Gehry Tries to Rebuild Image After Disney Hall

The room might be likened to an isolation nursery where a beloved infant remains in a coma for years because of a complicated illness. The father is visiting, and he is having a difficult time containing his grief.

In this case, however, the metaphorical baby is Disney Concert Hall. The nursery is the Santa Monica storeroom where its models are kept. And the anguished parent is architect Frank O. Gehry, who designed what was supposed to be the triumph of an already celebrated career only to watch it become his biggest heartache.

“It’s hard. It’s so emotional,” said Gehry, ushering a visitor down an open-air catwalk from his office to the locked room with models of the unbuilt and trouble-plagued hall. Inside, its swooping forms are reproduced again and again in a kind of silent taunt.

Gehry still hopes that the coma will lift. A new fund-raising drive and management reorganization are underway to get the hall built in five years, and Gehry expects to be very involved in the construction. More immediate, though, he looks forward to October, when the models will be moved out for an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, just down the street from the underground garage that is the only piece of the Disney complex constructed.

“All of this stuff--I’m hoping to take it all, get it out of here,” Gehry said, pointing past the 12-foot-high mock-up of the hall’s golden wood interior with miniature musicians and concert-goers in their seats. “We can’t live with it anymore. It’s too painful.”

By many measures, Frank Gehry is at the top of his form. At age 67, he clearly is the dean of California architecture, one of the most famous and influential--if polarizing--architects in the world. The competition to design a new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in Los Angeles gained more visibility this week just by including Gehry’s name among the three finalists, although another architect reportedly is the front-runner.

Gehry won the $100,000 Pritzker Prize, the Nobel of architecture, in 1989 for his daring use of sculptural forms and unusual materials that judges called “sometimes controversial, but always arresting.” His practice has doubled in size over the past decade to about 70 employees and about $10 million in annual work. His family is doing well, and he is healthy enough to play a lot of his beloved ice hockey. (The license plate on his black Lexus LS400 says FOGHCKY.)

He has major international commissions that most designers can only fantasize about: a new Guggenheim Museum under construction in Bilbao, Spain, through which he is scheduled to guide the Spanish king next week; an art museum in Seoul; a soon-to-open Prague office project in the Czech Republic, and a music museum planned in Seattle. Two more office complexes in Germany are in the works, including one in Berlin with a glass roof line shaped like a fish, a potent Gehry signature dating from boyhood frolics in the bathtub with live carp destined to become gefilte fish.

Yet hovering over all his success, he complains, is that ailing offspring: Disney Concert Hall. He says that as a result he feels like a pariah in Greater Los Angeles, where he moved from Toronto as a teenager in 1947. Gehry says he rarely goes out in public anymore, fearing that people will pester him about the building that is supposed to crown Bunker Hill and offer crystalline acoustics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He mentioned a recent lunch at a Santa Monica restaurant not far from his Cloverfield Boulevard office.

“Three separate people came over to me and asked what’s the matter with Disney Hall,” Gehry recalled. “One blamed me. The other said, ‘We’re sorry for you.’ I don’t like that either. I don’t like them feeling sorry for me. I don’t like them blaming me. And another said, ‘What are you going to do about it? You’ve got to clear your name.’ And I hate that too. That drives me nuts. Apart from that, I love L.A.”

Yet, clearing his name is what Gehry seems intent on doing these days.

For several years, he was reluctant to talk to the media about Disney Hall’s woes. But the cathedral competition apparently revived questions about that other potential landmark downtown. So Gehry decided to speak out.

A complex chain of management, political, planning, bidding and engineering problems postponed Disney Hall construction at least six years and more than doubled costs. Of the current $264.9-million estimate, about $150 million still needs to be raised. Project officials insist that Gehry’s design is not the cause and they are sticking with it. Still, many Angelenos blame the much debated exterior--likened to an exploding flower or a futuristic sailing ship carved of Italian limestone and titanium. A hall with a simpler design, they complain, would have been built already.

“The public looks at the design and hears about all the troubles and decides it must be that crazy architect’s screw-up. And it is presumed immediately that we are the culprit. And it’s not true,” Gehry said in his double-height studio, with a work-space loft, skylight windows and the corrugated cardboard chairs he used to market. “It’s dead wrong and it’s not fair.”

In this lobbying, Gehry displays insecurities more common to a newcomer than to a silver-haired architectural giant who commands an army of younger people working quietly on computer drawings and basswood models.

Just as his designs can provoke discussion, reaction to Gehry’s self-defense is mixed in the Los Angeles architecture and art worlds.

Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, called Gehry “one of the most original and most influential architects of the second half of the 20th century” and said no one should be surprised by Gehry’s feelings--or doubt his sincerity. “He put an enormous amount of personal and creative energy into Disney Hall. What this means is that this project is extremely important to him. His concern and disappointment are understandable, but at the same time there is an optimism that the city does have the strength and pride to do this.”

However, a prominent Los Angeles architect, who asked not to be identified, said Gehry always has been thin-skinned and is needlessly obsessed with Disney Hall. “I think Frank has enough big work not to have to worry about this,” he said. “What’s the point?”

One point, Gehry contends, is that the Disney Hall delays have cost him more than peace of mind. His firm was paid about $6 million for the Disney job. But because of the stigma, he says, he lost two or three lucrative Southern California commissions that he won’t identify. (Some construction industry executives suggest, however, that people who don’t like Gehry’s style might use Disney Hall as an excuse to reject him.)

At first, Gehry feared that the concert hall delays might harm him in the cathedral competition. Archdiocese decision-makers investigated the auditorium and other Gehry projects and found his work commendable, they said. Otherwise they would have eliminated him months ago. However, Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain is the front-runner for the cathedral project, sources said, because his blending of modern and historical styles appeals to church leaders more than the work of Gehry and the other finalist, Thom Mayne, a fellow Santa Monican.

Harry Hufford, who is now chief executive officer of the Disney Concert Hall committee, agrees that Gehry should not bear the blame for the hall project.

“His role was to be the creative genius, and he has provided that service. It was the role of others to manage the budget, the timetable and the detailed drawings. . . . I think he has been unfairly criticized and the design has certainly been unfairly criticized. It is a spectacular design, but it is a buildable design, and there is clear evidence of that in Bilbao.”

The $100-million Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has structural elements very similar to Disney Hall, reportedly is being built on time and on budget.

Another motive for speaking out now, Gehry concedes, is to help Hufford with fund raising. The family of Walt Disney has given $103 million, and Gehry feels a particular allegiance to Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller. “She ought to be knighted or sainted or whatever for them to still hang in,” he said.

Gehry was dressed casually, in an open-collar blue and white shirt, khaki pants and black loafers. His blue eyes peered from beneath spectacles. On his worktable was a bust of architect-President Thomas Jefferson and a statue of Mickey Mouse, a token of appreciation from the Walt Disney Co.--for which Gehry designed the shiny aluminum waves of the Disney Ice Center, a community rink in Anaheim where the Mighty Ducks practice.

The walls are decorated eclectically. Photos of his own amateur hockey team share space with copies of Renaissance religious paintings that Gehry says inspired him artistically long before his cathedral bid. The grouping of Mary, the baby Jesus and St. John the Baptist in one artwork influenced his arrangement of three office buildings in Dusseldorf, Germany--one covered in white plaster, another in stainless steel, the third in brick.

(Gehry, from a Jewish family, says his Panamanian-born Catholic wife, Berta, who helps manage his office, advises him sometimes on church matters.)

His work takes him to Europe or South Korea for about a week each month these days. Because of the Disney debacle, Gehry even thought about leaving town permanently for a professorship chair in his name offered recently by the University of Minnesota. In 1990, he designed for that campus a stainless steel-clad art museum that resembles a Cubist painting in motion.

But he has decided to stay in the sunny, playful and fractured California environment that shaped his odd-angled and exuberant style.

The Southern California landscape has Gehry buildings: the California Aerospace Museum, with the jet blasting out of the wall; the village-like campus of Loyola Law School, a splash of color west of downtown; the big-windowed Frances Howard Goldwyn Library in Hollywood; the Chiat/Day headquarters in Venice, fronted by Claes Oldenburg’s binocular sculpture; Gehry’s popular restoration of the Temporary Contemporary art museum downtown.

Nothing, however, to match Disney Hall or a $45-million cathedral for prominence and price tag.

Gehry’s insecurities were heightened by recent events in Paris involving the American Center building he designed with a curvy facade of pale limestone. After 19 months of operation, the center closed in January because of the organization’s financial problems. The architect says he is being smeared with that failure as well.

He eagerly counters with recent successes. The Hines Interests development company is working with Gehry on the Berlin bank building with the fish roof. Hines previously was hired to review and reorganize the Disney Concert Hall process and could have vetoed Gehry later in Berlin. “If we didn’t think he was able to do it, he wouldn’t have been selected” in Berlin, said Colin Shepherd, a Hines senior vice president who is development manager for Disney Hall.

One of the touchiest issues surrounding Disney Hall is the strained relationship between Gehry and Dworsky Associates, the firm that was named executive architect to create detailed construction drawings from Gehry’s design.

Dworsky’s supporters complain that Gehry’s work was too difficult to understand, while Gehry’s friends contend that Dworsky’s work was late and scared off bidders. Dworsky created the temporary finish for the county-financed Disney Hall garage--a top that Gehry disowns. Gehry expects to be hired to redo and finish the hall’s construction drawings, a suggestion that Hufford confirms is likely.

Dworsky, a well-regarded architect who designed the Federal Reserve Bank Building in downtown Los Angeles, said he does not want to point fingers on Disney Hall.

“I know what it is to lose and to win,” he said. “Life isn’t a continuous successful journey on everything you attempt to do. . . . This project is a wonderful project we all attempted to achieve.” But the money “wasn’t there to build what was designed.”

For his part, Gehry says the composition of the planning team wasn’t right on Disney Hall. And now he hopes that the new management team will wake his baby from the coma. So what if he will be 72 years old when the auditorium may be finished? Renowned architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson worked into their late years.

Architecture, Gehry said, “is like practicing the violin. It takes a long time to get it together.”