GEHRY & ZAHA: TITANS OF CURVES
Episode notes
Last December, Frank Gehry died at home in Santa Monica, ninety-six.
When I saw the news, I sat with it for a moment, then opened my laptop and looked for a long time at one photograph — Gehry standing in front of the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997, just finished, the building behind him like a docked spacecraft, the titanium flashing silver in the sun. He looked like a man who had just completed something very difficult and discovered it was entirely worth it.
I was his student first, and later worked in his office. He said something I've kept ever since: always do it for humanity.
This one is about two people. Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. The two most alike figures of the same era. A Canadian Jew who grew up in Los Angeles and found the soul of architecture in a crumpled piece of cardboard, and an Iraqi woman who grew up in Baghdad and drew, with a brush, spaces no one believed could be built. Their careers crossed in the same decades, in a mutual respect that never once tipped into imitation.