THE DARING OF GEHRY

Revisiting the museum that started it all, the 94-year-old architect reflects on his methods, his influence, and his ambitious new projects

- Belinda Luscombe

FRANK GEHRY WANTS TO BUILD A PARK IN LOS ANGELES. Not just a normal park on empty land; that’s for lightweights. Gehry wants to take chunks of the legendarily unlovely Los Angeles River, a 51-mile engineered waterway mostly lined with concrete, and suspend parks over them. It sounds like a pipe dream, or in this case more of a channel dream; it’s expensive, unprecedented, structurally complex, and anathema to many of the locals. But Gehry, 94, has made a career of overcoming such obstacles and, in the process, transforming cities.

Skepticism was also the initial response of officials in charge of selecting the architect for the Guggenheim Museum in the northern Spanish town of Bilbao, upon seeing the extremely rough models Gehry presented in 1991, in one version of which a tower was represented by an old bottle. “There was a lot of ‘Oh my God, what?’” says Juan Ignacio Vidarte, the director general of the gallery, who was at the meeting where Gehry made his pitch. “But after trying to understand, there was the unanimous decision that this was the right project.”

Gehry won the competition with a design that looks from some angles like a silverized Spanish galleon and from others like a prayer circle of titanium nuns. The finished building not only put Gehry on the map globally, and Bilbao on the map globally, but also became that very rare thing: a cultural artifact that was a classic as soon as it appeared. The officials behind the plan to revive Bilbao had hoped to get 500,000 people a year to visit. In the first three years after its 1997 opening, they got 4 million, and have had 21 million in the years since.