Gehry joins Sir Norman Foster in £8bn Malaysian-backed plan to transform derelict site with 3,500 flats, shops and offices
"It will be absolutely amazing and extraordinary," says Rob Tincknell, chief executive of the Battersea Power Station Development Company. "It really is so exciting that we will have Frank Gehry's first building in London, right next to the power station. It will become another icon, so you'll have two icons sat side by side. What could be better than that?"
It was announced last week that Gehry will be joining Norman Foster in the next phase of the £8bn Malaysian-backed plan to transform south London's derelict cathedral of power into a gleaming wonder-world of 3,500 flats, shops and offices. Gehry will be responsible for five apartment buildings including a centrepiece, named the Flower, which, says Tincknell, "will give Frank the opportunity to flex his design muscles as far as they go".
The developer is speaking in rapturous tones of awe and wonder, like someone who has just bagged the biggest real estate prize imaginable. Not the Grade II* listed brick behemoth, but the promise that a Gehry building will one day materialise next door.
"His style of architecture is completely unique," he continues. "You can't miss it. Other architects might design buildings of different styles, and do it differently each time, but Frank's buildings are a continuous interpretation of his idea of fluidness. It's just fantastic."
It is not an unusual reaction for someone who has just bagged a Gehry. The 84-year-old Canadian architect has garnered a reputation as the supreme magician of iconic forms, the go-to guy for a dose of wow-factor, bringing with him the promise of headlines, tourists and minor economic miracles. The billowing metallic flanks of his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, completed in 1997, have been credited with reviving the fortunes of this ailing post-industrial town, to the extent the building spawned its own term – "the Bilbao effect" – and ushered in a light-headed era of copycat projects initiated by countless other towns in the pursuit of icon-led regeneration.
Since the success of Bilbao, Gehry has become a global brand. He is the king of the crumple, whose tangled concoctions of swooping metal and teetering glass now dot landscapes the world over. There is the 76-storey skyscraper in Manhattan – simply branded "New York by Gehry" – which hangs like a shear silk scarf, rippling in the wind. There are tumbling university buildings in Massachusetts and Cincinnati, a museum shaped like a giant smashed guitar in Seattle, and a dancing apartment block in Prague . On the desert peninsula of Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, work is under way on what will one day be the mother of all Guggenheims, a 30,000 square metre museum complex formed from a jumble of clustered cones and tilting towers.
"He now comes packaged as 'Gehry', with quotes on," says critic Charles Jencks, a close friend who has known him since he started out in 1970s Los Angeles. "Like all the best artists, he has become part of the establishment, but he began on the outside, kicking against the fence. He's like the Woody Allen of architecture: he loves railing against the world and doesn't want to be liked by anybody – but at the same time he wants to be loved and accepted by everybody."
The Allen comparison almost extends to the level of fame he now enjoys. In a world of competing "starchitects", whose celebrity reputations often outshine their buildings, none come more starry than Gehry. His website carries a note that autograph requests can regrettably not be accommodated owing to the volume received.
He has appeared on an episode of the Simpsons, designing Springfield opera house in the shape of a scrunched-up envelope; he has made a hat for Lady Gaga, looking like a laundry bag savaged by a rottweiler; Mark Zuckerberg has asked him to design the new Facebook mega-campus, and to top it all, Brad Pitt has become the architect's unlikely apprentice.
Taking Pitt under his wing, generously indulging his fantasies of being the actor-architect, Gehry has worked with him on various projects, from a doomed development for Hove, which would have resulted in the East Sussex waterfront being desecrated with four 120-metre towers shaped like crumpled Victorian dresses, to a low-cost house in post-hurricane New Orleans, completed last year.
"I've got a few men I respect very much and one would be Frank Gehry," Pitt told Vanity Fair. "He said to me, 'If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.' That's become like a mantra for me."
Gehry has become a spiritual guide for more than just Hollywood stars, finding his influence reaching the highest corridors of power. In her final official speech last year, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton went as far as using his architecture as an elaborate metaphor for where the world should be going. "We need a new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek," she said to the audience at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Some of his work at first might appear haphazard, but in fact, it's highly intentional and sophisticated. Where once a few strong columns could hold up the weight of the world, today we need a dynamic mix of materials and structures."
So how did this rumpled everyman, who dresses in T-shirts and baggy trousers to meet corporate chiefs, end up being courted by the global elite, from princes to politicians? How did his punk post-modernist style end up being co-opted as a platitude in a Democratic presidential bid?
The beginning of the answer can be found on the corner of a residential street in Santa Monica, California, where Gehry built his first project in 1978 – a house for himself, which appears to engulf and eviscerate the carcass of a modest beige bungalow. Wrapping the existing building with a grungy cocktail of corrugated metal sheeting, raw plywood and chain-link fencing, through which angular glazed structures burst open, it was his maverick manifesto writ large. And it offended the neighbours to such an extent that one regularly brought his dog to defecate on the garden path.
The building burst on to the scene at a time when dull mirror-glass modernism was in vogue, standing out against California's conservative architectural culture of anonymous corporate blocks. Gehry's gritty street-style bricolage of cheap industrial materials was a refreshing antidote, riffing off LA's ersatz pop culture with energetic wit. His house attracted swarms of young architects and critics, and came to serve as his laboratory and showroom, coming to stand as the primal site of his myth-making. As critic Beatriz Colomina has said, it is "the House that Built Gehry".
"He developed an incredible skill at making very sophisticated work with cheap materials," says Jencks, who recalls how he would do "the kind of B-movie jobs, like malls and parking lots, that no other architect would touch."
Jencks suggests a key work was Gehry's Fish sculpture in Barcelona, commissioned to jazz up the base of a boring hotel tower in the Olympic port in 1992, which was the first time the architect employed computer modelling software, borrowed from the aerospace industry.
A curvaceous steel skeleton, draped with a shimmering golden lattice, the Fish was designed using Catia (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application), which has since become the staple of many architecture practices grappling with complex geometries. It has even spawned an entire separate branch of the office, now formalised as Gehry Technologies. Such modelling tools also allowed the multi-directional curves of Bilbao to be generated and linked up directly with the manufacturing process, a breakthrough in the building industry at the time.
But such cutting-edge technology comes with its pitfalls, and things haven't always gone to plan. Costing two and a half times the original budget, Gehry's Walt Disney concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, launched in 1987 and finally completed in 2003, was subject to more than 10,000 requests for information from contractor to architect, resulting in a legal dispute that ended in a costly settlement.
And the problems didn't stop there. When it was finished, neighbours discovered that the building's concave polished steel surfaces had the effect of focusing the sun's rays into their apartments, leading to skyrocketing air-conditioning bills and the danger of blinding passing drivers.
Returning to manual methods, Gehry's office had to sand down the offending panels to eliminate the glare.
Having done battle with the Walkie-Scorchie "fryscraper" by Rafael Viñoly – who, somewhat ominously, is also responsible for the Battersea power station masterplan – at least London should be ready for whatever Gehry decides to throw at it.
Potted profileBorn: Frank Owen Goldberg in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, to Polish Jews. He moved to California in 1947 and, after a stint as a lorry driver, studied architecture at the University of Southern California, then city planning at Harvard – which he left before completing, disillusioned. He set up his practice in LA in 1962, and has been married twice, with two children from each marriage.
Best of times: Vanity Fair declared him "the most important architect of our age" in 2010.
Worst of times: His proposal for the $112m Dwight D Eisenhower memorial in Washington, DC, has been severely criticised by the president's son, John Eisenhower, and his granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, who says her entire family opposes it.
He says: "In the 80s, everyone was redoing the past, rebuilding Greek temples. I said, y'know, Greek temples are anthropomorphic. And three hundred million years before man was fish. If you gotta go back … why are you stopping at the Greeks? So I started drawing fish in my sketchbook, and then I started to realize that there was something in it."
They say: "[Gehry's buildings] became not only more extravagant but also more detached: they became signs of 'artistic expression' that could be dropped, indifferently, almost anywhere … The great irony is that Gehry fans tend to confuse his arbitrariness with freedom, and his self-indulgence with expression." Hal Foster, London Review of Books, 2001
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