<i>60 II</i>: Frank Gehry

You may not know who Frank Gehry is, but if you’ve ever seen a building designed by him, you’ll never forget it.

Gehry is to architecture what Einstein was to physics, what Picasso was to painting, and what Jordan is to basketball, reports Correspondent Scott Pelley. In his way, he’s changed the world.

Gehry started as a truck driver, but was always fascinated with shapes. They come to him, he says, in “dream images, ” so revolutionary his staff has to use computers to figure out how to build them.

His greatest achievement so far is along the Nervion River in Bilbao, Spain. His Guggenheim Museum building there is so innovative that no art inside may be as important as the building.

It’s been called a miracle. When he finished it, Gehry stood there with his clients and was struck by a powerful thought.

“I thought it was a disaster,” he tells60 Minutes II, explaining “because you get self conscious about these things. You know, you push out like I did, and then you look at it, and you say, ‘What have I done to these people?’ No; it’s true. This is how I felt. They knew it, too. They were very disturbed, because I wasn’t able to talk in positive terms about it.”

But not everyone shared his view.

“The Bilbao Museum in Spain really changed the world,” said Paul Goldberger , architecture critic for the “New Yorker” magazine.

“That building has been attracting all kinds of people who aren’t necessarily great architecture buffs,” he says, “ all kinds of people who haven’t gone to Europe to see a building any newer than 500 years old in their lives. Yet they are all flocking to see this one, which really is a kind of cathedral of our age.”

Gehry is rumpled and shy. But his projects are his alter ego. There’s attitude in the angles, conviction in the curves.

It was an attitude built over years. You see the beginnings of it in the American Center in Paris, the Toledo Visual Arts Center in Ohio and the Weisman Museum in Minnesota.

But it all started with a small house in Santa Monica—the house he still lives in.

“The guy from over there came over one day when he saw it finished and he said he didn’t like it,” Gehry recalls. “And I said ‘Why don’t you like it?’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s just strange.’”

What Gehry had done was wrap his existing middle-class home in the kind of things he saw in his neighbors’ yards: corrugated steel, glass and a chain link fence—up on the roof.

“I was just trying to become part of my middle class neighborhood,” he says. “I was trying to figure out how to fit in.”

What Gehry had created right there on main street was a piece of modern art. He argues that his house isn’t the only thing that sticks out in the neighborhood.

”If you look t that composition of that house and that house, there’s a collision of ideas,” he says pointing to other homes in the area. “Even though they’re very conventional houses, they have not respected each other in any way.”

In 1978, the house made Gehry famous and caught the attention of the dean of American architecture, 95-year-old Phillip Johnson, who calls Gehry “ the best architect in the world, simple as that.”

But where does Johnson rate Gehry against past giants like Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe?

“He beat us all,” says Johnson.

Gehry’s work takes place in his Santa Monica studio, where 135 designers, engineers, model makers, are working on as many as 35 Gehry designs at a time.

There’s not a T-square in sight though Gehry claims to have one in a closet somewhere. All the work is done by computer. In fact it can’t be done without computers.

“What Frank does is he sculpts; he makes his shapes and then we take his shape and then we get it into the computer,” explains Rick Smith, an aerospace engineer who brings Gehry’s flights of fancy down to earth.

Gehry buildings begin with a Gehry sculpture. The architect crafts a shape, which Smith will trace with something called a digitizer and download into the computer. It’s a painful process for Gehry.

“It’s very hard,” he says. “I have a dream image, let’s call it, of this shape in my head, and when I see it on the computer, it’s dried out. So I have to hold the dream image while I’m looking at this dried-out image, and it’s excruciating.

“I can only hold it for so long. It’s like putting your finger in the flame and you have to pull it out. It’s exactly like that.”

Once the design is in the computer, engineers calculate how to support the impossible curves.

It’s a process that lets Gehry make a building dance - as he did with the tower in Prague they call Fred and Ginger. Gehry says the human form is the inspiration behind his designs.

“This feeling …when you’re a baby, you’re in your mother’s arms, and the folds of the dress are very comforting - this is my theory now,” Gehry says.

The view of a building as comforting and embracing, so essential to Gehry’s work, comes from a childhood filled with family but very little money. He grew up in Canada during the Depression, and spent most of his weekends in his grandfather’s hardware store.

The hours were spent, Gehry says, “kind of playing with the nails and screws, and cutting glass, and cutting pipe, and fixing toasters and clocks, and things like that. I loved it. I loved working with him.”

When his family moved to Los Angeles, Gehry tried a night class in architecture and it hit him like a ton of bricks. But before Gehry would change the way people look at buildngs—he changed something about himself first.

He changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry. “That’s a very personal story, “ he says. “I mean, it’s got to do with a former wife, and anti-Semitism at the time.

“We were having our first child, she was upset and worried about it, and would I want to bring a kid into the world to go through what I did…I used to get beat up for killing Christ.”

At the age of 72, Gehry now stays true to his roots. He’s still playing in the hardware store, trying to fix things. And the boy who suffered for being a Jew is designing a museum of tolerance in Jerusalem and a refuge for cancer patients designed for a friend, Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died of breast cancer.

“The idea started from a lighthouse—the lighthouse being a symbol of hope,” he says of the cancer refuge. “The corrugated roof is so that the clouds and the skies reflect, and as the clouds move across, there’s kind of a soft… see how the shadow goes acros.s”

He says he was inspired by a Vermeer painting that had a woman with a white shawl, that had a corrugated texture and it reminded him of Maggie.

Critics often compare Gehry to Picasso, and critic Paul Goldberger says Gehry, like Picasso, doesn’t have universal appeal.

“A lot of people still do feel that they look weird,” Goldberger says. “And and people are uncomfortable with weird things. Tthere are some people who question how well some of the buildings work.”

In Gehry’s view, the greatest building ever designed is San Carlino, a little church in Rome designed by Borromini more than 100 years ago. “It’s got all the moves in it that I’ve made ,” he says. “I’ve done nothing new since then.”

Although Gehry claims that he’s done nothing new and feared that his master work was a disaster, he does occasionally peer over his own wall of insecurity and admit what has been in plain sight for so many others.

The last time he went to Bilbao, he says, “I saw it for the first time as something else, I was detached enough - it was three or four years later.”

Gehry is now trying to figure out how to put his designs to work in downtown Manhattan - post Sept. 11. He's working with the Guggenheim on a proposed museum at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, 10 blocks from Ground Zero.

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