Conversations with Frank Gehry [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Barbara Isenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 21, 2009

An unprecedented, intimate, and richly illustrated portrait of Frank Gehry, one of the world’s most influential architects. Drawing on the most candid, revealing, and entertaining conversations she has had with Gehry over the last twenty years, Barbara Isenberg provides new and fascinating insights into the man and his work.

Gehry’s subjects range from his childhood—when he first built cities with wooden blocks on the floor of his grandmother’s kitchen—to his relationships with clients and his definition of a “great” client. We learn about his architectural influences (including Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright) and what he has learned from Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rauschenberg.

We explore the thinking behind his designs for the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the redevelopment of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, the Gehry Collection at Tiffany’s, and ongoing projects in Toronto, Paris, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. And we follow as Gehry illuminates the creative process by which his ideas first take shape—for example, through early drawings for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, when the building’s trademark undulating curves were mere scribbles on a page. Sketches, models, and computer images provided by Gehry himself allow us to see how so many of his landmark buildings have come to fruition, step by step.

Conversations with Frank Gehry is essential reading for everyone interested in the art and craft of architecture, and for everyone fascinated by the most iconic buildings of our time, as well as the man and the mind behind them.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With such signature buildings as the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Disney Center in Los Angeles, Frank Gehry has been called the most famous architect in the world. These conversations, edited from interviews California-based writer Isenberg (Making It Big) began with Gehry in the 1980s, cover topics from his first buildings—made as a boy from chips of firewood on his grandmother's floor—to current large-scale projects like a $3 billion redesign for Grand Avenue in downtown L.A. There is talk about the architectural politics of Los Angeles and the practical aspects of running a large architectural office. And while Gehry never name-drops, readers do get a sense of the celebrity and high-finance crowds in which he circulates. Gehry says he has always been more influenced by artists than by other architects, and those influences range from such friends as Robert Rauschenberg to Vermeer and Hieronymus Bosch. Whether designing jewelry or museums, he sketches constantly and his assistants build dozens of models before reaching a final design. Illustrations of these preliminary steps and of realized buildings add a visual component to the wide-ranging and informative conversations. 165 color and 41 b&w illus. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Arguably today’s best-known architect and certainly the most influential, Frank Gehry continues to challenge everyday thoughts about what a building can become. His iconic art museum in Bilbao, Spain, has made every community yearn for a structure that can so instantly become a landmark. In this oral history, Isenberg converses with Gehry about his life and his groundbreaking aesthetic. Gehry describes his origins, his Toronto upbringing, his decision to change his surname from Goldberg, his stint in the army, his education at Harvard under the GI bill, and his encounters with other architects and artists who opened his eyes to new and wondrous possibilities. He credits Los Angeles’ surging growth in the 1950s and 1960s for many of his innovations. Illustrations bloom throughout the text. Gehry’s drawings look like particularly inspired doodles. Photographs of Gehry in his offices and of his planned and completed structures help the reader visualize the physical ideas latent in the architect’s articulate and disarmingly unpretentious discussions. --Mark Knoblauch

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (April 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307268004
• ISBN-13: 978-0307268006
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 1 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #494,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barbara Isenberg writes and lectures about the arts. Formerly a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, she has also written for Time, Esquire and London's Sunday Times. Her most recent book,the Los Angeles Times best-seller Conversations With Frank Gehry, reflects her interviews with the celebrated architect over the past 20 years. Prior books include Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical,and State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work. Founder and host of the Getty Center's Art Matters public interviews, she received a Distinguished Artist Award from the Los Angeles Music Center, has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, founded and annually hosts British Theatre Backstage with Barbara Isenberg and was formerly Associate Director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. For more information, visit: www.barbaraisenberg.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Light in an Empty Room, May 28, 2009

By 

Dmitry Portnoy (Studio City, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Conversations with Frank Gehry (Hardcover)

This is a breezily readable, generously and eclectically illustrated book, packed with personal, practical and historical revelations and observations that paradoxically don't really add up to anything.

But wait: that may very well be the point.

First the good stuff. There are many, many pages here that are worth the purchase price: a photo of the model for the Disney Concert Hall that won the 1988 competition and that looks nothing like the finished building, another photo of what the Disney Concert Hall would have looked like had it been clad in travertine as was the original plan, Gehry's stories about surviving the Army and Harvard, Philip Johnson's assessment of the Bilbao Guggenheim, Gehry's practice of leaving building models outside for a year to see what they'll look like in the changing light of the seasons--and many more. I don't want to spoil all of them.

Here's what isn't here: any singular philosophy or manifesto, anything admonishing or inspirational, any broad program or narrow purpose. In the sixties, Gehry started using rough, exposed framework and junky materials like chainlink and corrugated metal because, craftsmanship in construction had declined, and a perfect finish would have been impossible. In the seventies, he turned an ordinary house inside-out and outraged half of Santa Monica-because he needed extra space for his sons. In the eighties, he won the commission for the Disney Concert Hall by making an emotional appeal to Walt Disney's accessibility and unpretentiousness. In the nineties, he created the most astonishing building of the late twentieth century by first refusing a commission to repurpose an existing structure.

Is there a pattern here? A take home lesson? None that I can see. It's all collaborative, and contingent, and improvisational, playful, experimental. Let's try this. That's not going to work? Then let's try this instead. Follow your genius. Go with the flow. Maybe it's all a big mystery.

But no, there's not even any mystery. In one of the funniest exchanges in the book, Gehry says, (of the museum in Bilbao) "They wanted a Sydney Opera House;" to which Barbara Isenberg replies, "How could you tell that?" which prompts from Gehry, "They said, 'We want you to build us a Sydney Opera House.'"

And that's exactly what he did. No big mystery. Not even anything to puzzle over.

In many respects, this book is as open, obvious, user-friendly, and beautiful and witty as one of Gehry's buildings. But it's also, paradoxically, empty. The buildings are filled with music and people and art. The book is filled with words and explanations, which are, I think, playfully, delightfully, even insightfully, beside the point.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insight Into the Evolution of a Creative Mind, September 8, 2009

By 

R. Crawford (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conversations with Frank Gehry (Hardcover)

I loved this book! Aside from the well documented and beautifully photographed architectural
references, this book offered a great personal view of Frank Gehry's early years, his influences, personal struggles and the evolution of his design and thought process.

I didn't want the book to end. Hopefully, a follow-up book will include more
of FG's early experiences and allow us to see where this next phase of his life will take him.

This book makes me want to go to Bilbao to see the Guggenheim!

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Read!, September 9, 2009

By 

Lauren Pope (Scotland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Conversations with Frank Gehry (Hardcover)

'Conversations with Frank Gehry' is an approachable look at his art, providing insight into the precision and planning of seemingly abstract architecture. The casual familiarity Isenberg has with Gehry is refreshing, allowing for a genuine representation of a complicated genius. I especially enjoyed the discussions on Gehry's forthcoming buildings. Well worth the read!