FEELING CONGESTED?
by Susie Hodgson
Maybe you’ve heard that Warner Brothers is building new headquarters. Maybe you’ve seen the architectural drawings of some rather strangely arranged “iceberg”-looking buildings floating along the 134 freeway. Groundbreaking took place in January of 2020. These dramatic new buildings have been designed by (arguably) the world’s greatest living architect.
He was born on February 28, 1929 in Toronto, Canada. Named Efraim Owen Goldberg, his was the only Jewish family in the neighborhood and he later said he was beat up regularly because of it. He was artistic, leading his father to tell him he was a dreamer who would never amount to much. His mother compared him to her friends’ children and he never measured up. Another female relative – his grandmother – played a key role in his early life. She’d get scraps from her husband’s hardware store and she and the little boy would build futuristic cities on the living room floor.
After he finished high school, the family moved to California, and our young hero got a job driving a delivery truck while he took night classes at L.A. City College. Truck driving wasn’t his thing, so he tried radio announcing “which I wasn’t very good at.” He also tried chemical engineering which he didn’t like. “I just started wracking my brain, ‘What do I like?’ And I remembered Grandma and the blocks -- and on a hunch, I tried some architecture classes.”
It wasn’t long before he started USC, earning his degree in 1954. Two years earlier, he had married Anita Snyder who would put him through school and gave birth to two daughters, Brina and Leslie. It was also Anita who encouraged him to change his name. She was trying to protect her girls from the anti-semitism her husband had suffered, not just as a child but even in the present day at USC.
So, being an artist, he looked at his name, Goldberg. To the eye, it can look like a mountain range with lower hills flanking the l, d and b. So he tried to copy the look of Goldberg. And he did. The family’s new last name became Gehry. He had never used the name Efraim except at his bar mitzvah. He always went by Frank. Frank Gehry.
After finishing college, Frank put in a year with the U.S. Army where he was tasked with making furniture – something he turned out to be very good at. So good in fact that the upper crust of the military kept taking and claiming his furniture. Maybe Frank should dabble in furniture..?
He did. In the 1960s, Frank’s line of corrugated cardboard furniture made it big! The cardboard chairs seemed to be flying out of Bloomingdales. Frank was shocked and didn’t take success well. He neglected his wife and kids. The marriage was a wreck with both sides admitting to infidelity. And Frank stopped making the popular cardboard furniture. He got a divorce in 1966 saying he wanted to do more with his life.
Fast forward to the 70s. In 1975, Frank married a Panamanian woman named Berta. They would go on to have two sons. In 1977, Frank bought an old home in Santa Monica and proceeded to renovate it. In essence, he surrounded the old house with a metal outer ring. Often called the apostle of chain-link and corrugated metal, Frank lived up to the title with this house – and the house became a tourist trap. Another smash hit.
And soon Frank would start designing even more. Here are just a few: The Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles. The Vitra Design Museum in Germany. The Olympic Fish Pavilion in Spain. The Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota. The Dancing House in Prague. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The EMP Museum in Seattle. The Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western University in Cleveland. The Stata Center at MIT in Massachusetts. The IAC Building in NY. The Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. The Marques de Riscal Hotel in Spain. And of course, Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. (Please google some of these! They defy description.)
To know Frank Gehry’s work is a love or hate thing. There isn’t much middle ground. In 1996, when the museum in Bilbao, Spain opened, it REALLY put Gehry on the map. Not only was the building breathtaking, but its existence turned around the economy of the region, resulting in a phenomenon called The Bilbao Effect. Many say that Disney Hall has done the same thing for downtown L.A.
Here are a few more facts about the architect, who, at age 91, says he’ll never retire.
He loves ice hockey and maintains dual citizenship in the US and Canada.
He designed a restaurant in Japan to be shaped like a fish while he was drunk on sake. He scribbled it on one of many cocktail napkins and they won the contract.
His thing for fish came about by rebelling against the post-modernism movement and his desire to go back in time as far as he could. Think Darwin.
He was once contracted to build a hospital for schizophrenic youth, leading him to comment, “I thought it was fitting that they asked me to do it.”
Gehry started working with chain-link fencing because “people hated it.”
Gehry recommends that everyone always be curious and keep a copy of Don Quixote and Alice in Wonderland at your bedside. He also urges us to work our tails off, question everything and remember that life is about people.
After the Bilbao was completed, all Gehry could see were mistakes.
He deeply regrets a cameo “appearance” he had on an episode of The Simpsons where he played himself. They show him throwing a rejected, crumbled piece of paper on a table and voila! It’s a concert hall. Gehry hates that people believe that is how it actually works.
Gehry finally gave up his world-famous house for a new home also in Santa Monica that his son, Sam, primarily designed. Gehry’s other son is an artist/teacher who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. His daughter Brina teaches yoga, but, sadly, his other daughter Leslie died of ovarian cancer at age 54.
The new Warner Brothers offices are expected to open in 2023. It is one of our biggest real estate deals ever with an estimated value of more than $1 billion. What do you think THAT will do to traffic?!
Want to learn more about Burbank? Come visit us!
The Burbank Historical Society/Gordon R. Howard Museum
OPEN SATURDAYS & SUNDAYS, 1 TO 4 pm - FREE Admission!
Located in George Izay Park, right next to the Creative Arts Center
Phone: (818) 841-6333
Web site: www.burbankhistoricalsoc.org
Email: ghowardmuseum@sbcglobal.net