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Frank Gehry's Three Favorite Things: "Food, Sex and Yale."

anonnyc10003
nb072

what about designing curvy stuff?

Apr 14, 08 11:14 pm  · 
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anonnyc10003

For himself?

Apr 14, 08 11:39 pm  · 
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nb072

no i mean why isn't that one of his favorite things. he does it all the time, right?

Apr 15, 08 12:30 am  · 
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morgan2sims

the question is.. why yale?

Apr 15, 08 1:43 am  · 
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holz.box

it relates back to sex... yale blows

Apr 15, 08 1:45 am  · 
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rondo mogilskie

Why Yale? Because they make the best padlocks for the S&M stuff he's presumably into

Apr 15, 08 7:33 am  · 
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n_

Gehry and I have similar interests.

Apr 15, 08 7:45 am  · 
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anonnyc10003

It seems almost everyone does these days. Yale had the Ivy record-low admissions rate last year and New Haven is gentrifying even more quickly than Williamsburg.

Apr 15, 08 11:43 am  · 
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liberty bell

holz wins the prize on this thread! LOL

Personally, I've noticed lately that I'm more likely to reach for my new Discover magazine than for my new Architectural Record. So I guess architecture ranks below science for me. Sex ranks above both, of course.


Apr 15, 08 11:48 am  · 
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farwest1

Gehry has taught at Yale for a number of years. A few years ago, visiting starchitects made $70,000 and were obligated to come to campus a total of four times. That's $17,500 per visit.

That's why he loves Yale.

Apr 15, 08 12:04 pm  · 
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liberty bell

<totally unrelated and bitter tangent>

...and *that*, farwest, is why I never want to work for a University ever again. How much did Yale pay their non-tenured non-star professors during that period, I wonder? There is a professor here in Indy who drives a van with 3" high letters on the sides that spell out "I love to teach, but I also love being able to pay my mortgage".

<end rant, return to discussing FOG>

Apr 15, 08 12:07 pm  · 
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You got a footnote for that, farwest? As I understood it, it was much leass $$ and more visits ...

Apr 15, 08 1:29 pm  · 
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simples

lb...let's hope the 70k comes from their marketing budget, not staffing costs...

and to take the thread back to gehry:

i am sure if he was addressing El Correo in Bilbao, the quote would read:

"Food, Sex, and Bilbao"

Apr 15, 08 1:31 pm  · 
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anonnyc10003

Yale has a $23B+ endowment. $70K to them is the equivalent of a pack of chewing gum. Yale pays its staff very well, giving them an automatic 13% of salary towards their 401k, free college tuition, 100% health, and $30K towards a home purchase regardless of their position. Yale administrative assistants make about twice as much as the average architect in New York City.

Apr 15, 08 2:11 pm  · 
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liberty bell

That's staff, anonn, I want to know what Yale pays the fresh young academics who are facing huge student loan debt and fighting one another tooth and nail for a few non-tenured teaching positions.

Maybe Yale doesn't have any of those (what do I know!), but most universities do, and the way they take advantage of young teachers is flat-out criminal.

Apr 15, 08 2:14 pm  · 
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farwest1

Full disclosure: that number was just the word on the streets of New Haven a few years ago. I don't know whether it came from RAM Stern himself, or some other back-alley source.

Apr 15, 08 2:15 pm  · 
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farwest1

But I do know that strachitects like Hadid and Gehry only visited campus 4 or 5 times. That's for sure.

Apr 15, 08 2:16 pm  · 
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liberty bell

Sorry, I'm not trying to derail this thread into slamming on either Yale OR Frank - it's a personal peeve of mine that universities have zillions of dollars for all kinds of things yet have diluted and diluted and yet further diluted their commitment to tenured positions in the past decades. That's all.

Back to Frank's passions: does he like football, or is that Eisenman?

Apr 15, 08 2:21 pm  · 
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anonnyc10003

Liberty bell, the quality of a job isn't based on how much it pays you. If academics are willing to work for $40-50K per year, as they obviously are, I don't see why universities should feel obliged pay them more than that, provided that the average income in the U.S. is less than $30K. It is somewhat a matter of supply and demand -- and it is probably harder to find a good administrative assistant than it is to find a recent Ph.D. with interesting research (which again, the pay does not reflect on how happy someone would be taking that position or the overall symbolic value of it).

The universities can use the extra money they save for financial aid, recruiting disadvantaged students, AIDS research, paying top tenured faculty more (in order to attract the world's best talent), etc.

Apr 15, 08 2:28 pm  · 
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simples

eisenman used to come lecture at uofm every other year, always in the same weekend of the UMvs.OSU football game...

Frank likes food, sex, and hockey...

Apr 15, 08 2:30 pm  · 
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FOG Lite

that's Eisenman. FOG is hockey.

So I'm unclear, why would he rank Yale up there with food & sex? I thought he was a Harvard man.

Apr 15, 08 2:34 pm  · 
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anonnyc10003

He apparently also said in the lecture that Yale was by far the best architecture school and the only one in the world open to so many new ideas at once.

Apr 15, 08 2:40 pm  · 
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citrus.grey

Right anon, because if there's one guy who knows a thing or two about being open to new ideas it's Gehry...oh wait...

Apr 15, 08 2:44 pm  · 
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conormac

TMI, Mr. Ghery.

Apr 15, 08 2:54 pm  · 
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liberty bell

Okay, really, I'm sorry to keep going back to this peeve of mine, but: anonn, I'm not talking about $40-50K a year. I would expect tenure track positions are about that. But have you looked for a teaching job lately? Try $6,000 per class per semester, no benefits, no sick time, and you get to reapply for the same position every semester. In my experience, this is the bulk of who is teaching at university levels these days. Which means tuition is paying for all the research, fellowships, etc., but the students paying the tuition are being taught by people who can barely make rent and have other/day jobs in order to survive. I see this as a complete failure of academia.

Like I said, Yale may not be like this, but many, many universities are.



So what kind of food does Frank like? Not sushi, I'm guessing, with his weird view of fish..

Apr 15, 08 3:06 pm  · 
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toasteroven

I wonder if it's different for public universities.

Apr 15, 08 3:26 pm  · 
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farwest1

I agree with most of what you said, lb. But I also think it's important to have practitioners teaching in architecture schools, not just academics who have never drawn a working detail in their lives. So I think having a "day job" as an architect is important for many architecture teachers.

Apr 15, 08 4:33 pm  · 
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liberty bell

I'll totally agree to that, farwest. My worry is for young graduates who think they are going to "go into teaching" and that will sustain them. it does happen, indeed, but it's harder than most young grads think.

Apr 15, 08 7:40 pm  · 
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nb072

My friend who's at Yale said she's seen Frank G on campus about 10 times already this semester.

Apr 15, 08 8:44 pm  · 
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kyleseyz

it's only a look-a-like, to confuse potential assassins

Apr 15, 08 10:51 pm  · 
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aspect

i think this is what he meant.

Apr 15, 08 11:28 pm  · 
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mespellrong

LB, where do your friends teach? the going rate around Chicago is $50 per contact hour, and no prep time for an inexperienced teacher. If you don't have a graduate degree officially in hand, there are a few places that will give you a course or two for $20 an hour.

and on the other side, knowing that more than once I've had a class with a professor being paid over $1,000 a contact hour, I'd happily do it again.

Apr 16, 08 1:21 am  · 
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