Review: Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollack

Abstract

Sydney Pollack, director. Sketches of Frank Gehry . Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Culver City, 2005, 83 mins., DVD, $19.99, http://www.sonypictures.com/ Frank Gehry (nee Goldberg): a man, a genius, an architect responsible for an entire classification of architectural effect (The Bilbao Effect). This is the Frank Gehry that Sydney Pollack’s 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry portrays. Providing a familiar outline of what constitutes artistic genius, from discussions of Gehry’s first job (as a truck driver), to his frustrations in school (including an F in his first class on perspective) to his obstacles in his personal life (notably, a controlling first wife) to his early architectural projects and his later, more extravagant ones, Sketches gives a glimpse of Gehry who, despite his setbacks, defies all odds and carves a singular space for himself and his architecture. His genius, cultivated through personal struggle and revealed through his architecture, lay precisely in his ability to prosper from an exceptional position in which he found himself both in life and in architecture—not quite modern, not quite postmodern, not quite artist, not quite architect. Who, we are led to think, but someone with true genius could look at a model of his work, smile, and say, “That is so stupid looking it’s great.” Sketches of Frank Gehry focuses on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as the moment when Gehry burst onto the global scene. A montage of publications …