Sketches of Frank Gehry

The first documentary by Sydney Pollack, Sketches of Frank Gehry is a remarkable look at a controversial and innovative artist who uses architecture as a means for creative expression. Pollack, a good friend of Gehry's, effectively portrays Gehry as a man who is hard driven yet humble and honest about his work, willing to take enormous risks in a field where it is frowned upon. Gehry uses his drawings, loose line sketches that at first glance looks like a Jackson Pollock drip painting, to get a feel or an impression of a project, and then it is used to build models, which are his primary medium to create the structure. He creates several models of various sizes, in order to get a sense of scale as well as not becoming wedded to a design that only works on a particular scale. He is assisted by a couple of designers who are essentially his right hand men, executing design tasks and shaping the models, responding to Gehry's creative impulses. His architecture office is a creative workshop where people design, build and rework various projects. There are interviews with known people in architecture and art -- Philip Johnson, Ed Ruscha, Hal Foster (a major art critic providing the lone dissenting voice, showing his own limitations with regards to the arts), actor Dennis Hopper, Michael Ovtiz, Michael Eisner, Bob Geldolf, and others. What is he most known for? In the 70's and 80's he did a lot of work on private homes, especially his own, which was typecast as part of the Deconstructivist aesthetic of the time. Deconstruction, in the crudest of definitions, is a breaking down a structure, language, sign or object in order to create something new. Gehry's innovative use of materials and taking things like chain link fences and using them in a different way, pushing them up in the sky at angles, redefined the common acceptance of the role of materials and how a structure should be. His most famous work, a project done for the Guggenheim Museum, is the Bilbao museum in Spain, completed in the late 90's. The curved surfaces soar out of the industrial skyline, and reflect the sun light like a jewel. It was seen as a masterpiece of building when it was completed, and for the past decade there has been a trend where cities are looking to commission architectural centerpieces to revive or boost their local economies, like the museum has done for Bilbao. A more recent work has been the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Pollack does a good job of running down the list of Gehry's architectural highlights, but most importantly, he gives a clear view of one man's creative thinking process, and the high levels of craft, design and work that is put into each work. While not recommended for the casual viewer, this is a revealing look at one of the top creative minds of our time. I liked it a lot!