How I Got Started: Frank Gehry I Fortune

how do you how do you create feeling with inert materials now the Greeks knew how to do it I've got a picture of the charioteer 500 BC when I saw it when I was 40 years old I started crying and I thought that's what I want to do I want to be able to build a building that makes people moves them 500 years from now [Music] what is it that made me want to come into this profession in high school I took shop and built things and I did well and that and loved it making things with your hands I looked at the professions one could go into and I remember looking at architecture at that time and architecture curriculum was to build a Cape Cod house or something you know was was not very interesting so I closed the book on that didn't even pay attention but I did go to the lecture series on Friday nights at the University of Toronto and there was a guy from Finland showing his buildings and furniture and that guy turned out to be Alvar Aalto so I was kind of peripherally interested I didn't know I was interested I was intrigued by the way things were built when I got to LA I went to night school I said he call it I took a ceramics class with Glenn Lucas who was well known for a thermos and he used to one that after a year told me not to stay in ceramic he said you're not gonna like this I think you should look at architecture he was building a house by Rafael Soriano I visited the site Rafael Soriano was telling people to move beams around and it was kind of exciting I guess I my eyes lit up the first buildings I designed looked like Rafael Soriano he got to me my mother took me to concerts when I was a kid in Toronto and I'm still to this day very interested in the topic buildings for music because you get a relationship between the orchestra members so they hear each other and it's comfortable to hear each other in a way that is substantial and uplifting you create a relationship between the Ordre and the audience that's palpable that they both feel if you do it right they both feeling so music stuff is really exciting and my belief that people talk to each other through the arts led me to the divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim the he and Edward Sayid created an orchestra where Palestinians Syrians Lebanese Egyptians play in an orchestra with Israeli and so I decide their 700 seat concert hall in Berlin as a gift to the orchestra and it really works so that's the music stuff the art stuff is also there Bilbao was a working relationship with a genius museum director Tom Curren and it's that collaboration that led to the project that we built which was a very inexpensive building compared to museum buildings Bilbao was built for $300 a square foot so it's and it came in slightly under budget and its return on investment has been beyond everybody's wildest dreams I mean if you start to use curves you think it's more expensive than a box right but we've developed with our French friends who build airplanes with their software we were able to the mystified shapes so you could build them cheaply and we built it like a warehouse a big warehouse every contract has a 15% lay away for for change orders if you show people exactly what to do demystify the way you build something they don't get the 15% so we did a 76 story Tower in Manhattan the exterior skin is all wiggly wobbly if everybody would say it that's too expensive we built it with zero change orders so the amount of money that you say actually went into the building instead of waste [Music] so we experiment with the feelings generated by materials in Bilbao since it was museum and not a lot of windows the exterior skin became a building it's a rainy climate and so stainless steel went dead stainless steel is exciting in California because you got a lot of sunlight by accident I had a piece of titanium and I looked at it and I put it out on a post and it rained and it turned golden and it felt right and so I said that's what we got to use when do you go to Bilbao and it's it's cloudy skies the thing turns golden and it's really beautiful in RL France we're just completing a building for a special lady my Hoffmann and it's where van Gogh did starry night and I've always wanted to paint on a facade with natural light and we built blocks that are covered with stainless steel and they're set at slightly different angles and when you go there with the Sun it changes all day long so it's like a watercolor it was beautiful [Music] you

Channel: Fortune Magazine

Views: 224,938

Rating: 4.9532461 out of 5

Keywords: Journalism Franchise, Fortune, business, wall street, finance, frank gehry, how i got started, architecture, design, walt disney concert hall, guggenheim museum bilbao

Id: RpzGuw1tZeE

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018