Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg

Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg

Author:Barbara Isenberg [Isenberg, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95972-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00


Gehry says he designed the Guggenheim Bilbao entry down a wide staircase to maximize its river setting and high atrium. (photo credit 8.4)

BI: You made another unusual choice in the way museum galleries come off the central atrium rather than lead one into another. My guide at the museum, Maria Bidaurreta, said it had to do with your notions of democracy. She said you felt that that nobody should be forced to go a certain way in a museum.

FG: I probably did say that.

BI: Could you elaborate on that idea?

FG: It was sort of an antidote to the Metropolitan Museum syndrome, where you go in, get lost, and you’re there for a few hours with no relief. I like the idea of going to a museum, seeing a section of it, then coming back to the center. You could branch out again, as well as be able to go in a continuous fashion around the central space. In this case, I also wanted to have the central space open to the city so that whenever you came back to that central space, you had different views of the city of Bilbao around you. It made the experience interactive and seeing art interacting with the city made sense to me. The city is a living thing, and the art is inspired by living. It’s kind of interrelated.

We just did that at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, too. It was one of the things that [AGO director] Matthew Teitelbaum wanted. A lot of museum people have picked up on that. It does work. It helps with museum fatigue. And it gives you options. So, in a sense, it is democratic.

BI: Much has been said about your choice of titanium for the exterior. How did that come about?

FG: We decided to make the building metal because Bilbao was a steel town, and we were trying to use materials related to their industry. So we built twenty-five mock-ups of a stainless steel exterior with different variations on the theme. But in Bilbao, which has a lot of rain and a lot of gray sky, the stainless steel went dead. It only came to life on sunny days. That’s why we could use stainless steel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where there’s so much sun it doesn’t die.

In order to get life into stainless steel, you can emboss and sand it to get an abrasive quality like [the sculptor] David Smith did. You can David Smith it, where you rough up the surface so it catches the light. That would have worked, but it would have looked like a riff on David Smith. I was frustrated because nothing was looking right, and I was still struggling with it when I was in my office looking through the sample files. That’s where I found a piece of titanium this big.

Gehry makes a square with his hands of about eight inches by eight inches.



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