"The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture"
| This week on the NYR Online, Martin Filler eulogizes Frank Gehry, who died on December 5, age ninety-six: The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined with a callow Postmodernism. Instead of trying to untangle those two discordant stylistic visions, which wastefully dominated American architectural discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, he showed an exhilarating way forward with freeform designs that drew on advanced contemporary art as their primary source of inspiration. He made the world safe for oddball buildings, and whatever one might think of the idiosyncratic architecture by the generation who followed him—Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Thom Mayne, and their ilk—their careers would be unthinkable without the precedent he set.
Filler traces the development of Gehry’s style, from the “punk rock” architecture of the Seventies—“exaggerated, off-kilter forms executed in cheap materials such as corrugated metal”—to his Eighties collaboration with Claes Oldenburg to his inauguration “as the last great architectural titan of the waning millennium” with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the Nineties. Along the way Filler details the nearly fifty-year professional relationship the two shared, wavering between critical distance and friendship. Since 1985 Filler has written more than a hundred articles for the Review, most often on architecture but supplemented by essays about subjects like Meryl Streep, Oppenheimer, Bruce Nauman, and the soprano Birgit Nilsson. Below, alongside his Gehry remembrance, we have collected five pieces of Filler’s architectural writing from the archives. At a moment when American architecture was caught between an exhausted Modernism and a callow Postmodernism, Frank Gehry showed the way forward. The World Trade Center rebuilding encapsulates everything that is wrong with urban development. —March 9, 2017 The architect has freed herself from the entrapments of the infernal fame machine. —September 29, 2016 “Le Corbusier’s reputation did not derive solely from his vast corpus of designs, which still astonishes in its inventiveness and boundless implications. His renown was enormously enhanced by the more than fifty books and pamphlets through which he promulgated his radical vision of a new building art for the modern age—everything from city planning to interior design.” —April 30, 2009 “Frank Lloyd Wright insisted that his buildings be organic—that is, unified in conception from the largest construction to the smallest detail. He rejected the celebration of discontinuity that has been a main characteristic of twentieth-century art from Cubism and Dada onward.” —January 13, 1994 “That is the paradox of Miesianism: though Mies believed he had established universal models making it possible for all architects to design clear, functional, economical structures after his example, his architecture was in fact so dependent on highly personal factors—his innate sense of proportion, his fanatical attention to detail, and his keen instinct for dramatic contrast in settings ranging from the bucolically rural to the densely urban—that his principles remain woefully incomplete in the hands of his less gifted followers.” —June 12, 1986 Special Offer
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