Frank Gehry considers an accomplished past and uncertain future
The Los Angeles Times. By Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic

Frank Gehry, who turned 80 on Saturday, is the most famous architect in the world by a healthy margin. He is also, arguably, the most significant talent in American architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright. His firm, Gehry Partners, has streamlined a process in which his free-flowing sketches are turned into digital designs and then into dazzlingly unorthodox buildings around the world.
...

And yet if Gehry now stands atop a mountain he spent much of his career trying to ascend -- driven by a fierce ambition he has often tried to conceal beneath what he calls an "aw, shucks" persona -- he does so at a moment when the mountain is beginning to crumble beneath his feet. After a decade in which a handful of leading architects became global stars -- with Gehry leading the charge -- and private and government clients alike were willing to finance jaw-dropping feats of architectural innovation, funding for new construction has suddenly vanished.

Most distressing of all for Gehry, two projects that he saw as capstones to his career, gigantic mixed-use developments on L.A.'s Grand Avenue and at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, have both been put on hold.

"I've had a disappointing year, couple of years, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," he said in a wide-ranging conversation in his office last week in which he was by turns ruminative, weary and hopeful. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."

In response to the global slowdown, Gehry, like many of his peers, has been forced to radically cut his staff, which he said is now half the size it was just a year ago. In a broader sense, the virtuosic approach to design that Gehry has embodied since his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened to rapturous acclaim in 1997 faces an increasingly pointed critique within his profession.
...

And Gehry is clearly stung by the charge that his most mammoth projects -- the Brooklyn development, in particular, which was originally planned to include as many as 16 towers -- have been vehicles for self-aggrandizement forced on unwilling communities. After all, he has long painted himself as a lonely talent pushed to the periphery of the profession in the early decades of his career by myopic developers and less principled colleagues.

In his mind, he doesn't run roughshod over the little guy, as he has been accused of doing by neighborhood activists in Brooklyn. He is the little guy.
...
Full article.

"...There are some buildings that are background, some that are foreground. Miss Brooklyn (the tallest building), I call my ego trip..."

"This is an extraordinary opportunity for an architect like me, I’ve been doing these iconic buildings, like Disney Hall and the Bilbao museum, but not an opportunity like this, to do housing, to do a mixed project and build a whole neighborhood practically from scratch and fit it into an existing fabric and make something special out of it."

"There is progress. There's constant change," said Gehry, according to NY1. “People aren't riding around on horseback anymore.”
"They should've been picketing Henry Ford," he cracked, according to several news reports.