| Like most architects, Frank Gehry didn’t achieve wide recognition until relatively late in life. Unlike most architects, however, when he finally became famous, it was for a game-changing project that altered everyone’s idea of what a building’s form could be: the titanium-sheathed Bilbao Guggenheim, completed in 1997 when Gehry was 68, with its massive, torqueing Cubist volumes glittering in the Spanish sun. That now-iconic design breathed life into a moribund European city, started an international craze for museum building that has not yet abated and made Gehry’s own name known to people who couldn’t identify another living architect at gunpoint.
It would be hard to top that in 2011, so Gehry isn’t trying. At 81, he is putting the finishing touches on his latest project, the New World Symphony in Miami’s South Beach neighborhood, which is smaller than many of his public projects, and more personal, too, because of his longtime friendship with NWS’s artistic director, Michael Tilson Thomas, whom Gehry has known since Tilson Thomas was seven years old. (Unlikely though it may sound, the future Pritzker-Prize winner used to babysit the future maestro.) The NWS bills itself as America’s Orchestral Academy and serves as a training ground for young musicians. It has a vigorous and decidedly eclectic performance schedule, with a central hall that will be used for everything from a series called Journey, focusing on different parts of a single composer’s work, to the regular DJ-and-dancing offering called Pulse.
From the outside, the all-white Miami Beach building, opening January 25 just a stone’s throw from the convention center where Art Basel is held, doesn’t really look like a Gehry — his signature style is by now so familiar that any departures from it are noteworthy. Only over the main entrance is there a small sculptural constellation of the sail-like forms or which he is known, which seems to be a tip of the hat to his admirers, and perhaps a thumb in the eye of his detractors, too. After all, he’s been called an “auto-plagiarist” for repeating himself with grand but similar forms in such projects as the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and Seattle’s Experience Music Project.
The façade of the New World Symphony is actually more reminiscent of the work of his friend and fellow starchitect Renzo Piano. The left half of the facade is an 80-foot-high glass curtain wall divvied up by well-articulated mullions, while the right side is simply a 7,000-square-foot blank slate — but it’s actually a screen of sorts, meant for “wallcasts” of the performances happening inside. “The reason the building is so severe from the outside is that it comes alive at night,” explains Michael Tilson Thomas.
Even with the projection wall, “One could’ve built a towering kind of thing there, an iconic exterior,” Gehry says. So why didn’t he? The first reason is context, that key element of architectural success that Gehry has been accused of ignoring in favor of dramatic curves. For example: LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall; the sculptural, soaring building is sometimes hard to even get a proper look at because of its crowded downtown site. (As an aside, Gehry says that Disney Hall, his best-known performance venue, was actually designed to have its exterior projected on, too, “They just never did it.”)
“Miami has a different body language. It didn’t feel right,” says Gehry, who used plain old white plaster and more boxy shapes than usual to make it fit into Miami Beach’s Art Deco scheme. Cost was also an issue: One early design had what Gehry calls a “bigger gesture,” but that was scrapped as too expensive, so that now, “the priority is the inside,” he says.
With elements like the glass facade, the projection wall and the extensive skylights (a common Gehry trope), the NWS engages life outside the building directly, in keeping with the organization’s experimental, democratic approach to training artists and bringing classic music to a wide audience. “Michael wanted people to be able to come from Lincoln Road and sort of wander by and get a sense of what was going on inside,” says Gehry. “They can drift in and stand at the back of the room and listen, and then drift out.” Some concert tickets will cost as little as $2.50, and the technologically advanced building also has 17 miles of fiber optic cable to project the music played in all of its performance spaces to a global audience.
Those famous Gehry forms — the ones that the architect creates with paper, by hand, in his “sketching” process — are mostly insideITALICS the building this time. “The big glass panel lets you see into the sculptural Cubist stuff, as you call it,” Gehry tells me. (The architect has always been loathe to characterize his signature style. “I don’t know what to call it.”) Once you’re in the six-story atrium, you can see how the two biggest interior gestures explode upwards and almost meet — one of them has already been nicknamed The Flower — forming a kind of canyon in the air.
Gehry, who was born in Canada and raised and educated in Southern California, was first noticed by the wider world for the 1978 design of his own house in Santa Monica, California. Though it was postmodernist in the way it playfully rearranged familiar shapes for a new house that was essentially built around the existing one on the site, Gehry later told Vanity Fair[ITAL] that the prevalent postmodernism of the 1970s and ’80s was never what he wanted for himself: “I was desperate not to go there.”
Searching for something that was warmer than the straight-lined glass and steel of Modernism but that cohered more strongly than a pastiche of older styles thrown together in a new way, he created his own exuberant approach that seemed to take its shapes from painting and sculpture as much as architecture. Gehry’s mature work has one oft-commented quality: “It always seems to be moving,” as Howard Herring, the president of the NWS, puts it. For the 2007 headquarters of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp on the edge of Manhattan’s west side, Gehry designed a partially frosted glass façade that appears to gently twist to the north.
In the Miami Beach building, some of the movement is literal. The main stage has 10 sections, each of which can be raised or lowered on its own, and large sections of the seating can be folded up like a Murphy bed to change the space at a moment’s notice. Gehry says that frequently when flexibilities are built into spaces, “clients don’t use them,” so he went the extra mile to make it easy. “It’s open to a lot of things and its non-preciously built, so you can knock out a wall, you can take some seats out, you can put some seats in,” he says.
The overall design of the interior is a little looser and rougher than Gehry’s usual. “Having a place for students, that gives you a lot more freedom,” he says. “You don’t have to use fancy finishes and stuff. In a way I like that better. It’s got a kind of immediacy to it.” A particularly appealing detail of NWS’s atrium lobby is the striking robin’s-egg blue of the built-in sofas the architect designed, and the roof garden, with its ocean view, is destined to be an audience favorite.
Gehry says he’s “always anxious to deliver a client’s dream,” and he speaks with an extra dose of emotion about his longtime friendship with Tilson Thomas and the way it informed the building. “The building can be more than he had dreamed of,” he says. “He’s going to grow into it and discover it.” But Gehry, a longtime classical music devotee, doesn’t think their styles are necessarily similar, in art or life: “He’s been very respectful of my thing, but he doesn’t live in buildings like I design. He’s got more eclectic tastes, let’s say.”
As far as the future goes, Gehry doesn’t take anything for granted — perhaps that’s because it took him so long to hit his stride. “I don’t promote myself, I wait until somebody calls,” he says regarding his approach to getting new projects. One assumes the phone is ringing off the hook, but given the global recession and the fact that Gehry’s work is inherently ambitious and costly, that might be overstating the case. “I could use a little more,” says the world’s most famous architect. “But I’m OK.”
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