A life in shapes

FRANK GEHRY’S buildings often come to define the cities where they are built. Think of Bilbao, a down-at-heel northern Spanish steel town until Mr Gehry’s confection of beaten metal, which opened in 1997 as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, changed the way people thought of architecture and collecting—and put the city on the cultural map. Mr Gehry helped create the era of big-name “starchitects” and he has become a frequent lightning rod for society’s mixed feelings about urban spectacle and celebrity.

None of this could be predicted early on, for his career did not take off until middle age. He is now 86, and shows little sign of slowing down. “I get excited about working on new things,” he said recently. On the list is a shimmering tower that he is creating in Arles, France, to mark a lushly funded private arts complex called LUMA and a series of wriggling slabs for the vast Battersea Power Station in London which is being converted into luxury flats. He is adding to the quarter-mile-long building he recently completed for Facebook in California. And he is supporting arts education in low-performing Los Angeles schools. Mr Gehry is hard on himself, never satisfied that a given design is right. “All I see is what I could have done better. I can’t help it.”

With the passing of the years, though, a look-back has become unavoidable. “Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry” (Knopf) by Paul Goldberger, a critic, is the first biography written with the architect’s acquiescence. At the same time an expanded version of a retrospective that began at the Pompidou Centre in Paris has now opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Mr Gehry’s home city.

The architect grew up in Toronto in straitened circumstances, and his long climb to the pinnacle of architecture was arduous. Mr Goldberger shows him not to be flamboyant and arrogant, as many people think, but unassuming and easy to like. There was much soul-searching in the early years about whether he risked eternal penury by taking the harder path of doing only the work he wanted to do. After all, he was good at drawing up inexpensive and ordinary designs for flats and shopping centres—just what his clients and collaborators sought.

The exhibition does a good job of documenting Mr Gehry’s artistic evolution as consistent themes begin to emerge. In 1978 he created the Familian house in which off-kilter cubes of exposed wood framing poked out from tidy white boxes. He then went on to wrap his own stolid Dutch colonial house (pictured) in Santa Monica with chain-link fencing, corrugated metal siding and tilting planes of glass, riffing on the rapidly ageing, fast and flimsy cityscapes that the rapid growth of California had produced. He thought of his house as a laboratory of ideas. Neighbours took it as an attack on their dream of a tidy Mediterranean paradise.

Although Mr Gehry’s bold designs emerged from an individualistic California ethos, a conservative civic establishment greeted his design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall with consternation when it was unveiled in 1987. It was an awkward collision of boxy auditorium and greenhouse-style lobby, which Mr Gehry would rapidly refine into the unfurling leaflike exterior that was ultimately built. It would take 16 long years of cost overruns, funding shortfalls and construction delays before the hall opened—to extraordinary acclaim. Mr Gehry was awarded architecture’s Nobel, the Pritzker prize in 1989, when he was 60. Yet his most admired work lay ahead. The Vitra Museum for a Swiss furniture-maker, in particular, introduced the lyrical interlocking curves that he has used with ever-greater freedom and which have become his signature.

The process by which Mr Gehry works is almost entirely intuitive, which plays into the hands of sceptics, because it subverts the idea of architecture as mainly a practical art. What is often overlooked, though, amid the sculptural fireworks is his clear and pragmatic organisation of space and an unerring sense of proportion. Many architects struggle with both; for Mr Gehry they come easily, leaving him free to develop elaborate spatial drama and sculptural form that, at its best, looks inevitably right.

He has not shied from controversy. He has attempted to engage protesters over labour rights in Abu Dhabi, where the design he completed in 2006 for another Guggenheim Museum remains unbuilt. He relishes work on a vision to make the 51 miles (82 kilometres) of the concrete-lined Los Angeles river an urban amenity as well as a model of flood control, even as critics see his presence muddling an undertaking that had languished for decades.

Mr Gehry’s best projects are almost uniquely, engagingly lyrical: the fluttering surfaces and gorgeously ballooning spaces seem unbound by either gravity or the limits of construction technology. The “sails”—the ascending, curving panels of glass that form the carapace of the Fondation Louis Vuitton which opened in the Bois de Boulogne in western Paris a year ago—appear to billow above the tree line. It is a feat that was thought not worth attempting—before Mr Gehry made it happen.