's sculptural architecture depends, at least to a certain extent, on other architects not doing the same thing. His buildings are many things, but prototypes they are not. They are works of architecture created for pleasure and for thought as well as for use.

Goldberger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on architecture, one of the greatest living authorities on the discipline; in his professional career he has certainly encountered the kinds of fierce attacks Gehry's work has always generated – including that they're ugly, impractical eyesores, monuments mainly to ennui and egotism, multimillion-dollar follies that'll be out of all fashion long before their low-bid construction materials pull apart like taffy over the heads of their unfortunate occupants. Thanks to our author's controlled but passionate advocacy, few readers of Building Art will be likely to turn its final page under those impressions, however, and all future biographies will be indebted to Goldberger's groundbreaking, affectionate work.