FRANK GEHRY AS DIRTY HARRY “If the contemporary search for bourgeois security can be read in the design of bus benches and mega-structures, it is also visible at the level of auteur. No recent architect has so ingeniously elaborated the urban security functions, so brazenly embraced the·resulting frisson, as Los Angeles's Pritzker Prize laureate, Frank Gehry. ...he has become one of the principal 'imagineers' (in the Disney sense) of the neo-boosterism of the 1990s. He is particularly adept as a crossover, not merely between architecture and modern art, but also between older, vaguely radical and contemporaneous, basically cynical styles. Thus his portfolio is at once a principled repudiation of postmodernism and one of its cleverest sublimations; a nostalgic evocation of revolutionary constructivism mixed with a mercenary celebration of bourgeois-decadent minimalism. These amphibian shifts and paradoxical nuances in Gehry's work sustain a booming cottage industry of Gehry-interpretation, mostly effused with hyperbolic admiration.
Yet, Gehry's strongest suit may simply be his straightforward exploitation of rough urban environments, and his blatant incorporation of their harshest edges and detritus as. powerful representational elements in his work. Affectionately described by colleagues as an 'old socialist' or 'street-fighter with a heart', much of his most interesting work is utterly unromantic and idealistic. Unlike his popular front mentors of the 1940s, Gehry makes little pretense at architectural reformism or 'design for democracy'. He boasts of trying to make the best with the reality of things'. With sometimes chilling luminosity, his work clarifies the underlying relations of repression, surveillance and exclusion that characterize the fragmented, paranoid spatiality towards which Los Angeles seems to aspire.
A very early example of Gehry's new urban realism was his 1964 solution of the problem of how to insert high property values and sumptuary spaces into decaying neighborhoods. His Danzinger Studio.in Hollywood is the pioneer instance of what has become an entire species of Los Angeles 'stealth houses', dissimulating their luxurious qualities with proletarian or gangster facades. The street frontage of the Danziger on Melrose in the bad old days before its current gourmet-gulch renaissance - was simply a massive gray wall, treated with. a rough finish to ensure that it would collect dust from passing traffic and weather into a simulacrum of nearby porn studios and garages. Gehry was explicit in his search for a design that was 'introverted and fortress-like' with the silent aura of a 'dumb box' . 'Dumb boxes' and screen walls form an entire cycle of Gehry's work, ranging from his AII-American School of Dance (1968) to his Gemini G.E.1. (1979), both in Hollywood. His most seminal design, however, was his walled town center for Cochiti Lake, New Mexico (1973): here ice-blue ramparts of awesome severity enclose an entire community (a plan replicated on a smaller scale in the 1976 Jung Institute in Los Angeles). In each of these instances, melodrama is generated by the antithesis between the fortified exteriors, set against 'unappealing neighborhoods' or deserts, and the opulent interiors, open to the sky by clerestories and lightwells. Gehry's walled compounds and cities, in other words, offer powerful metaphors for the retreat from the street and the introversion of space that characterized the design backlash against the urban insurrection; of the 1960s.
This problematic was renewed in 1984 in his design of the Loyola Law School located on the western edge of Downtown Los Angeles in the largest Central American barrio in the United States. The inner-city situation of the Loyola campus confronted Gehry with an explicit choice between the risks of creating a genuinely public space, extending into the community, or choosing the security of a defensible enclave, as in his previous work. The radical, or simply idealist, architect might have gambled on opening the campus to the adjacent community, giving it some substantive stake in the design. Instead, as an admiring critic explained, Gehry chose a fundamentally neo-conservative design that was:
open, but not too open. The South Instructional Hall and thee chapel show solid backs to Olympic Boulevard, and with the forbidding nor overly welcoming. It is simply there, like everything else in the neighborhood.
(This description considerably understates the forbidding qualities of the campus's formidable steel stake fencing, concrete block ziggurat, and stark frontage walls. But if the Danziger Studio camouflages itself, and the Cochiti Lake and Loyola designs bunch frontage in stern glares, Gehry’s baroquely fortified Frances Howard Goldwyn Regional Branch Library in Hollywood (1984) positively taunts potential trespassers 'to make my day'. This is undoubtedly the most menacing library ever built, a bizarre hybrid (on the outside) of dry-dock dreadnought and Gunga Din fort. With its fifteen foot security walls of stucco-covered concrete block, its anti-graffiti barricades covered in ceramic tile, its sunken entrance protected by ten-foot steel stacks, and its stylized sentry boxes perched precariously on each side, the Goldwyn Library (influenced by Gehry's 1980 high-security design for the US Chancellery in Damascus) projects the same kind of macho exaggeration as Dirty Harry's 44 Magnum.
Predictably, some of Gehry's intoxicated admirers have swooned over this Beirutized structure as 'generous' and 'inviting', 'the old-fashioned kind of library', and so on. They absurdly miss the point. The previous Hollywood Regional Branch Library had been destroyed by arson, and the Samuel Goldwyn Foundation, which endows this collection of filmland memorabilia, was fixated on physical security. Gehry accepted a commission to design a structure that was inherently 'vandalproof'. The curiosity, of course, is his rejection of the low-profile, high-tech security systems that most architects subtly integrate in their blueprints. He chose instead a high-profile, Iow-tech approach·that maximally foregrounds high security functions as motifs of the design. There is no dissimulation function by form; quite the opposite, Gehry just lets it hang out. How playful or mordantly witty you may find the resulting effect depends on your existential position. The Goldwyn Library relentlessly interpolates a demonic Other .(arsonist, graffitist, invader) whom it reflects back on surrounding streets and street people. It coldly saturates its immediate environment, which is seedy but not particularly hostile, with its own arrogant paranoia.
Yet paranoia could be a misnomer, for the adjacent streets are a battleground. Several years ago the Los Angeles Times broke the sordid story about how the entertainment conglomerates and a few large landowners, monopolizing land ownership in this part of Hollywood, had managed to capture control of the redevelopment process. Their plan, still the object of controversy, is to use eminent domain and public tax increments to clear the poor (increasingly refugees from Central America) from the streets of Hollywood and reap the huge windfalls from 'upgrading' the region into a glitzy theme-park for international tourism. Within this strategy, the Goldwyn Library - like Gehry's earlier walled compounds - is a kind of architectural fire-base, a beachhead for gentrification. Its. soaring, light-filled interiors surrounded by bellicose barricades speak yolumes about how public architecture in America is literally. being turned inside out, in the service of 'security' and profit.”
- Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Photographs by Robert Morrow. New York: Vintage, 1992. pp. 236-240.