Frank Gehry's Building Reputation

ARCHITECTURE

Pym's novels are awash in tea.

-JAMES WOLCOTT

Considering the guest list (from Jerry Brown to John Travolta) and the city (L.A.), it was remarkable that so many left the chic benefit at Rebecca's with the impression that the "star" who outshone all others was Frank O. Gehry, the architect responsible for the restaurant's aesthetic bill of fare. Though he looked more like a political-science professor than a luminary from the Southern California firmament, Gehry's

frumpy facade was merely a measure of his indifference to the ever changing currents of fashion—both sartorial and architectural. For evidence of the latter, one need look no further than Rebecca's ceiling, from which hang a pair of H. G. Wells-size tin crocodiles.

There is no appropriate room in the traditional house of architecture for crocodiles. Nor has there been, until now, an appropriate room for Frank Gehry. But Gehry's time, as they say, has come. This month, the Walker Art Center opens a major retrospective of his work, and, more important for an architect committed to building, Gehry's beachside office in Venice, California, is currently flooded with enviable commissions. His architecture has always made the Establishment squirm; it is too unsettling, too difficult to categorize. Is Gehry a modernist or is Gehry a postmodernist? Inquiring colleagues want to know. He conducts his search for a "relevant" architecture without assistance from convention; the forms and materials (plywood, corrugated metal, asphalt, and chain-link fencing) and construction techniques that he turns up along the way have stretched the elasticity of architecture's boundaries. During the late seventies, Gehry's emphatic forays into the outer limits terrified potential clients but made him a bona fide member of the avant-garde and a cult hero to a generation of young designers. Yet for years Gehry was harnessed to the enfant terrible yoke that ensures an almost inexhaustible supply of lean commissions.

"If you hang on long enough, it will turn out," concluded Gehry not long ago, when it had become apparent that for him it finally had. Justcompleted additions to the firm's portfolio include a library in Hollywood, a computer science-engineering building at U.C. Irvine, and, of course, Rebecca's. And then there's the new headquarters for the ad agency Chiat/Day, which Gehry has to thank for allowing him to fulfill his long-frustrated dream of collaborating with Claes Oldenburg. At an on-site party last May, the savvy image-makers handed out T-shirts emblazoned on one side with an elevation of the building-to-be, and on the other with Oldenburg's contribution, a giant pair of binoculars, and the message "I've seen the future and it's gonna be fun." They didn't consult Gehry, but he didn't seem to mind. Or disagree.

—CHARLES K. GANDEEWalker Art Center. Minneapolis. (9/21-11/16)