Few architects can claim to have changed the course of history in their discipline. Frank Gehry has done so twice. The first time was in 1978, with the house he built for his family in Santa Monica: a wooden structure of the kind that used to sprout up all over America, to which he grafted a mind-boggling array of corrugated iron, metal mesh, glass cubes and plywood panels. This furious gesture marked the end of what was known as the International Style and its frigid minimalism that nipped creative aspirations in the bud.
The second time was in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. His Guggenheim Museum, a glittering explosion of supple, seascape-like forms, left the world speechless. No one had ever seen anything like it. Created with software from the aviation industry, it ushered architecture into a new age, digital and spectacular, drawing millions of tourists to what was a declining port city and popularizing the idea that a building could change the destiny of a town. More famous than the artworks it houses, it made him the world's biggest architectural star.
This incredible double feat wasn't enough for Gehry. He has also changed the face of Los Angeles, the city where he settled with his parents in 1947, at the age of 17, after living virtually all his life in his native Canada. Los Angeles is a city as much as a myth, with its idyllic climate, the Pacific Ocean, Hollywood, motion pictures and noir novels. It's a melting pot of the wildest dreams and the most violent nightmares, where unbridled capitalism meets extreme individualism. In this mirage city, people come to invent their identity. It has an endless suburban sprawl – 88 cities, 12,000 square kilometers ripped open by a network of freeways that when created, was unique in the world. LA is never static, always in the making. It's the absolute anti-city and the city of the future all at once, which British architecture critic Reyner Banham, in his landmark book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), understood could only be defined by movement.
'Creativity is scary'
As it happened, distances became impossible, traffic jams a living hell. The all-automobile concept took a beating, and the city slowly began to rethink itself, with the development of a subway system, high-rise buildings and the recovery of its heritage. It's still light-years away from a carbon-free city, but the feeling of having a history and an identity has been strengthened. Monuments have sprung up here and there, and Gehry is responsible for the one that fully embodies the myth of the city: the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003). Home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it shines from the top of Bunker Hill, a stone's throw from the Downtown business district. A masterpiece of its creator, it brings the Bilbao Guggenheim's unbridled virtuosity to near perfection.
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