gatekeepers of security, the world for 250 years. and what example are we setting for the world, if we're going to not stick up for our in what we have so cherished for long. you know and i, i think about all of this and i, i don't ever want reach a point in my life where i look back again and i think could have done more. could i have said something? how i explain this, my children or my future grandchild, grandchildren or future generations of that. i stood back when it might have been easier to remain. you know, i think that when we move forward and, hopefully move forward a little more hand in hand and to be able to have productive conversations, we've righted our wrongs and we've looked towards our better angels, as we have in past cassidy hutchinson for your courage, for your willingness to share and speak out, and to to

be one of those pillars that stands up for our democracy in those brutal, harsh moments. thank you for sharing with us. thank you vergood morning. thank you all for coming. thank you for coming. did i. i think i'm on my way there, but i. there the united states has produced two extraordinary, influential major architects, both named frank. this is not frank lloyd wright. this is the other one i didn't meet frank lloyd wright. i wanted to, but i in i'm sure

you all know that frank won the pritzker prize for architecture which is the the award of the of the design. well that was in 1989 before you were born. there's evelyn de broad. and just to just to set i, i want to read to you the citation that was written at that time. it's very short. so only seven sentences. but i need to set the stage a little bit before i read it. in 1989, the and i should also preface this by saying i'm not an architecture critic nor an art architecture historian, so i may get some. oh, well, i'm going to leave.

for about ten years before the pritzker prize was announced, the architecture profession, i think you could say, was in some esthetic turmoil. the there was an exhibition that had been mounted at the museum of modern art in 1979 by arthur drexler, called transformation gardens in modern architecture. it was controversial, partly because drexler, who'd been at moma for a very long time, is the longest serving curator in the history of the of the museum. he basically did an exhibition which said modernism in architecture is dead. it is over. some agreed. some people didn't agree. there was fistfights and things like that. and the profession changed and a number of architects began develop what came to be called postmodernism kind of trying to adapt neoclassical style or

neo-gothic styles or whatever. and meanwhile, in santa monica, this guy had built a of of structure around his little 1920s bungalow and on a side street. and in santa monica that was unlike anything that was being done. so let me read these seven sentences to you from the citation in an artistically it that too often looks backward rather than toward the future where retrospectives are more prevalent than risk taking. it is important to honor the architecture of frank o. gary refreshingly original and totally american proceeding as it does from his populist southern perspective. gary's work is a highly refined

and sophisticated and adventurous esthetic that emphasizes the art of our architecture, that in a way an art critic is here. his sometimes contrary virtual but always arresting body of work has been variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent. but the jury, in making this award, commends this restless spirit that has made his buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent values always open to experimentation. he has as well, a sureness and maturity that resists in the same way that picasso did, being bound either by critical acceptance or success. his buildings are juxtaposed collage edges of spaces and

material aisles that make users appreciate of of both a theater and backstage which simultaneously reveal. although the prize is for a lifetime of achievement. frank was about 60 at the time. the jury hopes mr. gehry will view it as encouragement for continuing an extraordinary work in progress, as well as for his significant contributions thus far to the architecture of the 20th century. while. so slow, i never read that luxury. that's why i read it, because i have two questions. one. did you believe it? then, and do you believe it now? no, no. you didn't believe. it's not about the. it was for me. it wasn't.

i was interested in what was going on in architecture. i was very interested in what drexler was talking about because we were coming out of we're coming out of wars and modernism and building is by breyer and except for frank wright and everything was kind of cold and and. you know, these are all very precise and the culture wasn't that it was. it was heading for all kinds of chaos. so. i looked at it. i remember the i remember the show at moma, the drexler show, and it was very powerful. if anybody had seen it, it was it was really seductive.

it was you could just go there and slap it up and just do that for the rest of your life. and some of the architects started going down that rabbit hole. i was at a conference with a lot of them, a lot of my friends. so michael graves and more than two were in philip and. it was at that group that time that philip put the little twirly sitting top of the at&t. it was as a result of that show and some the other architects were doing what we ended up calling postmodernism, because the show drexler show of postmodernism was very seductive. like you just you could just go in those buildings and love it. what was seductive about it?

you just get warm and friendly and you embrace saying and you know, it didn't. but it had nothing do at the time. we were living in it. and so details. details of details. so it worked for some people. but, you know, it generally couldn't go there because it was expensive to do it. i was at a conference with all of those guys and i remember i got, i had my 15 minutes of i said, why do we have to go backward? it's like, why can't we? why can't we? the world is moving. there's airplanes and all kinds of movement cars, boats, rockets, whatever. can't we find a way to express our time.

there must be something that's that inspirational, that we can deal with. and i ended it. i remember ending it by saying, well, if you can't, maybe go back 300 million years before man to fish because i had been studying japanese woodcuts by hiroshi god. one when you started in architecture? when i did in the fifties, it was right after the war. so the the g.i. came back from japan with a pile of information on how to build a small house of beautiful houses with the tommy mats and a little wooden structure. so my teachers at usc were we're

doing that. and it was pretty seductive. so i got involved with japan and so i hiroshi guess would cut some fish were particularly interesting to me for some reason and i said very architecturally they express movement 300 billion years before man why don't you look at that for inspiration. well, they didn't, but i did. and. and i got fish. yeah, that's how i got fish. and i apologize for getting fishy, but that was a law you probably have seen pictures of or been to frank's in santa monica, which is a sort of circa 20, i think it's dutch colonial pink stucco house. it was on the ocean. it was on ocean avenue, and they

moved it in 1900 to that. so and it was a duplex in and there was land beside it. so i just built kitchen and dining room to it. and so when you sat at the dining room table or when you were in the kitchen, you were looking at the house complete the facade when you were in the living room, you were looking out and it was you know, it was discussion between the past, how the neighbors hated me. they tried to get they went to the city, tried to get it knocked down. neighbor from across the road was standing there with me one day and he said, how could you do this to this neighborhood? and i said, where do you live? and they pointed across the road and i said, you have a chain link fence around your garden, don't you?

he said, yes. i said, you have an old trailer in the backyard, don't you? i said, yes, but i said, you have a car jacked up on blocks in your front yard. don't you? i said, what's the matter with that. give me a break. i anyway, it kind of worked and i said, i keep it, i keep that house for some reason, for the kitchen that you were mentioning, asphalt, asphalt, floor, like the driveway to the garage. and i remember the first time i went there, this must have been in the eighties sometime when we met. and i went there and i was sitting at the kitchen table, there's a big skylight up above and a glass wall and. it dawned on me what you just said. i was looking at the picture window on the pink stucco,

looking into the living room of the house. and i thought the great, the great modern california cliché of architecture is indoor outdoor living. and there i was, outdoors, indoors, looking at the indoors while i was outdoors at the same time. so i didn't look, knew nothing like nothing like richard or albert frey or it was not glass walls with sliding doors and so on. well, i wasn't trying, actually. i didn't just happen know my life with that in mind my personality wasn't trying to do that. i was just making a house for the family. i can't i can't help. is there anything japanese about that esthetic. i don't i don't know.

probably. the warmth. maybe. maybe, yeah, i don't know. i did a few japanese. i my very first house out of a was looks like it was designed by a japanese architect. uh huh. it was for julius shulman's brother in law. they never built it, but. it. it's very japanese. and then the. well, i actually played in the gogo ku orchestra at ucla. they had a ethnomusicology department. and so i joined that that's the imperial court music. uh huh. there's this there's very few pieces and musicians only work in the imperial household and.

and so when disney hall was finished, i, the go-go crew came to disney hall. uh, they'd never come. but i have pictures of them sitting on stage at disney hall, and you could see the japanese influence in the walt disney concert hall. uh, okay. you can see it. it's pretty clear. okay, let's just see it. something comes from somewhere. everything. i mean, speaking of disney hall, let's. disney hall, the guggenheim, bilbao the louis vuitton foundation in paris. ah, three pretty well known buildings these days. one thing that interests me about them is that they all, in some way riff on boats and

sailing. and the disney hall is like this big three masted schooner with giant sails and and bilbao is a more industrial, you know, because it's it's up against the river in an industrial town and the louis vuitton glass building, those big glass sails are like a like a sailboat or an impressionist painting. what is this with boats? i know you you were a sailor and you built own boat. and i were a sailor. i am a sailor. you are a sailor. what kind of i have a i have a boat and i designed a boat first. yeah. yeah. the foggy, right? yeah. yeah. so what's the, what's the attraction for for boats of esthetic motif in designing. i don't know. there's something there's clarity of kind. i don't i don't know. i just love it.

i love the feeling of nature and blah, blah, blah. i get it. i can get romantic about it. well, they they have they do have a sense of graceful movement to them. and yeah, i mean, one of the interesting things to me. well it's again the fish. yeah. and the fish. so you fish from the boat. no, i don't. okay. but there's the movement expressly that's kind of interesting because when, when typically thinks of architecture as, as a solid and immovable static. yeah but you're buildings are engaging movement. yeah i in bilbao it was really engage the the city the river the bridge the all the things that were there. and so became a partner a visual

partner on this on the river front. uh, it also has a variety of galleries and. i work hard at that because that's a big deal to me. so then i work, it worked out. disney hall i work with. the l.a. philharmonic for years. from my first meetings with her in this, when he came to l.a., he asked me to work on the hollywood bowl and he became my music teacher and spent a lot of time with him. and with the music world. and so and when the competition for disney hall came up, it was logical that i would enter. we never thought i would win,

but i did. it took a while. i the not a musician, i i'm not a scholar or music. in fact, i just did wrangle with gustavo and i'm not bogner guy, so i was a little nervous about it. but i just did it as a friend. but i like to meddle with music projects. you've done a lot of set designs for for physical productions. do you approach the design kind of of an opera set the same way you approach a building. i approach everything same way. got to whatever the the issue is, you to deliver.

i feel very compelled to deliver on time, on budget. i'll let -- and i do. yeah i've got a great track record, but like where do you start? what's the you know what you were doing. that's right. but what do you this is that all. i met with the i met with ernest. i met with the the community people the program was pretty clear. we saw buildings that were already a concert hall that were built that weren't very successful, like new york, like wherever, san francisco or they

were lacking. so this is around the country. and and we really got into it with the musicians and with with. i about with the composers, with the conductors, with the. so it's a central thing. yeah, but you get into it, i mean you got, it's not peripheral. i got a minute. yeah. a. we're okay with. something like disney hall or bilbao which are both, you know, sort of at the peak of architecture of our time. is there anything about either of those buildings that you would change? you'd like a do over on? i, i think disney could be

simplified a little bit bit, but. it's not as complicated as it looks. it's just wings are just the stairwell and so i just made them curved. it's a box and the and it's a box that has a lower part, orchestra part and, an audience part. and the balconies. so it's all pretty much proscribed. it's it's how you put it together and how it connects with the musicians do they feel part of it the biggest problem in designing a concert hall is the relationship between audience and, the performer, and that's the same in theater. and if if a theater person you

walk into a stage and you see the audience, you know pretty quickly for the year, they're same in music so we constantly look for for ways to improve that for instance disney there's the stage is up we we got vito out for an opera pit orchestra pit which was too bad so this last rheingold i had to sort fabricated an orchestra pit which compromised compromised of the sound and so it's it's not easy to do opera in disney hall because it's not an opera house. but we did a little concert hall and, berlin for daniel barenboim for divine orchestra,

israeli-palestinian israeli-palestinian. i got involved with it that it as a gift to them because it was i was upset about what israel was doing and that i wanted to. that's my politics. forget get me. but until it's an existing warehouse in berlin so i could couldn't hang seats or balcony on the on the building because that was i couldn't do it. so i ended up having a floating balcony. we had nobody done that and it's bonkers. fantastic. and we're trying we want to do one in disney hall in hall. we want to float a balcony and have an upper level. the other thing we discovered by

accident is that when the orchestra's playing members are on the same floor as the audience. it's magic it's crazy, but works okay. huh. so the colburn school that we're doing across the road from disney right has that will have a thousand seats but first rose feet are on the floor with the orchestra and it has the floating balcony flying so you learn keep building on it. but the main thing is the connectivity and and i in all the years since disney hall has been open. people come up to me, i go to at concerts and tell me how that works. and the orchestra tells me how that works so that they feel it. so that's it.

that's the payoff. so that kind of a social connection. yeah. and it works and theater too, you know, when disney hall was almost the famous actress came. oh, god, i forgot. or anyway, she came and walked on the stage. the building wasn't finished. and she said, frank, this works you up. so it does. you feel it, you know, if i was down there, we would be happier with each other. now you want to know, you know. but it's that those subtleties, that stupid art and new york, they've just spent a lot of money redoing it they didn't completely get it they they got part way but they didn't get it. so gustavo's going to have to

work. but the culture is like theater. it's exciting. it's like art is it's like art galleries. it's like all the stuff we look at, we go to we love, we live on. i think that makes us happy. speaking kind of social connection. the that sort of brings up the idea of city planning and one of the things about disney hall is the context in which it exists. i mean, the street from a fairly cumbersome um dorothy chandler pavilion but the design kind of of disney hall sort of it just sort of like connects into, into this big building across the street like pulls it into part of the conversation and makes the life on the street better and. well, i designed the building across the road to the hotel.

that one. yeah, different one. yeah, that's not. no, but i was able to talk to each other in a funny way. i think. but i think that's the issue is, is connections, right. yeah. making connections with people, using the building to your advantage. it's not hard to do. you just have to think about, you know, you mentioned ernest fleishman and his teaching you about music and you i'm sure teaching him about other things. um, how important is the client in the development of a project major major? in what way they got to you got to partner them. there's several issues. one is the partnership to arrive

at the conclusions so that it fits the way they want to use building. so you've got a picture of that and the other stupid thing is budget. and so. knock on wood, we come in on budget. people don't know that me but we deliver that's a major of my deal. i won't i do it unless i can do that. there's a general conception that good architecture is expensive and trash architecture is cheap --. good architecture means that the people, these people us people have to want to do it. you have to have an open mind because things are changing. it's not the same today as it was 20 years ago. so if you want to make 20 years

ago, you're going to spend a lot of money and, waste time. you got to deal with the present. the present is exciting in music and theater and everything. jazz i, i'm very involved with herbie hancock, right right? i think i've been i'm you. you must have some secret. you don't know about dealing with budgets because you were telling me recently that the that bilbao which was that. oh, my god, there's this impossible building that. it costs $300 a square foot to build that building. and if you do an inflation calculation to the present, that's about $800 a square foot for a fantastic museum that people want to go to. okay. if you that to the san francisco

museum of modern art, 1213 hundred dollars is the brode museum, 1213. the big megillah, the l.a. county museum which is currently under construction. that's 1800 per square foot, which is sort of, you $800. you've to know something that we don't know. i do what? i'm not going to tell you. okay. i'm. no, it's obvious. you work with the i mean, it's a construction. world we got involved with. i was doing a building in spain. it's a big fish. if you've been to barcelona, you've seen it next hotel and

the the body of the fish came down. then it has wings. so when the body comes down and has the wing at that how to that draw so the guy knows how to build it. okay. so the developer was a british guy, nice guy. he came to me, he said, i love your bill. i want to build it, but i don't know how to do that. i had an italian fabricator who i just started working with. i had just started investigating ibm and computer programing and stuff, and by accident, i fell in to that so systems who build jet planes, falcon jets in france and their software is called cartier very expensive really expensive.

one workstation was over 100 bucks and it's hard for engineers to pay for all that. massimo, the guy from italy, says, how do i do this? i said, buy a workspace. so he buys one. he goes back to italy and he calls me a week later and he says, perfect, you. so we build. i mean, so it's just a matter of searching out the technology. there's stuff there i mean, can't you can't do you can't levitate but you know, you have to work with geometry and but there's a lot of flexibility. there's a lot of room of people ask questions and and search for things and i think younger at i'm hoping younger people i have been teaching at yale for 20

years or so and every project i get them involved with doing music, concert halls and and so been a lot of of students that have worked with me now that at least have trained at that i don't know where it goes i don't know. there's a project you've been working on for at least a decade, i would imagine that that's in some respects quite different from from what we've been about, but in some ways fits and is the l.a. river for the los angeles river, which runs from the valley to down roughly long beach and ocean is 51 miles long. it's a concrete channel the the concrete was poured in the beginning or early in the 20th century because it's it's essentially a flood channel in

l.a. la's flooding today. it is much hopeful. yeah that essentially. yeah it is a flood channel which is why the concrete is there because things have grown up around it and. you don't want to flood. tell us about that project. what do you what do you concocting for the 50 miles of l.a. river? two things. one is that there's groups of people and they're very brilliant thinker. i forget his name, but. developed a program called friends of the los angeles river and they wanted to take the concrete out and make it a garden landscape. very beautiful idea. wow. 51 miles of gardens. and what's wrong that? what do you take it out?

godzilla comes to only 2% of the time. that's the problem. nobody believes it. but 2% of the time. godzilla. and if there's the garden landscape, it displaces hundreds of homes. yeah so we can't put up with that. so what's the solution? one of the solution they've been building parks over freeways in parts of the country, and they're not they're not cheap, but they're not out of line. you could build a park across a freeway. so we've been studying the area all of all of this work by. the way is philanthropy. i don't get paid it. so i got into it. and the the speaker of the

house, anthony rendon, is very intelligent guy. and he he wanted to do. so. i said, why don't we the neighborhood south of l.a. kids growing up there, have a ten year shorter life span. this is fact you could read it. you can get it but you can't hide it. they live ten years shorter because they don't have open space and they got the 710 freeway breathing, killing them. so that's a reality. kids are dropping out of school or it's it's it's a mess. nice. oh, man great people. fantastic you know so we've decided to make a cultural center along the it's ten years

the the the they gave us a piece of land to do it and then we found well that was a parking lot for county vehicles and after we had the design we couldn't use it anymore because the county vehicle had to go there. but parking anyway. so finally we got through all of that. we've a little street. it's going to have an art program from like involved. we've got gustavo with youth orchestra, l.a., which is the outgrowth of he came from from venezuela, which is what we did in inglewood. we remodeled a bank building, knocked the park for a dollar 98. i mean, it was really. yeah. and so we can build this street and we can have dance and all

that stuff. we finally got it cleared and that is janice hahn has gotten approved and we're clear. we only have we've got most of the money. we only have to raise 50 million more all of our time. i'm not i'm not fundraising. so we're going to do it with no problem. i mean, to have your name put on the street, that cultural mama mia. yeah, it's no problem problem. so i think that's a goal. and it's going to be the park part. we wanted to cover two pieces. the it's at the confluence of the rio hondo and the l.a. river and so we've shown how and there's a v, so there's a little

area that's parking lot that we can get and a park and we could cover part of the river and on the l.a. river and part of the river on the real hondo. and we could get a 40 acre park, 40 acre, 40 acres in an area where there's no park. and we have renderings of and it's beautiful. it's easy to do the cost. and it's been approved by the corps of engineers is the cost is $800 million to save kids lives. now i don't know it's going to work i know if the world is going to do it, but it's there the cultural center definitely will be built at will give some center and focus for that community it's going to be interesting. they're going to have their own orchestra, their own concert

hall, 500 seat concert hall. they'll be able to do like we've been doing it in inglewood at the bank building, which is not i mean, that the extra to turn a bank building into, a concert hall was only two or $3 million and bingo, it's now being used as a concert hall in that neighborhood. so it doesn't take much. they don't have to be fancy. we these are kids. they're rolling through it. and i've convinced abu dhabi, where i'm doing a opera house to build a concert for kids because the new leader, abu dhabi, sheikh khalid, is studying classical piano. so he's really it. and lang lang is his teacher. so lang lang, we're all

connected now, but i think i think, you know, if i make more excited about that stuff, yeah. and luckily i don't. well i going back to your house in monica is chain link fence and plywood, corrugated metal. it's like not it's not marble crystal chandelier, things like that. and it's gorgeous. it's beautiful. yeah. assembly you and we've got a couple couple of minutes left but when you first came to to l.a., we're living here in the fifties, early sixties, you got involved in the art world. how important was that for you to work with artists. well, i can. i can't remember how it all started. i would say seeing an architect

here, like he had an art department, i forget the names of the artists, but i used to go to all of their their stuff. i got to know who i got to know was a service named glen luken. who? you were right there. that's a ceramic artist. so i was taking ceramics with glen lucas. and glen realized i was going to be a ceramics and and he was really sweet that we were we were kind of poor. so he put me into c architect lecture class at night and i was put in it with john kelsey. who would be kelsey became kelsey lab that did the path a museum right and we were in that

class for a year and we got skipped into second year architecture. that's how it happened. uh huh. and craig kauffman would had just come to sc and first year craig kauffman yeah, but we ended up at ucla. yeah. and he was a knockout, you know. i mean, you couldn't. yeah it was just exciting to be around him and was a lot of, a lot of activity with the art world and met billy on and it was like a wide open but ed moses was the connection for me. uh huh. so he was crazy. ed yeah, right. it was crazy. but did he did lead me to the promised land. yeah, we're, w