Frank O. Gehry on the bill
Frank O. Gehry is one of those rare architects hailed by the critics and the public alike. Born in 1930 in the Canadian city of Toronto, he moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17 and came to prominence in Europe at the end of the 1980s with the famous Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein in Germany. A few years later, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao sealed his international reputation. Gehry has earned a prestige rarely enjoyed by architects.
He has recently been the subject of a film « Sketches of Frank Gehry » directed by Sydney Pollack. His project, explains the director of Out of Africa, is the fruit of his friendship with Frank Gehry, creator of extravagant curves who, after having turned down several proposals for films about him, chose Pollack to carry out this task. The documentary sets out to show a meticulous architectural work, a subtle mixture of visions and of revisions, perceptible in the gestural sketches that are a promise of future forms. And, taking as a point of departure these abstract sketches, explores the process that transforms them into three-dimensional models, to then become buildings with atypical materials and extremely innovative forms.
Sidney Pollack takes particular care to catch on film the greatness of the architecture of Gehry, from his first construction - a hay barn in California - to buildings that today feature among the most impressive constructions of the modern era, from the Guggenheim Museum to the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
This retrospective film, which succeeds in changing our perception of architecture, does not mark the end of Gehry's career. Most recent projects include the future « Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation » designed as a glasshouse in the form of a cloud to stand in the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris and an ambitious project - the talk is of 1.8 billion dollars - devoted to the regeneration of a part of the centre of Los Angeles . For over forty years now, Gehry has exploited all his innovative capacity to create the powerful forms that characterise his work. He doesn't seem to be ready to stop.
