AMERICAN INFLUENCE
was brought to a very happy conclusion. It was a 16-year arc, which Bilbao fell right in the middle of. In those years, Gehry was very eager to get out of Los Angeles. He felt like a pariah in his home city. His building was the butt of jokes. It was a very hard time. Do you think clients these days still have a willingness to let an architect experiment even while considering the money end of the impulse? It’s uneven and very spotty. It existed for a brief time in China. I think it’s faded already, but there was a narrow window in China. The window began when they had enough money and ambition to do certain things, and it’s beginning to close as they develop too large of a middle class for the economy to produce enormous, ambitious things on the backs of vast armies of underpaid workers. I’ve never forgotten what somebody told me in 2008, when I came to visit the new Beijing airport by Norman Foster before it was finished. I was told that at the peak of construction— do you know how many workers they had? 20,000? 50,000! At the peak! That’s how they were able to produce this thing in no time. The timeline from conception, through design, through building, to the opening of the Beijing airport was shorter than the time period of the environmental review process for Terminal 5 at Heathrow. That’s funny. It’s very funny. You know, democracy isn’t always the best thing for architecture, but obviously it’s the best thing for a lot of other reasons, and we hardly want to give it up to make more buildings. China is also now increasing and beginning to develop its own generation of good Chinese architects, many who have been educated here in the U.S. That’s a real difference from a few years ago. The difference from China and Japan is, of course, that Japan has been developing very strong architects on its own for a long period of time. China has only begun to do so in the last generation. The architect-selection process can be so telling—or not. I’ve been serving as a consultant to the board of the Obama Foundation, in the search of an architect for the Obama Library in Chicago, and its unlike any other presidential library— the search is international, not national, at the president’s request. I don’t think you could be cosmopolitan in 2015 without looking globally. This doesn’t mean they are going to make a choice that isn’t American, but it means they absolutely want to look at a field that’s global, and then make a decision about what they want to do. 147
Who are some architects you look at as being the most expressive of not only the place they’re working in, but also of where they come from? We want to talk about other people than Frank Gehry, but I would have to say he certainly would be on that list. You see a little bit of Los Angeles in everything he does. He was so shaped by the roughness and funkiness of the city. I don’t know whether anybody really represents that well. I remember Gehry telling me that when he got the job to do the 8 Spruce Street apartment building, he started looking at skyscrapers in New York in a way he never had before. He spent a lot of time walking around and just studying them. I think to some extent he’s done that all along. Studying all kinds of precedence. Not to mimic, but just to know. The really interesting question, though, is whether anybody truly represents a place anymore, or embodies it in their work. I’m thinking of most of the best architects I know, and I don’t think of them as particularly doing that. But I don’t know if architects necessarily have done that in the past that much, either. Look at McKim, Mead & White doing traditional and classical buildings as well, if not better than, anybody else around—and becoming quite famous for doing that work. It was primarily in New York, but a fair amount of it was elsewhere in the U.S. Did that represent the people of New York’s sensibility, or was it something else? Henry Hobson Richardson, who created that style—we actually call Richardsonian Romanesque—was based in Boston and did some amazing work all over. But is there something particularly Bostonian about that? I don’t think so. Was there something American about it? Yeah, I think there’s something very American about taking historical precedence and making it a little bit more picturesque, softer, integrating different things. Treating history like a buffet table that you can pick and choose
things from and combine them on your plate in an interesting composition—that’s a very American trait. Where does Gehry come into this? Gehry is very interested in things feeling comfortable and almost sensual. A lot of what he does is really a form of decoration and is against the old, orthodox, modernist doctrine, which is all about structure and purity, directness and simplicity and transparency—as a Robert A.M. Stern mansion would be. The thing, to me, that distinguishes Gehry is that with a lot of the other people’s buildings, there’s a level of abstract thought required to really appreciate them; with Gehry’s, that doesn’t happen so much. That’s another thing that I tried to talk about in the book: Gehry’s work is, in fact, accessible. And it’s rare that work that serious and that innovative—and that much part of the avant-garde—is also as accessible. I think that’s something he very much wants historically. He’s an intellectual when it comes to vivid reading and breadth of knowledge, and where he gets his ideas. But his work is not particularly intellectual. Who precedes him in this vein? I’m not sure that there’s been an American, at least since Frank Lloyd Wright, who has this quality. The only American architect of equal stature and quality, to me, between the two Franks, is Louis Kahn. But Louis Kahn’s work was never particularly accessible, actually. It’s very beautiful and very powerful and very moving. But most of the time you kind of have to know more about architecture to get into it and be thrown into orgasmic delight.