1991 Frank Gehry on being at the right place at the right time

2019-11-22T16:09:00-05:00

I built a house around a house [using chain-link fence, corrugated metal, asphalt, and other common building materials]. It was the first completely free piece I did. I did it exactly the way I wanted. My client was me and my wife, and my wife egged me on. … I talked about the asphalt floor, and I was going to chicken out, and she said, “Come on, I want to see that.”

A recently published Los Angeles Review of Books interview conducted by Steven Jay Fogel and Mark Bruce Rosin with Frank Gehry in 1991 highlights a few fascinating tidbits of the architect's early life and his career pre-Bilbao.

In the wide-ranging interview, Gehry discusses, among other topics, his thoughts on success, his non-linear path to architecture, and his thinking on architecture as his career was just about to take off.

Gehry on early heroes

My grandmother had a big effect on me. She had run a foundry in Poland when she was a young girl, and she was very hands-on. She would take me to the woodshops where she’d pick up scraps for the wood stove she cooked on. She would bring home all the scraps, and we would play on the floor. She would make cities with me.

Interior photo from 2007 of the Santa Monica Place mall designed by Gehry in 1980. Image courtesy of Wikimedia user Bobak Ha'Eri.

Gehry on big professional turning points

It was when I was doing Santa Monica Place that ...

What Is Becoming of Deleuze?

2015-12-14T00:05:00-05:00

If you are trapped in the dream of the other, you are fucked.

ON 4 NOVEMBER 1995, Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping from his Parisian apartment window. He left behind a philosophical legacy that went on to influence numerous academic disciplines: continental philosophy, cinema studies, literary theory, cultural criticism, social and political theory, LGBTQ studies, art and architecture theory, as well as the growing field of animal studies and environmental theory. In part this is because Deleuze himself enjoyed such a broad and eclectic range of influences. He innovatively combined the thinking of Bergson, Foucault, Kant, Hume, Lacan, Leibniz, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spinoza with insights on artists such as Bacon and Artaud, novelists like Kafka and Carroll, along with filmmakers such as Herzog, Hitchcock, and Eisenstein. And this is just a brief nod to some of his deepest influences. There are many more. All the intellectual excitement and flurry over Deleuze may confirm the prediction made by his good friend and fellow philosopher, M...

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1991 Frank Gehry on being at the right place at the right time

What Is Becoming of Deleuze?