Few dreamers have so captured the public's imagination as Frank Gehry '54 of Santa Monica, Calif., generally considered among the most important and influential architects of our time. His Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which led to that city's economic rebirth, has been called "the world's most celebrated new building" by The New York Times, while Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is similarly considered a visual – and acoustic – masterpiece.

Barbara Isenberg, a celebrated arts writer who is associate director of the USC-based Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, has written about many of Gehry's endeavors, interviewing him again and again for newspapers, magazines and books since the 1980s.

A few years ago, Gehry, who recently turned 80, asked Isenberg if she would help him organize his memories through an oral history. That work evolved into Conversations with Frank Gehry, published in late April by Alfred A. Knopf, and excerpted here.

Education

BI: It took you a while to decide on architecture as a career.

FG: I finished high school in Toronto, and when we moved to Los Angeles, I enrolled in night school at LA City College because it was free. I took art and architecture classes both. The man who taught my drafting class told me he thought I had some aptitude for it. I was so upset when I got an F in a perspective class that I took it again the next semester and got an A.

BI: Is this when you studied ceramics with Glen Lukens? You've often mentioned how he recognized your early leanings toward architecture.

FG: I studied with Glen at USC extension. He was also helping to create a ceramics industry in Haiti, and I assisted him in tests of different glazes that might fit the Haitian soil. Once, I remember, the pot I put in the kiln came out so well that I said to Glen: "God, that's beautiful. It's just wonderful what can happen with the kiln and all those glazes."

Glen said: "Stop. From now on, when things like that happen, you take credit for it, because you did it. You made the pot. You put the glaze on. You put it in the kiln. You're allowed to claim credit for it, and I want you to do that." He was trying to make me feel part of it. That was a very important lesson that resonates for me even now.

 Around the time I was taking the ceramics class, I met a guy at USC named Arnold Schrier, who was an architect from Montreal. Arnold was doing graduate work at USC and we started looking at buildings together on the weekends. We looked at [Raphael] Soriano and Rudolf Schindler and [the experimental] Case Study houses. Arnold also knew the architectural photographer Julius Shulman, so we used to go to dinner at Julius's house … Julius was photographing buildings with Richard Neutra, too, and Arnold and I used to go out on these photo shoots with him, where he'd let us observe. I remember Neutra posing for the camera.

BI: What about other influences, like the Los Angeles architect Harwell Hamilton Harris?

FG: I like his house on Chrysanthemum Lane, above Beverly Glen, which has a roof with big eaves that stick out with trellises on the ends. Gehry picks up his pen and reaches for his drawing paper. He draws the Harris house from memory.

FG: Remember what it was like at USC then, when that sort of love affair with Japanese classicism was engendered for me because so many teachers were GIs returning from Japan. Teachers like Calvin Straub showed us all the classical Japanese houses which fit right in in Southern California, because it was all about wood and light. There were also many architects who were senior to me who came out of USC and were doing work that was evocative of Japan and evocative of Harwell. Harwell was kind of a king of our mountain at the time.

Early Work

BI: You told me once that the first house you designed here, the Steeves House, looks to you like early Frank Lloyd Wright in Japan.

FG: It did. It was easy to adapt wood architecture to Southern California.

BI: Wright was clearly influential for you.

FG: I studied every section drawing, model and building of Frank Lloyd Wright. Everything.

BI: When did you do that?

FG: In my youth. Right from day one. When I was at USC, I had [Henry Russell Hitchcock's 1942 book,] In the Nature of Materials. I memorized every house and every floor plan in it. I loved Frank Lloyd Wright, and he fit into the Harwell Harris/California thing that I could access. I went to see what he did in Oak Park [Illinois]. I went to see Robie House. I went to see Unity Temple. I studied Taliesin East and Taliesin West [the Wright centers in Spring Green, Wisc., and Scottsdale, Ariz., respectively]. I studied his planning ideas at [Wright's utopian] Broadacre City and his ideas about the high-rise and his Mile High Building [in Illinois]. I read everything I could about Wright's life, and I visited the buildings in Marin County that were built after his death. I knew Frank Lloyd Wright.

Los Angeles

BI: Do you ever think how your professional life might have been different had you stayed in Toronto?

FG: Los Angeles is quite a different city from Toronto. The Canadian psyche is much more conservative, quieter, laid-back – or at least it was when I lived there. L.A. when I got here was brash, raucous, frontier. Carny business. The movies. The development was vast and rampant. Whole neighborhoods seemed to spring up instantly. It represented a kind of open­ness and freedom because it was risk-taking somehow. There was an edge to it. Some of it was greedy and awful, and some of it was positive and moving. But it represented a kind of energy and resourcefulness, a willingness to try things. I think if I'd stayed in Canada as an architect, I wouldn't have grown up with the sense of freedom that I got here. There's a lot more freedom because Los Angeles doesn't have the burden of history.

Walt Disney Concert Hall

BI: You never expected that you'd win the Disney Hall competition, did you?

FG: My European colleagues thought I had the inside track, but it was quite the opposite. I was the long shot. In fact, at the beginning, I was invited by Ron Gother, the Disney family lawyer, to come to his office and meet with him. He told me that I should get out of the competition because it was a waste of time. They knew my work, and there was no way the family would have Walt Disney's name on a building I designed. He actually said that.

BI: Yet you persevered. You didn't pull out.

FG: That's me. That's my work, that's what I do, and it's always going to be like that. I suppose that's what toughened me up for the future. I have to be grateful to them. But I actually tried to get out. Can you imagine if I had done that?

I stayed in and worked on the competition, and it was very difficult. I submitted the work, we had interviews and each team made a pre­sentation. Meanwhile, our models were all brought to an office building nearby where everyone reviewed them. Without our names.

Gehry asks his wife, Berta, to join our conversation, and she reminds him of the morning the announcement was to be made. Of "the butterflies in our stomachs the entire morning." How they held hands and their hands were ice-cold. How they kept pacing up and down. Both Gehrys appear to be choking up with the emotion of that memory, and when Gehry speaks again, he worries aloud that he might actually cry talking about it. Which he does.

FG: We stood there, in this very formal room, holding hands. Then the door was opened. I could hear a press conference starting, and a review of the competition process went on and on and on. Finally, they said they'd chosen their winner, and sure enough I heard my name called. Berta and I walked out to thundering applause. It was thrilling.

Did you see my picture in the Los Angeles Times and the grin on my face? You can see I was just ecstatic. It was a great breakthrough in my career, to get a project like this. And then the saga went on for 15 years before it was built and open.

BI: Fifteen years is a long time.

FG: It happens all the time - you compete, you get the assignment and then you wait. They have to fund-raise and, sometimes, like Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art expansion, it doesn't happen. With Disney Hall, it took so bloody long to realize, with so many stops and starts, that people said it wasn't going to get built. It was only after Bilbao that the powers that be in L.A. realized that I did know what I was doing, and that it wasn't a folly. I guess they were also embarrassed that it didn't happen here first, though I don't really know.

So, in 1998, they resurrected Disney Hall, and I went through a whole lot of angst and agony with people on the board who wanted to control how it was done. It was the same story all over again. At one point, even though it was going to get built, they were not going to build it with me; they were going to take my design and have somebody else do it.

BI: Were they seriously considering that?

FG: Yes, they were, and I had a face-off on it. I wrote a letter and said they could use my design, but that I was going to step aside. Then word of that apparently reached Diane Disney, Walt and Lilly's daughter. She didn't really know me at that point, but she told them that the remaining $25 or $30 million of her mother's money would only be released to them when I told her it was okay. That's what made it possible. It was a tortured story, and it's kind of a miracle that it got built. I would credit Diane because in the end it was her move that made it happen.

That happens a lot with me. They look at what I'm proposing, what I'm working on and doing, and it seems strange to everybody, so they think it's unbuildable and impractical. People still think I don't follow programs, I don't follow budgets. That comes up in the press all the time. They are presumptions people make because of the work. But having to wait so long isn't just something that happened at Disney Hall. That's life in architecture.

Musical Influences

BI: Michael Maltzan, your project designer for the Disney competition, said you "stew and stew and talk to people." What happens when you "stew"?

FG: I immerse myself in the project and its issues. So in the case of Disney Hall, I listen to music. I go to concerts. I talk to musicians. I talk to listeners of music. I talk to anybody who'll talk to me about what a concert hall should be.

BI: You're also very interested in music yourself. What is it about music that attracts you?

FG: Well, first of all, I'm a dilettante when it comes to classical music, but I certainly appreciate it. Although I'm not knowledgeable about the history of things, I love to go to concerts and listen.

BI: Describe how you listen.

FG: When I concentrate on music, I listen to its structure. I try to understand the repetitions and evolution, because it evolves spatially for me. Some music tells a story: In Tchaikovsky, the clouds are coming and the rain is coming down. But then the more abstract Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and contemporary music, like John Adams, don't tell a story. So you listen for the structure and you try to understand it. Sometimes you hear some familiar phrases or ideas, and sometimes you can pick up where they come from. Quite often I'll go to a concert, get very tired and sort of float off into some kind of reverie. I'm just sort of semiconscious, and I'll find myself fantasizing spaces and shapes and things.

BI: The music will stimulate images for you?

FG: Yes. It's very much like architecture. You know architecture has been called frozen music and somebody asked me if that means that music is liquid architecture.

BI: You've said that if you could be an instrument you'd be a cello?

FG: I love the persona of the cello, the sound of it and the image of it. I've always had a fantasy about playing the cello. I almost signed up for lessons once, maybe 20 years ago, but I realized it would be ludicrous at that point in my life. I always fantasized if I could transform myself into a musical instrument I would want to be a cello. I saw too many Walt Disney movies.

The Work

BI: Do you have a favorite time when you're working on a building?

FG: Yes. It's when I have the plans and the scale right for both the neighborhood and the project in block form, before I make these curved shapes, before I do anything. When I get to that point, I feel comfortable that this is where we're going to go, and the next move is just to finish the detailing, materials and character of the shapes. It's what I call being in the candy store, because that's the fun part. It's also the most scary part because it's the unknown. I start sketching and trying things until, all of a sudden, something emerges that becomes interesting and I sort of follow it. But it's intuitive. It's not preconceived. I don't have an exact plan of action, and I always feel like I'm leaping off a cliff.

BI: Do you think perfection is possible?

FG: At the University of Southern California, they had cut in stone above the door a quote from Michelangelo which said, "A work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection." I like that because it got me off the hook.

Other Influences

BI: Does sculpture have a particular attraction for you?

FG: Yes, but painting more. Sculpture is more definite. Painting is more ephemeral, so you can read more into it. You're freer to interpret from paintings than you are from a 3-D object. You can fantasize more. It's not that the images you're looking at are translatable into a building; it's the fact that the images are there and they're so beautiful. They're so filled with ideas. What I get out of it probably has nothing to do with the painting, except for the energy of it. Knowing that some human being got revved up and did it, revs me up to do something.

BI: Does nature do that for you, too? Looking at the ocean, looking at a mountain ...

FG: All of that. Animals do, too. The shells of turtles. The fish lamps and snakes and all of that come from nature. My old house and my new house are both very much involved with nature.

Juggling Assignments

BI: You say yes to a great many projects. Isn't your attention split in a million directions?

FG: Working on one single project is something I've always found difficult. I need a little pressure and to work on lots of things at once. I get energy from working. You need a mix to bounce off. It's like billiards. I need three or four projects at least, so that I don't overthink one of them.

I also like the energy things give to each other. If you're doing one thing and something happens to it - if the building department or the client decides to stop things - you're desperate. Over the years, I've always tried to be doing a bunch of things so I feel more secure. They're not all going to go away at once.

BI: Have you ever had everything go away at once?

FG: Yes, in 1978. I had done a lot of work for the Rouse Company, and most of the people in my office were working on Rouse projects. Matt DeVito, the president of Rouse, came out for the opening of Santa Monica Place [shopping mall]. Since we were friends, I invited him home for dinner. He looked at my house, with its chain link and other nontraditional building materials, in its first iteration, much rougher than it is now, and he thought it was pretty strange. During dinner, he said: "You must like this. You did it for yourself." I said, "I do." Pointing in the direction of Santa Monica Place, he asked, "If you like this, how could you like that?" So I said, "Well, I don't." When he asked, "Then why did you do it?" I told him, "I have to make a living." He said he didn't think I should do work I didn't want to do. I agreed, we shook hands and we agreed that we would quit working together.

That was on a Friday night, and on Monday, I had to go to the office and let nearly everybody go. I had about 50 people working there. I kept three. I asked Berta to come in, because we didn't have a receptionist or anything. It was an emergency, so she dug in and did it. She became our chief financial officer out of that.

So I've seen the devil. That wasn't the first time something like that has happened either. It happened earlier, and it's happened since.

Legacy

BI: I went to hear Thom Mayne speak just after he won the Pritzker Prize, and he said a couple of things that you've said as well. One was that architects tend not to get recognized nor get really good work until they're older, often in their fifties or sixties.

FG: It takes a long time for people to trust you and for you to develop a unique language. You also have to develop a way of building that unique language so it doesn't leak, so it can be done on budget and all of that. It takes a while. So by the time you get there, you're in your late fifties or sixties. And that's the tradition. Louis Kahn didn't get anything until he was in his late fifties. Frank Lloyd Wright was the same. Cor­busier. Mies van der Rohe. It's just a profession that peaks later. Then it's over so fast.

From the book Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg. Copyright 2009 by Barbara Isenberg. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Pub­lishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. 

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Barbara Isenberg, a contributor to the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine, is also the author of State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work and Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical. She is associate director of the USC-based Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities.