THEY LAUGH
I'm in the movies!
This programme contains some strong language
Buildings that defy expectations.
The impossible, realised.
All products of one extraordinary imagination...
..the architect Frank Gehry.
Most of what's built isn't architecture.
We know what the greatness is, we deny it in favour of banality.
His buildings embellish cities across the globe.
And now a Gehry will grace Australia,
taking its place amongst Sydney's celebrated landmarks.
Frank Gehry is perhaps one of the world's most famously
provocative architects. His buildings both intrigue and ignite.
Frankly, there's no comfortable middle ground with Gehry.
For Frank, rules are there to be broken.
You get a sense of what this facade does when you get down here.
I'd say, a building that's been crushed. That's my interpretation.
I'm just thinking, "What he was smoking?!"
It's so out of the ordinary.
Walls doing things that they shouldn't be doing.
It's not going to be able to be done. No.
I just thought, you're bending the ruler too much.
The most common assumption is that he's the greatest architect in the world.
And they're right.
It's vulgar, it's showy, it screams out for attention like a child
throwing a tantrum in a supermarket.
He's got an ego. But how can you not have an ego
to build things like this?
I just think Frank's buildings make you smile.
So, what will Sydney make of him?
And what will Frank make of Sydney?
Almost 20 years ago, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum of art
in Bilbao catapulted him to global fame.
He hasn't looked back since.
Here, at Gehry's LA studio, a surprisingly unassuming
exterior belies a vast hive of architectural creativity within.
Models for presidential memorials,
skyscrapers and Facebook's new HQ,
cover every available surface.
Everything in this place comes from inside Frank's head,
even the furniture.
The actor Brad Pitt has spent time here as an informal apprentice.
Yet another drawn to Frank's flame.
And it's all the more impressive given that Gehry is now
well into his eighties.
I've always had this... forward thing.
I find it hard to give up.
Erm...
I don't like to give up, I don't give up.
You've got this big machine in here, this incubator, which is...
Well, I didn't have it in the start.
I made the models myself, I did all the drawings myself
and for some years - for several years.
But I've held to those values
and I've worked out my language
through the sketches and the models.
This is, this is heartening...
heartening.
I've heard him say so many times, "If I knew where I was going,
"I wouldn't go there."
In every way, your buildings have a kind of energy which says
that they're not necessarily going to do what you expect them to do.
Only because I'm looking for a way to express feeling and movement.
Most buildings have no sense of humanity.
They're cold and lifeless and having...you know,
they're not welcoming to people.
Nothing's ever perfect.
So, that's a good thing, I think.
So, I like buildings to look like they're in progress.
If any of the designs look like something we've ever done before -
they're out!
And if any of the designs look like anything anybody else has
ever done before - they're out.
So, with those kind of ground rules it forces us
to invent new stuff all the time.
Australia, however, has a somewhat chequered history
when it comes to bold new structures.
Sydney is famous for two great 20th-century landmarks,
Sydney Harbour Bridge, first conceived by a convict - Francis Greenway.
A bankrupt English architect transported to Australia for the crime of forgery.
And, of course, the Sydney Opera House.
Designed by an idealistic Dane,
who'd built very little before and who was unceremoniously dumped.
It's a miracle that either of these masterworks were ever realised.
Every city in the world has a bunch of ugly buildings
and very few good ones and Sydney is the same.
With great pain they got the Sydney Opera House.
It's been an icon that's paid off.
But it's this stark concrete tower block that's drawn
Frank Gehry to Sydney.
It's been the University of Technology's most recognisable
building for over 30 years.
But now it seems it's time for something new.
The university seemed to be ready to take a risk.
We want people to think differently about business,
we want people in this country to think more creatively.
They want the same thing everybody wants -
all clients want -
they want a landmark, iconic building,
that will be a symbol for them of the future -
where they're going.
In fact, the UTS team had already seen a building
they liked in America.
An unlikely looking business school designed by a self-proclaimed dreamer.
The kind of building we would like is, well,
something of the kind the architect Frank Gehry would construct.
Frank was just sitting at his desk and got a call.
Frank said, I've been waiting for 30 years for someone to call me
to do a building in Sydney or in Australia.
Frank fired off a four word text.
"I'm up for it."
Well, I didn't believe it could possibly be true.
We knew once we were on the road with Frank Gehry, it would be very
hard to turn back.
Usually, we're going into a place and doing something that nobody's ever done before or seen before.
So, there's some resistance, some scepticism,
some, you know, "You can't do that."
Maybe, he was just doing a couple of doodles one day and thought,
"Yeah, I'll doodle on a doodle on a doodle and there we have it."
These are the sketches that Frank undertook at the pizza
restaurant and I managed to
rip a side part of the tablecloth
and it's putting the building in the context of its surroundings.
He's musing on where things will fit in that space.
Ultimately, however, this emerged -
which is the treehouse design, with the trunk of social spaces
branching into discipline areas and research groups.
And I called it the treehouse.
I was drawing it, we were talking, I said, it's kind of like a treehouse.
Roy picked it up like God had just... Ha-ha!
..which was embarrassing.
It's like naming a child. Yeah. And he got all excited about it.
So, I thought, "OK, if you're happy, I'm happy."
You get a sense of what this facade does when you get down here...
Roy's enthusiasm wasn't universally shared.
When Frank first revealed his working model,
some critics described his design as a crushed paper bag.
Others - a termite's nest.
I think it's dead ugly.
It looks like a pile of old cardboard beer cartons left
out in the rain for the rubbish man to collect.
There's a little bit of disdain within the community.
I guess, jealousy maybe plays into it a little bit.
With impossibly curved brick walls, an explosion of logs
for the central teaching area and the surreal steel staircase,
it was also unknown territory for those charged with actually building it.
When I first saw the design,
I didn't know how we were going to go about building it.
Apart from the floors being level,
there's nothing square, there's nothing plumb.
Everything's curved.
I hadn't actually heard of Frank Gehry before I started here,
so I wasn't too impressed.
They want to know in Sydney what you think of them and then of course they're going to tell you
what they think of you.
HE LAUGHS
A number of years ago, I visited and I gave a talk at UTS.
And they had just built the building where they're housed.
The concrete one with the tower.
It was very much like Toronto 50 years ago.
The Toronto of Frank's youth.
The son of Polish immigrants,
Gehry, born Goldberg, grew up in Canada during the great depression.
The only Jewish child in his elementary school,
he was beaten up for killing Christ.
Salvation came in the form of culture.
His mother introduced him to classical music concerts
at Toronto's Massey Hall.
And she took him to the city's art gallery,
inspiring a lifelong passion for painting, sculpture and music.
He grew up in somewhat tough surroundings.
I think those sort of toughened him up a certain amount.
So, the combination of toughness and grit
and yet a love of cultural things all do come from his childhood.
He also had a very close relationship to his grandmother.
She and Frank would sit there and play with these pieces of wood.
They'd make little cities, they'd make bridges, they'd make streets.
And years later, when he was trying to decide what he wanted to be,
he remembered those moments and he remembered how exciting it was
to be able to create something like that.
And to do it the way you wanted to.
At the same time, his orthodox grandfather Samuel,
ingrained in Frank a questioning approach to life.
I think that comes from my childhood, studying Talmud with my grandfather.
Everything is why. Right?
Question everything. And, why not?
And, why isn't? And, why can't I?
In his late teens, Frank and the family headed west to Los Angeles
in search of a fresh start.
And yet this 21st-century star architect began his new life
working as a truck driver.
I was 17 and we were very poor.
I was a deer in the headlights, I had to get a job and work hard and...
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
Studying architecture, once I got there, I appreciated LA.
What you have to remember about Los Angeles in 1947 is that it
was an incredibly different place than it is today.
The frontier spirit of the city
ignited something in him, as well.
Through the '50s and the early '60s when he was just starting
out in his career, Los Angeles was growing along with him.
We could say that his childhood in Canada was formative -
LA was transformative - it, it, it,
opened whole new vistas.
Literally and psychologically to him.
I was living with a bunch of painters and sculptors
and I was a vacuum cleaner.
You know, not consciously, but unconsciously
I was picking up stuff
and picking up more of methods and
way of thinking of trying things.
We could work under the radar. New York didn't care.
Europe didn't care.
Nobody cared.
I'll sing!
I'm very eclectic and I steal ideas from everybody.
I'm more into the illusionary qualities of a building
and creating a sort of visual richness without it being there.
You almost have to trip over it.
I feel like I have pursued
a loner course out here.
Partly because of my conviction about developing a personal thing...
The work of Donald Judd fascinates me.
It's sort of using cheap materials
and getting a lot of response out of it.
The idea of creating architecture with equally modest materials was
a striking feature of Gehry's most significant early building -
his own home.
I think, certainly his house, his first unbridled expression
of a bunch of ideas, where the notion of
new and old and unfinished and raw
and finished all clashing together was first expressed.
It was definitely a pretty radical thing to look at.
He bought an old pink, of all things, pink Dutch colonial house.
About as ordinary and conventional a suburban house as you could
imagine and then proceeded to sort of partly deconstruct it,
expand it, alter it and radically transform it.
And yet, the original house never disappeared.
You could always see elements of the original house in it.
I think he made a breakthrough with the house.
It's funky because LA, it's kind of tinny and inner mesh
and stuff like that.
Also, the idea of collage - you collage them together.
And that was a very, kind of, refreshing moment.
To be almost abstract.
His connection to the art world inspired him.
The trigger for me was Rauschenberg
because I was trained to be perfect.
Perfect detailing, edges, everything just right.
I started doing small houses and remodelling.
And the clients couldn't afford perfect craftsmanship.
I was looking at Rauschenberg's work
and I thought what if we make a virtue of the bad workmanship?
What if it becomes part of the palette?
What if you use it?
And that's when I started to do that.
Frank isn't an architect of the precious,
he's an architect of the gritty.
And taking the gritty, the ordinary, the chain link
and elevating it into something
that has art in it.
I picked a material that was hated universally - chain link...
..and I thought, I'm going to study this thing
and see where the edge is.
I liked the idea of having the kitchen on the driveway.
I would light it when we had guests over
so that it looked like you were sitting on the driveway...
..and looking at the old house - it was kind of a voyeuristic thing.
And the house was completed in 1978.
The neighbours often referred to it as an eyesore.
One of them was an architecture critic
and he trained his dog to relieve itself on the house.
The guy across the road came over one day and he said,
"I don't get it, what are you doing?"
I said, "I'm copying you."
He said, "What are you talking about?"
I said, "Well, look at your house.
"You're repairing your car on your front lawn.
"The back yard - you've got two trailers,
"you've got chain-link fence, you've got corrugated metal..."
I said, "I'm using the same thing. Look."
He says, "Oh, but mine's normal."
The abnormalities even spread to the furniture.
Throughout the '70s, Frank designed a range of cardboard chairs,
whose popularity helped pay for his Santa Monica house.
A chair is a miniature design problem.
One that's a mini building.
Almost every great architect has done a chair and, you know,
Frank's cardboard chair is so Frank.
Cardboard is crummy
and yet Frank makes it into kind of this
slightly chaotic looking thing that's, above all, comfortable.
Frank's love of simple industrial materials endures.
His Sydney treehouse will be clad in brick,
a local staple and a choice inspired by the 19th century buildings
that surround the UTS site.
But at this testing workshop, his enormous challenge for Sydney's
bricklayers is to somehow make these bricks curve like flowing fabric.
He must have a good mind.
I don't know what he was thinking, "I'm going to make life miserable
for the bricklayer that's going to be doing this job!"
You made it more difficult, didn't you, by deciding to use bricks?
I found, over the years, that the craftspeople love the challenge.
They get bored doing the same old stuff.
You know, the brickwork on this building is extremely challenging.
The facade of the project, and I'll show you on my screen over here,
is made out of a steel substrate,
a mild steel substrate,
and on this substrate there are some ties on which the bricks rest.
And the density of these ties changes depending on the curvature
of the building and the brick ties are supported on a steel frame.
That's the hardest part - to put the ties in there.
You can see the channel then and then fix all of this in the front
and the back of the bricks and then tie them up so they can stay there.
You know, the way the brick gets placed on this building is not going
to be some mechanical process, it's going to be a craft of,
you know, a brick mason - a brickie - placing each brick
and the way they place the brick and the way they strike the mortar
and the way they do all this stuff is going to create...
we're going to live and die by how they do it.
You see that one up there?
The brick - the back of the brick - is resting on the tie.
Which probably means the brick is tipped back.
No, they should have dropped the carriage for the tie lower.
Time will tell if Sydney's craftsmen are up to the task.
I don't think it's a deal-breaker,
but it is going to cause this tipping thing to happen.
It's something that we've never done before, so we all learning.
Even though we're bricklayers, but we're learning on this job.
The house that Frank built became the house that built Frank.
1980s LA saw a host of, well, gregarious new Gehry buildings emerge.
They weren't projects that would have given me
the kind of presence in the world that I have now.
But I felt like I was doing OK.
This intriguing concoction built for the Chiat/Day ad agency was
a collaboration with sculptor Claes Oldenburg
and is now Google's LA office.
I first came across the Chiat/Day building in the '80s.
First of all, I saw it and I didn't know what I was looking out.
Oldenburg's binoculars
and this sort of combination of things that shouldn't be there.
And then I entered it...
..and I saw this extraordinary space with that beautiful whale in a corner.
The staff in the place completely exhilarated.
The art is the art of living. The art of spending time in it
and making it part of your life.
I pay attention to that, I'm very conscious of that.
Everything's for people,
so if we, as architects, focus on that, we won't go wrong.
The Chiat/Day building's eclectic interior reflected Frank's past
and future preoccupations.
One room created entirely from cardboard
and his whale meeting space,
an early foray into metal clad curved forms, inspired by nature.
This was Gehry's major international leap forward.
His first creation in Europe,
the Vitra Museum saw bold curves breaking up his trademark angles.
I like trying things, I like the curiosity of it.
Anything that locks you into a system, I go that way.
It was one of the first times that he really pushed formal
boundaries in a new way.
It predicted some of the shapes that he would be doing later on in far
more powerful and dramatic ways.
Vitra was a precursor of all later work.
Nobody was doing curvature at the time.
He was really beginning to incorporate new ideas into his
built structures, about the possibility in particular
of bringing motion into the experience of a building.
And he began using these swooping curves that made the building
appear to be alive in a very interesting way.
Frank being Frank, he had of course been experimenting with more
than just buildings all along.
Fish were something that attracted him.
He drew fish, he built fish, he started to live fish!
I don't know if he liked to eat 'em,
but fish were a big part of his life.
Since I was always looking for a way to express motion with inert
materials, by chance studying fish gave me
the first inklings of how to do that.
One of the first things he did was investigate the ways that the
turning and torque-ing of a fish's body -
be incorporated into a building and could perhaps give us
another line of delight.
The idea that something very fluid
gets built out of something really massive and rough is...
the kind of contradiction in that, contained in that design element
is really interesting.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, the bricklaying team have begun
work on site, but it's not getting any easier.
I love my job(!)
Unbelievable.
It's so out of the ordinary,
walls doing things that they shouldn't be doing.
I reckon, I think this panel here,
it's worse than the test panel we done in the lab.
It's a bit higher, but just by looking at it, it's scary.
He always tries to create a certain element of tension in his work,
or movement.
With this one, I think there's quite an interesting tension
between an element or a material like brick
doing things that flowing curtains do.
If you go back in history in the art world,
the fold has always been a fascination.
With Michelangelo, he spent endless hours drawing the fold.
So, it's clearly a manifestation
that has some resonance with humanity
and I say it happens because it's primitive.
Because when you're in your mother's arms you're enveloped in folds.
We go this way.
In UTS, we made the public areas part of the folds.
So that the communal spaces that the people are going to meet in -
meeting rooms, the cafes, and all that -
are treated with this eccentric kind of facade.
This playful facade. Playful facade.
And when it's done we'll see if it's worth it.
HE LAUGHS
But eccentric facades of this complexity don't just happen.
We digitise the design that has been created by the design team
and analyse the design for constructability.
And we figure out areas which are not buildable
and you can see these areas in red over there.
And then what we do is very closely work with the design team to
remove these areas in the design phases so that we don't have to do
these changes once the buildings go out for bidding or go out for construction.
Yellow means that there would be lots of additional ties
because the surfaces are leaning in or surfaces are leaning out.
I'm very into this computer stuff, but I don't know how to turn on.
I'm totally below compos mentis.
Somewhat ironic given that Frank is now the go-to architect
for tech titans like Facebook
and that digital technology has been crucial to his success.
If Frank Gehry had lived 50 years earlier...
..he might not be Frank Gehry.
He might be a lesser Frank Gehry.
The fact that he lived at the cusp of the digital age and at the
introduction of the digital age enabled him to realise his dreams,
in a way that he really might not have otherwise.
Make it in a conduit or a dash line or something. Yeah.
If you had to pick one building over the last 20 years,
one building, that stood for this time in architecture,
that expressed its technology, its aspirations,
its effect on cities - that would be the building.
I defy anyone to stand in front of that museum
and say it's not one of the most beautiful things they've ever seen.
The greatest moment of Bilbao is
when you see it for the first time against the cityscape.
You see that this extraordinary, unusual form
that in one way it looks completely different from anything around it,
but in another way really does respond to the nature of that site,
to the industrial past of this port and shipping city.
But the museum's riverfront location was never part of the original plan.
They gave me an in-town building
that had a 19th-century brick wall
around it, with turrets at the corners.
I'm a brave sucker sometimes.
I said, I think it's a terrible sight for the museum.
After dinner, we went up on the hill and they said,
"Well, where would you put it?"
And I said, "There...
"by the bridge."
There was a crumbling brick factory there.
By some miracle, I got it.
How do you even manage to point to a place and say I'd like that
and it happens?
Well, I'd had a few drinks!
With a new site agreed, the building he came up with fused
great 20th century leaps forward in both art and engineering.
Picasso's cubist masterpiece, The Accordionist, helped inspire
the bravura architectural forms, but these were only made
technically possible by Gehry's team designing the Guggenheim with
pioneering software meant for building aeroplanes.
30 years ago, I was trying to emulate the world of movement.
Cars, planes, everything moving and I couldn't build it.
I tried.
It was difficult and expensive.
And I went to IBM and they connected me with Dassault Systemes in France.
Dassault build aeroplanes.
I knew this was the future.
They gave me the stuff to try...
..and the first time we found success with it is we used it in Bilbao.
It achieved what Frank had really want to do for so long.
To create an architecture of feeling, of sculptural expressiveness.
It was utterly transformative.
I mean, it was totally different from that kind of dark,
old city that it was sunk in to with those emerald green mountains.
But it didn't look foreign, I mean, that was the thing. It was like a spaceship that had landed,
but it was a friendly spaceship, a neighbourly spaceship.
One that took note of what was there
and just raised it up to a whole new level.
The world swooned.
Some ten million people visited the museum in a decade.
With Frank's masterpiece helping generate nearly 1.6 billion euros in tourism
for the Basque government.
Good news - it was cheap.
The good news is it works, the good news, people like it.
Bilbao was 100 million. Really?
$300 a square foot. That's amazing. I know.
So, it's the cheapest museum that's been built in the last...
years, you know.
I think the Guggenheim in Bilbao was a very important moment
because it's changed a lot of things.
Every city wanted a Guggenheim.
Finally cities were represented by architecture,
which had been a dead thing for a long time because...er,
you know, not since, for example, you know, Sydney..
So it empowered the architect and I think that was very, very critical.
His career was never quite the same after that
and architecture was never quite the same after Bilbao.
Across the globe,
a swathe of stunning works elevated Gehry to greatness.
'Squeezed into this otherwise orthodox landscape is what's been
'unflatteringly described as the architectural
'equivalent of a motorway pile-up.'
But then, perhaps inevitably, a backlash.
'It is an example of how technology
'and virtually unlimited resources can create what some
'see as a masterpiece, others as a monstrosity.'
People bring their own baggage to everything, you know,
their own interpretation, so some guy said it was a heart transplant
operation that went awry - I kind of liked that one.
I think people will see whatever they see.
Frank's calling card is not restraint,
I think it's fair to say.
Frank Gehry is the Kim Kardashian of architecture.
Ha-ha! Personal view.
And if Brad Pitt is making coffee and running around
and filling the copy machine for Frank Gehry and his team,
well, fuck Frank Gehry, he wins.
And so I made the "Fuck Frank Gehry" T-shirt.
His assistant called and said, "Frank would like some shirts".
I was happy to oblige. He wanted them different colours.
APPLAUSE
Frank is a hockey player. He knows how to chuck and to chuck back.
He's a tough guy, he can take a punch.
One side is a very sweet teddy bear, kind of cuddly,
but I don't think he is like that.
He didn't achieve all that by being a pussycat.
The critical voices got a sterner rebuff in 2014,
when a Spanish journalist enquired as to
whether Frank's architecture was just about spectacle.
HE SPEAKS SPANISH
When they tell you guys...
He later apologised, blaming the outburst on jet lag.
I ask this now just for fun when I give a lecture -
"How many people in this room think my buildings are expensive?"
I said, "How many people in this room think I'm prima donna?"
I think the hallmarks of Frank's work are bravery
and the pleasure principle.
He is willing to look into extraordinary new forms, not just
so that he can brandish his own identity and ego but
because he thinks there's actually something in there for all of us.
Sometimes, Frank's forms aren't immediately obvious.
There are beautiful limestone walls with square cuts around most
sides of that building and then you go inside and it has a giant
conference centre in the shape of a distorted horse's head.
And it came from an image I had.
I don't know where it came from, but it popped into my head.
Was that a conscious decision or was it just something that came to you?
Yeah, it's the latter. I was fantasising a shape like that.
It was a competition so we didn't have time to really design
the conference room, so I told the guys, "Put that in a model."
We won the competition
and I had a meeting with the bank
at the time and I said, "Look, you don't have to have this shape. We'll..."
They said, "That's why we picked you."
If you're going to commission Frank Gehry, you know,
you are in for probably a nightmare.
You are going to get something that people are going to talk about,
that half of the people are going to hate,
and that half the people are going to love.
So what other talking points is Frank offering Sydney?
Well, unexpected teaching areas for a start.
The oval classroom is going to be, you know, a contrary.
It's a rougher element, it's heavy timber,
stacked heavy timber - almost like a log cabin.
The pieces are oversized, you know,
and, as you look at it, it looks a little unrefined.
We certainly don't have any carpenters that have ever cut
a piece of timber that weighs two tonne in half before.
I mean, Frank's obviously got an element of craziness about him.
I suppose I should be nervous, but I have great confidence in Frank
and commitment to the journey that we're on.
I think the response of everyone at UTS was
"What happened to the twisted metal?"
They wanted something special
and so we made the stairway... A very generous stairway.
Right, they can sit around and...
Every time we bring a piece in, people are blown away and
they're only getting bigger and bigger,
so it is going to be pretty wild.
We had to actually get one of the guys, six foot one,
six foot two, to stand next to the panels in the photo so
we could actually look at them and go "How are we going to get these in?"
It's out there, it's wacky, it's going to be awesome
when all the plastic comes off and you see the mirror finish.
That's highly...it's just polished to a mirror, so it will be
very interesting when it is all done and look quite, quite amazing.
Something amazing was exactly what Chicago needed in 1996, when early
plans for the city's Millennium Park were jettisoned by its lead patron.
I was shocked. These plans,
and I'm not kidding, had gas light.
And so, I turned to a friend of mine
and I said, "What millennium are we talking about?"
Something boring in America's premier city of architecture?
Cindy sent out a Mayday.
I said if they could get Frank Gehry
that would be the art,
they don't need anything else.
When it was first announced that he was doing the Pritzker Pavilion
it just struck me as bizarre.
I mean, I wrote in the paper that it was kind of like asking
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Jimi Hendrix to play a duet together.
It just seemed like there could never be harmony.
When he came to Chicago, he was very cognisant of the fact that this
was a city of bone beautiful buildings -
buildings that express the steel that holds them up.
So, Frank kind of took that
and he spun it in his own California digital way to create this,
you know, structurally bare-bone ellipse-shaped trellis.
But it shapes this incredible room,
this outdoor room, and it's become a place.
It isn't just structure - it's place, it's community.
I think people are very proud of it.
It is very joyful to see that people appreciate it and love it and feel
that that's their park because it is. It's the people's park.
Learning from history, the buildings that somehow seem to deserve
iconicity are concert halls, city halls, libraries...
Courthouses.
I don't really believe in that. Public spaces?
Yeah, so those kind of buildings I've...
invested with that kind of effort to make them the best you can do and that works.
As with Bilbao, Frank's iconic buildings have a wider impact.
His Chicago pavilion dramatically increased local real estate values.
And this "Gehry effect" is exactly what some in Sydney
are banking on too, with hopes that the UTS building will help
regenerate the whole industrial neighbourhood it's part of.
There is a calculated risk with Frank Gehry. You know he will pull it off.
His buildings will become famous, so you sort of buy into that energy.
I think the Gehry building will definitely reorientate
the compass to this end of town
and I think what has always been the sort of service end of Sydney -
the ports, Darling Harbour, the dirty end of town.
Frank Gehry rolls into town with his crew
and his ideas into a town depressed.
There are mostly liquor stores,
crime, dirt, whores everywhere
and here comes Frank to change everything and, you know what,
he probably will.
He wants his things to connect to place.
He may not do it in a literal way, he may not do it as other
architects do,
but he does not design funny shapes in his office
disconnected from anything and then plop them into someplace.
I mean, that is very much not what he does.
I don't wake up in the middle of the night and say,
"Oh, let's do a...thing."
That doesn't interest me.
Although Frank's buildings are always very
different in appearance from their surroundings,
Frank pays a lot of attention to his surroundings
and incorporates aspects of them
into the building when he is making it.
Frank's design response to the UTS building's unglamorous location
is to reflect it.
The eastern elevation is all brickwork.
The basic idea of that is when you're standing in the city
and you look west all you see is brick facades everywhere,
so it blends into the existing buildings.
On the western elevation, if you are looking towards the city,
you're looking at glass and you're looking at glass buildings,
hence glass on the west, brickwork on the east.
When you do a building, you're organising it
round a bunch of principles.
You don't mimic the environment you're in. That's a big one,
So you deal with the scale
and the relationships so you're not
giving them the finger - you create a kind of relationship.
The avalanche of glazing comes in bespoke pieces from China.
Each section takes about eight weeks to arrive and costs around £16,000.
It's rather a lot of money to have dangling from the end of a crane.
Stop, stop, stop, stop. We are not going to make it. Hook down.
Bring it down.
We've cancelled the lift for the moment because it's too windy.
It's over 35ks and I'm going out to the south.
I'm not happy with it at the moment.
Sometimes it goes bang, bang, bang, bang and
you get 20 in a day and sometimes it doesn't work out that way,
especially with all the angles for this one.
They are different, very different.
It will be amazing when it's done, but very different.
Really cool. I'm thinking it looks good, all these different angles,
the brickwork looks good.
It's going to look sick.
Glass isn't the only issue on site.
Despite two thirds of the brickwork being complete,
the problems keep on coming for Gus and his team.
Yesterday, the architect
and engineer went around and picked up a few little mistakes,
so they took some photos to show us exactly where the mistakes are.
It is hard for them
and it's hard for me too because I need to check and make sure
that everything is done the right way, but I can't see every single thing.
All right, guys. You can see the pictures here.
It was in this panel here, OK? All the ties were too short.
Now, just remember, all the ties have to come into the channel.
There are small plate at the back, big plate inside the channel. Yeah?
Make sure that doesn't happen again, please,
because it makes us look like we don't know what we're doing. OK?
It is harder to take down than what it is to put it up,
so try not to make mistakes.
It is not easy to create architecture.
It affects people, it moves people, it touches their emotions
and works with the city in ways that a simple building can't.
I think the New York building is tremendously important,
not only because it is the tallest thing he's done
and it's in the city of skyscrapers.
It represents another
element in his quest to be radical and conventional at the same time.
He rethought the curtain wall by making it literally a curtain.
Except it's a shimmering metal curtain
and it catches the light very beautifully. It looks
great from both the Brooklyn side and the New Jersey side.
It is very visible, especially in lower Manhattan.
It's a real monument on the skyline and it changes all the time
because of the light and the material that it's dressed in.
The Beekman Building is talking to the Woolworth Building.
The Woolworth Building, in my opinion, is number one, the important.
The very first of those buildings in New York. Yeah.
I ain't going to mess with that guy.
I'm going to be nice guy to that guy.
The client wanted me to put a hat on and I refused.
I said, "We're not going to mimic, we're going to talk to,
we're going to be polite, and we're going to build a New York skyscraper,"
and that's, I think, what we did.
From the cascading skyscraper in New York to
a riot of sails in Paris, Gehry's determination to find new ways
of expressing movement remains insatiable.
Moored at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne Park, this sleek
armada is a foundation dedicated to contemporary art and culture.
An aerial view of this building shows the Bois de Boulogne
and this thing in the middle of it.
And then you see the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.
It's heavy-duty association.
I sail and the thing you like about sailing is that it's natural.
You play with the wind and you play with the sails and you get movement.
Having a bunch of sailing ships, like a regatta on the Bois de
Boulogne, with the changing light - it was just thrilling to me.
Because I lived here for a year, 1960, with kids.
We were very poor.
I knew the Bois de Boulogne, I brought the kids to the jardin.
Two little girls, one of them passed away a few years ago, so it's
very poignant to come here knowing that she isn't here and can't come.
At the end of the war, we were all fascinated with simplicity...
..and there was a whole minimalist thing that somehow made sense.
Even though I didn't completely buy into it, personally,
it seemed to be the antithesis of...
Human nature ..human nature and how we want to live.
If you look at Picasso's studio, it's filled with all kinds of stuff
and my friends' studios are always filled with all kinds of stuff.
That seems very normal and human and I love that.
Understanding the risks that are involved in doing
architecture like this speaks volumes about the braveness that is Frank.
You know, I think it rubs off on everybody else here.
I think that when you see that
and know that he is taking that risk you want to do your best for him.
This job is the first job that I really enjoy coming to work.
It's never happened before and it's amazed me, actually,
but you enjoy waking up in
the morning, you enjoy coming into work
because we're really getting to show off our skills here.
When craftspeople get into the process,
then there's a...
Then they kinda get with it,
then there's a huge amount of pride
and workmanship that comes out of that.
The lighting, the shading... It's just...
It does - it looks like it's moving.
It's just changing continuously all day long and I imagine if they put
the right lighting and everything, that'd continue through the night.
BUZZING
And for Tony, this career highlight
needs permanently acknowledging.
Frank Gehry is inspirational, I guess,
in the way that he's thought outside the box
and I just don't understand why
no-one has ever thought like the way he has before.
You know, for the most part, it's like a box on top of a box, on top
of a box, on top of another box, next to a box, and, um...
this isn't like that.
It's sort of really out of the ordinary.
And it's amazing to be down on the ground looking up and say,
"I built that".
So it's pretty cool.
There we go, the last brick on the front.
In my hometown, when we finish a house, we bless it,
so we get a bottle of wine and we smash against the wall,
or a bottle of grappa, whatever is handy.
But here, I brought a bottle of champagne today
and I'm going to bless with this.
Thank Christ this job is done.
Cheers. Salute.
HE SPEAKS HIS OWN LANGUAGE
MUSIC: 12 Etudes Op.10, No 2 in A Minor by Chopin
We could not have possibly have envisaged
what emerged at the end.
It must be a leap of faith,
because you don't know what you're going to get.
We won't see what this building looks like until it's finished
and they take the scaffolding off. It's a striptease.
It goes on over three or four weeks and they come down from the top
and the beauty or the ugliness is revealed! Ha-ha!
Just get you, Frank, to explain the staircase to us. I can't. You can't?
It just happened?! LAUGHTER
Wonderfully eye-catching.
So, the nice thing is it was handmade.
Yeah. Hand-laid brick. Yeah.
Well, it looks wonderful.
What do you think are the building's greatest architectural achievements?
Well, one of the greatest architectural achievements
is that it's got built on time and in budget.
LAUGHTER
A very simple question,
are you happy? What do you think of it now it's done? Oh, boy.
LAUGHTER
So, er...
I'm Jewish and I feel guilty about everything.
LAUGHTER
You know, it takes me two years to come around.
I see all the things I would change and want to change.
And actually, I wouldn't change.
Certainly it gives them a spirit of invention,
that nothing's fixed
and as soon as you think you know the right way to do something,
somebody'll come up with something, some way to
take you off on another adventure.
I think that Frank is having one of the greatest later-life creative
surges in history.
You'd have to compare it to like, the late quartets of Beethoven,
the things that people look at as great late expressions.
The productions of the last ten years have been some of the most
delightful of his entire career.
I don't mind if you don't like it.
I'm sure I'm not perfect
and can't do everything always right.
You want to do good things, you want to be part of making things better.
That's a nice feeling when you can feel like you've made
something that makes people happy,
I still do it for that reason.
Are you still looking for yourself?
Uh...
I don't think about it that way any more, but maybe.
I think I sort of found myself.
I continue to be curious, I keep moving on,
but that's the central theme, I guess,
is curiosity
and the opportunities of the people you meet along the way.
Well, that's the guy. That's the tattoo, yeah.
You know what we call that pattern - the earthquake pattern. Yeah.
Oh, you know.
This job was fun, it was awesome. It was good to come to work every day.
Even when we were finishing off, still looking up
and still mind-blowing every day.
I just want to thank you for designing the building
the way you have. Where do you want me to sign it? On top there.
But then if you lay the brick, you can't see it.
Oh, I'm not going to lay this one.
Work invigorates him.
He's not tired of it, he has a whole lot of other ideas
that he hasn't yet gotten to
and I think that drives him more than anything else right now.
Whether his work can go on without him
is a question on many people's minds,
including his own.
We have to figure a way that the office can exist...
..when I leave.
I'm 84, so...
Nobody has been good at this, at succession.
So do you think about legacy?
I'm trying to.
But the guys out here tell me to stop it.
They say, "Look, have fun, keep going - we'll figure it out.
You know, "When the time comes, we'll figure it out."
One, two...
MUSIC: I've Got The World On A String by Louis Armstrong