Walt Disney Concert Hall

Get ready: soon in your city will appear large, sparkling, quaintly curved buildings.In Barcelona, ​​New York, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, Paris and other world capitals, the arrows of cranes will rise and the construction of glass sails, corrugated monoliths, prickly polyphonic towers and other structures that will forever change the silhouettes of these cities will begin. All these buildings are designed by a gray-haired 78-year-old ochka from Los Angeles, whose office is a small booth, furnished with plywood furniture.

Ten years have passed since the Bilbao appeared on the world cultural globe thanks to the Frank Gehry Museum of the Guggenheim (according to Philip Johnson, "the greatest architectural construction of our time"). Four years have passed since Gehry built the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which, according to everyone's opinion, marked the beginning of the revival of the city center. Now everyone wanted something "funny". "I used to spend a lot of time on the road, but now the customers are coming to me," Gehry said with his characteristic restraint. - Glory caught me by surprise. Perhaps, if this happened to me, when I was about thirty, the glory would corrupt me. "
A constantly expanding list of new projects will surely bring even more glory to Gehry - and even more blasphemy from critics. Each of them in its own way expresses dissatisfaction with the fact that in the buildings built by Gehry, the external effects predominate over the functionality, and the fact that these buildings do not fit into the surrounding architectural environment. In the coming years, critics will have many reasons for practicing sloth. Soon the Disney concert hall will seem to them a nice leprosy of Mickey Mouse: in Paris, over the Bois de Boulogne, a huge glass "cloud" with an area of ​​4366 square meters will hang. M, which will house the museum. In the center of Las Vegas will be built medical research center, more like a roller coaster. A museum will appear in Jerusalem, which will look like a turbojet engine that has collapsed. And in Brooklyn, Atlantic Yards, a "city in the city" worth about $ 4 billion, will be built. On 9 hectares of land, Gehry will build a tower and a sports palace that will be the same for Brooklyn as the building of the Rockefeller Center was for Manhattan.
It seems that the invented by Frank Gehry broken, curved and prickly forms increasingly claim themselves as new architectural tables. Henceforth, it is the creations of Gehry that determine the style of our era, just as in the past they defined the style of Wright, Ren, or Mikelapgelo. But those architects in their whole life have not seen anything like what Gehry managed to do in just 20 years since he made the largest and most rapid architectural revolution. However, Gehry works in the neighborhood with Hollywood, and this must be amended. In the western part of Los Angeles, just a couple of blocks from the Pacific Ocean, there is an anonymous building with a corrugated facade. If you enter this building and cross the concrete vestibule, you suddenly find yourself in a room that looks like a hangar, where around 200 people work at tables and offices of cheap packing plywood. In the center of the hangar, resembling a quarry, in the office, more like a booth, sitting himself Gehry in a black T-shirt and jeans. "I'm sorry, I did not have time to shave this morning," he says instead of greeting. Above all this cheap and cheerful sham such a vision of Valhalla towering two dozen glittering mock-ups of future grandiose structures, including several options for building Atlantic Yards. This project, like many of Gehry's previous projects, causes a lot of protests, lawsuits and critical articles. "These megakwartals are a vivid example of poor urban planning," Petition James, a member of the local municipal council, evaluates the project.
"It seems to me that the local society simply looks at what they have gotten in the past - these" boxes "- and thinks:" Oh God! "Says Gehry. - I hope, seeing that I offer them something completely different, they will remain satisfied. Undoubtedly, everything will be much more amusing and attractive than now. "

Fun and attractive. Indeed, no matter how tricky the academics and critics might pour into describing Gehry's creations, the truth is that ordinary people from the street consider most of the structures that he created to be attractive. And anyone who has seen how in the sterile to the boredom of the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, children literally devour the seven-meter glass fish created by Gehry, and tourists photograph each other against the giant binoculars installed at the entrance to the Chiat / Day office in Los Angeles, - Anyone who has seen all this will confirm to you that in the public view the "amusement" of architecture is more important than its functionality.

And something very important has already happened. This man blew up the dull forms that flooded our cities and made a pass in the name of art and economic calculation to reconcile with sluggish, boring or refined minimalist structures. We said goodbye to the modernist "boxes" for the German working people of the International era and ceased to yawn.
"Only a very small part of what is being built can really be called a true architecture - that is, an architecture that aims to create something beautiful with optimistic and humanistic methods," Gehry says. - Most of the buildings are built simply as "boxes" for money laundering. They have nothing to do with architecture. " "When the house is under construction, I like it more than when it is already built. In an unfinished house there is a certain openness, development is felt in it, and you have access to it, "he continues, glancing at the pipes laid straight through the studio, from which pieces of insulation hang. "Maybe it's because I grew up in a Canadian mining town, in which there was not a single remarkable building, but industrial production was presented in all clearness, where the process is always more interesting than the result."

"I'm not going to create another Bilbao or Disney Hall," Gehry says. "It does not amuse me anymore." I want to do something completely new - for example, to build an underground building in Philadelphia. " He shows me the mock-up of the neoclassical Philadelphia Museum of Art with a whole network of underground galleries, which, apparently, will give odds to any land galleries: "Can you imagine what it's like to give expression to a structure that simply can not be seen? But I accept this challenge. "

If you correlate these conversations about the expression with the sharp corners of Gehry's creations, then indeed there may be suspicions about some randomness of these projects. This, by the way, is vividly illustrated by the famous episode of the animated television series "Sim-peons", in which Gehry builds a concert hall in the form of an exact copy of a crumpled piece of paper lifted from the sidewalk. In fact, designing, financing and erecting these revolutionary buildings requires a design and business discipline worthy of Henry Ford.
"I'm not some great vizier there who scribbles scraps in his office," Gehry notes. - When I work with clients like Bruce Ratner (Atlantic Yarde developer), who is very keen on things that I myself follow in designing: graphics, music, sculpture, - all our disputes around the project are connected with material problems. How much is it? Will we be able to meet the deadline? That's why I have so many computers. "
Computers ?! Gehry is famous for not touching them. There is not even a laptop in his office. But if you go to the far corner of the studio, you will notice a large computer room similar to the trading room: here is Gehry Technologies, a separate company with a staff of 60 people controlling the design and construction processes that Gehry works on. The company executes and third-party orders. Despite all the seeming jokes and even recklessness of Gehry's projects, they are no more spontaneous than in the Nuremberg congresses of the Nazis. "The whole set of tools needed for strategic planning fits at the tips of our fingers," Gehry says. - Click on the button and you see, for example, how much construction costs in Iowa or in any other place where you want to build. I took the technology, because I always knew: the game is controlled by someone who has more information. "
Nevertheless, he rejected models by Gary himself more than the Rolling Stones of supermodels with broken hearts. "We are building a layout, discussing it, making some adjustments on the computer and building a new version of the layout," says Gehry. "Before we start real construction, we create 50-60 mock objects." At last, Yeri shows me his next miracle. He bent over the mock-up of the home stadium of the New Jersey Nets basketball club, which will be built in Atlantic Yards. "Look," he says to me excitedly, "any passer-by can look directly from the street inside, see the scoreboard and find out what the bill is." It will be nice for the local kids and those who can not afford to buy a ticket for basketball. "