Frank Gehry Is Making Waves Up and Down Hudson River

RED HOOK, N.Y. —  Since his Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in Spain, Frank O. Gehry has been the globe’s hottest architect. He’s designing an airport terminal in Italy, a bank in Berlin and the $255-million Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

But even while the 69-year-old Santa Monica architect seems to be walking on water these days, he’s finding it hard to build next to it--at least here in New York.

Two arts-related Gehry projects along the Hudson River, more than 100 miles apart, are facing intense environmental and not-in-my-neighborhood opposition.

Just four days after the American Institute of Architects announced that it will award Gehry its highest honor, the 1999 Gold Medal, a slide showing one of the new projects embodying his celebrated style--of architecture as sculpture--set off derisive laughter at a meeting packed with opponents.

That happened Monday night, as hundreds of residents of this quaint town two hours north of Manhattan gathered at the local firehouse for a hearing on a proposal by Bard College for a $24-million performing arts center intended as a showcase for avant-garde theater, concerts, dance--and Gehry’s curving, silvery-roofed design. The standing-room crowd burst into applause only when a series of speakers vowed to do whatever it takes to stop the arts center, as now planned, in the heart of the area made famous by the Hudson River School artists.

The problem? The block-like “rear-end” of the 105-foot-tall stainless steel, glass and concrete structure may be visible from hiking trails along the Saw Kill, a creek on a historic adjoining property, Montgomery Place, a mansion-and-gardens site cherished by preservationists.

“This proposal on this site should be put out of its misery,” declared landscape architect William D. Rieley.

The anger here, however, may seem muted in comparison with the squawking in Manhattan that began when word leaked out last month in the New York press that the expansion-minded Guggenheim wants to build a new branch on Pier 40 off the Lower West Side, whose Greenwich Village neighbors had been promised a park. Never mind that no one has yet seen Gehry’s preliminary drawings for a possible $400-million Guggenheim over the river.

“The fallout is overwhelmingly negative,” said Alan Jay Gerson, chairman of New York’s Community Board No. 2, the advisory governing body for the area. “This may be the right idea for New York, but it’s the wrong place in the city. . . . If [a project] is not first and foremost a park, it won’t cut it on Pier 40.”

‘If They Want Me to Go Away, I’ll Go Away’

Of course, no architect, no matter how acclaimed, can expect local communities to accept ambitious--and provocative--works without scrutiny. Gehry, who was presented with a National Medal of the Arts at a White House ceremony last month, is no exception.

“I’m not interested in coming down and laying down an architectural manifesto and saying, ‘Take it or leave it,’ ” he said this week.

“I’m never ravenous to build my buildings . . . for my personal ego, all that bull. . . . If they want me to go away, I’ll go away.”

He downplayed the Guggenheim proposal--which museum officials insist is “very preliminary”--as little more than something “we drew on napkins,” then made rough models of, after he and Guggenheim director Thomas Krens got to musing about what they might do next after their triumph at Bilbao.

“Tom Krens would like to build a major thing in New York,” Gehry said. “He has those kind of dreams when he goes to sleep. . . . But it’s nothing to get excited about. Since it was cocktail napkin talk, who cares?”

Well, it’s not crazy to think that he cares.

Gehry may have little old ladies come up and touch him on the streets of Spain, and have the leaders of some countries beg him to build some building, any building, anywhere he wants, but New York has frustrated him for years.

So far, his only New York commission has been a small cafeteria for Conde Nast’s new headquarters building at 4 Times Square, at Broadway and 42nd Street, which is scheduled for completion sometime in 2000.

Other attempts to build here have been disappointing. As far back as 1978, arts patron Christophe de Menil hired Gehry to design the renovation of her Sutton Place townhouse. But after a painful, yearlong battle over the design, he was replaced by a local architect. In 1996, Warner Bros. asked Gehry to come up with a design for 1 Times Square, the landmark tower made famous by the New Year’s Eve ball drop. Warner Bros. had leased the building and wanted Gehry to give it a fresh look--one that would make it a major attraction and be easily identified with the studio’s image.

Gehry designed a giant cuckoo clock, with a chain metal skin that slipped over the entire building like a giant fabric skirt. When the clock chimed, Superman would swoop out on tracks and pull back the mock drapery, revealing a gaggle of Warner characters, including Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. But the projected budget, $80 million-plus, was too high for Warner executives. Gehry says that after an enthusiastic initial meeting, they never called him again.

In the Shifting, Center Moves Into Line of Fire

Though the 1,200-student Bard College had been talking about building a new performing center since 1972, it was only four years ago that Gehry was hired to make it a reality, personally wooed by the small college’s Renaissance-man president, Leon Botstein, who also conducts the American Symphony Orchestra.

Botstein said he wanted “the greatest artist-architect of our age” to create an 800-seat center that would symbolize the school’s emphasis on “cutting-edge work” in music, dance and theater, eschewing safe crowd-pleasers. “You won’t just get ‘Aida,’ ” Botstein said. “And it’s not going to have ‘The Phantom of the Opera.’ ”

Though the 550-acre campus fronts the Hudson, the only sites he and Gehry seriously considered were well away from the river. Gehry leaned toward a spot close to the college’s administration buildings, to help “create a center” to the sprawling campus. But Botstein insisted that, for practical reasons (“we are a poor client”), it had to be next to two other performing arts buildings, so they could share facilities like dressing rooms.

Gehry said he then suggested a site lowered down a ravine so that the facility’s tall fly tower--where scenery is lifted--would not be such a “Godzilla.” But that site was 300 feet from the Saw Kill, the boundary between Bard and the area’s other powerful institution.

That’s Montgomery Place, the home of a columned 1804 revival mansion with “the greatest porch outside the South.” The property, closely associated with 19th century romantic landscape architect A.J. Downing, is on the National Register of Historic Places and supported as a tourist attraction by Historic Hudson River, a group backed by many influential silk-stocking preservationists.

And on Monday night, after Bard officials spent an hour trying to convince the Red Hook planning board to grant the necessary height waivers and other approvals for the Gehry project, the Montgomery Place opponents got their turn.

Led off by landscape architect Rieley, who is based in Charlottesville, Va.--Thomas Jefferson country--the opponents insisted that they had nothing against Gehry or his design.

But he belittled Bard’s computer simulations and studies--tests hoisting balloons to the proposed height--which suggested that the back of the hall would be visible only from three points on hiking trails. The opponents did their own computer studies and hoisted video cameras to the proposed height to make that case that the boxy back of the building would be “an imposing presence” visible far and wide, from across the Hudson even.

The natural setting is “more important than any building,” Rieley said. He said the whole dispute would go away if Bard simply moved the site elsewhere on the campus.

Earlier in the day, though, Botstein said he worried that Gehry’s design will face opposition from Bard’s “nasty neighbors” no matter where it goes.

The college president sees it as a classic battle between “old stuff” and Modernism, over competing notions of “what will define the Hudson Valley in the 21st century.”

“They think the pinnacle of history is 1840,” he said of the opponents. “They want to preserve the images and aesthetic prejudices of an aristocracy that has lost its power in American life . . . landscapes and buildings from now forgotten prominent people of the 19th century. . . . They believe the great age is behind us. They don’t want the past to be redefined. They don’t want new productions of Shakespeare. They want to stop time [and] punish younger generations with a nostalgia that can only lead to bitterness.”

Cherry Bomb in a Can or Vision of the Future?

It was quite a rant, one that might easily have been dismissed as exaggerated oversensitivity to criticism, especially after several speakers from the opposing side that night made a point of praising Gehry and his design.

But there also was that telling moment when Rieley showed a series of slides of 1800s art of the area--then a shot of Gehry’s model. That brought the derisive laughter from dozens of opponents of the project.

After the hearing, he confided that Botstein is right in saying that many people still don’t get modern architecture like Gehry’s.

“A lot of people don’t like it,” Rieley said. “To them, this looks like somebody put a cherry bomb in a tin can.”

The laughter was not lost on one participant in the hearing--Craig Webb, an architect in Gehry’s firm who has helped lead the project.

“Twenty years ago, we got that all the time,” Webb said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier. I was shocked and offended.”

So many people wanted to speak at the hearing, the planning board continued the proceedings to this evening, and said yet another session may be necessary next week. A decision is not expected until January, at the earliest.

That’s also when, down in Manhattan, Gerson’s community board--which covers Greenwich Village, Little Italy and SoHo--will be considering proposals for the Pier 40 over the Hudson, which now serves as parking for 2,300 cars. The board already has passed a resolution urging elected officials to “withhold support” for any plan that doesn’t “reach broad consensus.”

“If the Guggenheim is really interested in the waterfront,” he said, “I’ve invited them to come.”

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Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff contributed to this report from Los Angeles.