I enjoyed last night’s PBS broadcast of SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, a documentary by Hollywood director, Sydney Pollack. While the documentary is mostly about Gehry’s architectural process, I saw it as an interesting conversation between two middle aged friends  with tremendous drive, ambition and personal demons, who are also hugely successful in their chosen artistic professions.

It even includes a fascinating interview with Gehry’s psychiatrist, who speaks frankly about some of Gehry’s personal and artistic struggles. He says that he’s been credited with making Frank Gehry a great architect (by FG, by whom?). He, of course, denies this. He does admit to helping Gehry unleash his creative freedom (note: his genius, his huge ego). Other architects have come to him because of that but he turns them away.

The interviews conducted by Gehry’s friend Oscar winner Sydney Pollack are personal and frank, — a fascinating conversation between good friends. Pollack drives in Gehry’s car and they talk about his childhood, his influences, marriage, working with clients, being a professional artist and the compromise that entails.

Gehry takes him in buildings, inside his design office. At one point Gehry says that his biggest disappointment is not being a painter. But he admits that he would never dare to paint a painting. Too hard, he says.

The film shows how, beginning with Gehry’s own original sketches for each major project, Gehry and company turn these drawings into finished
buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone.

Gehry works very closely with his design assistants, who quickly transform his sketches into three-dimensional models. He works in various scales, he says, so as not to become too enamored of the model itself.

He says: "We
constantly go back and forth between the models and the drawings,
because (pointing to the drawings) if this doesn’t work, that doesn’t
work!"

These models are scanned into an  unbelievably sophisticated computer and rendered into working drawings. These computer programs have made it possible for Gehry to render and build the strange and eccentric shapes he imagines. This would never have been possible without these CAD programs. Gehry himself is completely computer illiterate.

Various clients are interviewed, who describe the process by which Gehry’s buildings are developed: the give and take, the back and forth. Clearly, Gehry is a very smart guy, with a big ego, who is constantly listening, revising, and enhancing his vision.

A rule-breaking architect, he strongly disagrees with the notion that architecture should fit in and not be noticed, Gehry’s work stands out, sometimes glaringly, often beautifully, in contrast to the cityscape around it.

Gehry’s approach is sculptural with a strong understanding of shape, contour, materials and light. 

The film made me think that it will be exciting to have Gehry building in Brooklyn. It is too bad that the Atlantic Yards site is so controversial. If it had been connected with the BAM development zone it probably would have been a no-brainer. His Barry Diller building went up on the west side highway with almost no hoopla as far as I know.

I’m willing to bet that Gehry sees all the public opposition as just a lot of noise — just part of the usual chaos and insanity that goes into any architectural project in NYC. I don’t get the sense that he thinks a lot about the social impact of his work. He obviously thinks about what it means to be in and outside of one of his buildings — the  experience of the light, the shadows, the shapes, the flow.

But I’m not sure if he really cares about city planning and urban issues.

And he did admit to sometimes being embarassed by the scale and
audacity of his work. "Who let me do that?" he says at one point.

The issues of urban flow and city planning really belong to the developer after all. The idea of planting sixteen high rise apartments in the Atlantic Yards belongs to Ratner not Gehry. Gehry might be a very interesting architect to do it but he’s not going to be the one who will speak to  the issues that concern Brooklynites.

If the stadium works for Brooklyn the way it works in Bilbao – seamlessly contradicting and merging with its surroundings in a mesmerizing way – that would be wonderful. The matter of too many apartments, too little urban flow, and too little infrastructure need to be addressed so that quality of life is insured.

SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY is worth seeing. Even just to see Gehry’s shrink talk about his client in such an open way.