Movie Notes:

We watched “ Sketches of Frank Gehry,” in my materials and processes class.  It was a documentary that explored the life and the work of renowned architect Frank Gehry. It was directed by his friend that did not have any experience making a documentary (or using a videocamera apparently) , which is why Gehry thought he was the perfect man for the job. The result was a very intimate and sincere look at Gehry’s life, experience, and work. It showed his supporters and critics and didn’t hesitate to show some of the skeletons in the closet. While I was unsure how the movie pertained to the class content, the movie was interesting. It's a fascinating look into an architect who's broken lots of architect rules and decided to create buildings that don't look like anybody else's. Which I guess may be a creative process. The movie showed a great deal of gehry’s creative process. First he doodles on sketch pads. They dont look like building...they look like the work of a kindergartner.



A form emerges from the scribbling. He makes commands and occasionally helps as his assistant works with construction paper, scissors and tape to make a three-dimensional model from it. He tells assistant to move things and  to play with the model. Occasionally he tapes things …. His assistant cuts pieces of tape to hand to him. Eventually, it looks about right. His assistants use computer modeling to design a CAD model and to work out the stresses and supports. Gehry's buildings are so complex that he believes they would have been impossible before computers (which he does not know how to operate). Certainly the math would have been daunting. Computers assure him that his cardboard fancies are structurally sound. His road to this process was a long one as he began doing classic architecture. He hated doing “borring” buildings that clients wanted. The clients only wanted what already was because that’s all they have seen. Finally challenged by a client about why he was doing this if it wasn’t what he wanted gave gehry the realization that he should do just that. And he did. But he had to leave his wife and kids? Durring all of this gehry was dealing with his own identity and what he wanted. He worked with a psychologist who suggested that he needed to stop his fervent pursuit of architecture, or focus on his family. He chose to dedicate himself to his architecture.