Frank GehryFrank Gehry

Frank Gehry sees himself as an artist first, and then as an architect, working much as an artist would. He has translated the vocabulary of contemporary art into an architectural language of his own, disobeying the rules of his profession and questioning its historic conventions. Like Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, he has introduced "bad taste" into his concepts, while keeping himself outside of the contemporary dialogue between modernism and post-modernism. His stature in architecture today (though not his work) has been compared to that of the great American original Frank Lloyd Wright. Our film, Frank Gehry: an architecture of joy, is about Gehry's work of the 1990s: his breakthroughs in architecture and the extraordinary flowering of his work during this decade. It reveals Gehry's approach to his architecture through visits with him to some of his key works: The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the primary example of his use of the Dassault computer program; the Frederick R. Weisman Museum in Minneapolis, which he designed before Bilbao and without the help of computers; the Vitra Museum at Weil am Rhein, his first European commission; the Energy Center at Bad Oeynhausen, a technical and cultural center; and finally, the DG Bank Conference Center at Berlin's historic Pariser Platz, a controversial building which Gehry himself thinks may be one of his best works, and whose construction we follow throughout the film.