Chroma Conversations: A Man and His Fish
Michael Marshall, Design Director of Marshall Moya Design, was preparing an article for the Washington Independent Review of Books, on Paul Goldberger’s “Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry”. During the interview, something occurred to him. The push arrived in the form of music, jazz and hip-hop, and how these genres (in many ways) were reminiscent of Gehry’s work. His observation unearthed, for him, a glaring disconnect in architectural design media. Most forms of design have specialty media that cater and celebrate diversity through its many mediums, while architectural coverage is lacking in identity and personality. We welcome you to our new blog, Chroma: Conversations.
-Michael: Hello Paul, this is for the Washington Independent Review of Books. Now for full disclosure I am an architect in DC. I actually went to Yale from 1980 through 1984. I had Frank as a critic at that time and the British Architect Jim Stirling. Isosaki was also around the architectural school then.
-Paul: Yeah, right that was the golden age.
-Michael: Starting off with the fish, and the other shapes that define Frank. His forms were reminiscent of hip-hop culture and the aesthetic of what he was doing at that time, similar to Antoine Predock’s Native American aesthetics. As an African American I can see those things in Frank’s work. As a matter of fact, when he taught us, and this was the Fall of ’82, there were times he and some of the other classmates of mine would make trips to New York to see what was going on in the street culture of the city. I think these are the things, for both architects, that really make their aesthetics American as opposed to more European influence. The question is, Frank’s work was so raw, urban and street. It shared the same energy hip -hop music had while coming into vogue, and rap music, and that whole aesthetic. Then I look at Antoine Predock’s work, what he was doing in the Southwest was so close to Native Americans, he had a surreal sensibility about landscape, do you think these are attributes that really make their work truly American?
-Paul: I think with Predock that was certainly the key. I think the connection between Predock and Native American design theme and issues are a little bit closer and easier to make, than a connection between Gehry and hip-hop. It’s true, that there’s absolutely a kind of authenticity of the street in a lot of that work and that period. But it’s still, I think, closer to Los Angeles the kind of vernacular of Southern California, and a lot of cheap construction that was prevalent there. That is that, you know, you are dealing with an environment and the condition there in which the freeway was in the way, and the boulevard was the street. So, in a sense of getting down to real stuff, yes very much so. But let’s connect hip-hop to where Frank picked up, on the very American themes, of improvisation. I think of it really as more connected to jazz, a generation earlier than hip-hop. There’s very much a connection, but it’s slightly in a previous phase. Where a lot of it is sculpted through the artists of Los Angeles, who he was close to and was so influential to him.
Michael: I think the jazz connection especially makes sense given his age group. He would be the age of some of the people that were in the Mile Davis’ group
Paul: Yeah, all that stuff is very, very important to him and I think a far more direct influence than hip-hop. I think hip-hop is one of those situations where it is a kind of accidental conversions which is not the same as direct influence. In other words, the similarities that you’re seeing are real, but it’s not as much as of a cause and effect relationship. And they were doing certain things that happened to be somewhat similar to some of the things Frank was doing, but I don’t think of it as a direct influence.
-Michael: Coming back to the fish elements in his projects from the 80s, he says that his family allowed him to play, at least from what I read, with carp. Do you think he might have been influenced by Warhol and that sort of pop reference?
-Paul: I think the fish actually has a lot of meaning, and it’s not one or the other. His grandmother and the carp is the story that he would always tell because it’s sort of the most layman-friendly. The one that seems the most accessible. It’s also disingenuous to build that whole thing on that, and he generally doesn’t. He knows that the reality was more complex; and in fact I think it’s several different things at once. Your point about Warhol is certainly a part of it. We know that he was very involved in art at that time, and pop art was just a huge part of the art world. I think what’s always been more important to him is the actual shape of the fish, which has such complex curves that’s so beautifully resolved into something very simple. The way it’s made up of scales, which again, are these little flat pieces that resolve into a beautiful curving shape. Those were more important to him because they got into the essence of his own aesthetics and sensibility.
-Paul: I think with Predock that was certainly the key. I think the connection between Predock and Native American design theme and issues are a little bit closer and easier to make, than a connection between Gehry and hip-hop. It’s true, that there’s absolutely a kind of authenticity of the street in a lot of that work and that period. But it’s still, I think, closer to Los Angeles the kind of vernacular of Southern California, and a lot of cheap construction that was prevalent there. That is that, you know, you are dealing with an environment and the condition there in which the freeway was in the way, and the boulevard was the street. So, in a sense of getting down to real stuff, yes very much so. But let’s connect hip-hop to where Frank picked up, on the very American themes, of improvisation. I think of it really as more connected to jazz, a generation earlier than hip-hop. There’s very much a connection, but it’s slightly in a previous phase. Where a lot of it is sculpted through the artists of Los Angeles, who he was close to and was so influential to him.
Michael: I think the jazz connection especially makes sense given his age group. He would be the age of some of the people that were in the Mile Davis group.
Paul: Yeah, all that stuff is very, very important to him and I think a far more direct influence than hip-hop. I think hip-hop is one of those situations where it is a kind of accidental conversions which is not the same as direct influence. In other words, the similarities that you’re seeing are real, but it’s not as much as of a cause and effect relationship. And they were doing certain things that happened to be somewhat similar to some of the things Frank was doing, but I don’t think of it as a direct influence.
-Michael: Coming back to the fish elements in his projects from the 80s, he says that his family allowed him to play, at least from what I read, with carp. Do you think he might have been influenced by Warhol and that sort of pop reference?
-Paul: I think the fish actually has a lot of meaning, and it’s not one or the other. His grandmother and the carp is the story that he would always tell because it’s sort of the most layman-friendly. The one that seems the most accessible. It’s also disingenuous to build that whole thing on that, and he generally doesn’t. He knows that the reality was more complex; and in fact I think it’s several different things at once. Your point about Warhol is certainly a part of it. We know that he was very involved in art at that time, and pop art was just a huge part of the art world. I think what’s always been more important to him is the actual shape of the fish, which has such complex curves that’s so beautifully resolved into something very simple. The way it’s made up of scales, which again, are these little flat pieces that resolve into a beautiful curving shape. Those were more important to him because they got into the essence of his own aesthetics and sensibility.
On top of that, there was this idea that the fish is the prehistoric form that continues. He, in at least one instance, talks about it as a response to post modernism; that if you think about it, you sort of want to go back to history. Fine, but why stop at Greek temples? Here, I’ll give you millions of years of history. So it’s not that one of those things are right, and the others are wrong. I think all of those explanations collectively contribute to his interest in bordering an obsession with the form of a fish.
-Michael: Gehry was also working on a sort of miniaturization of building programs, and so was Jim Stirling around the time. Do you think he was looking at those guys, or which came first?
-Paul: I know that he was watching all of them and they were watching him. There are definitely some very interesting early projects, even before Loyola. I think it was the Kay Jewelers, a couple of stores and some malls. There’s a project that’s not illustrated in the book, I don’t think those are either mentioned, that was called “The World Savings and Loans Branch Office” out on some boulevard somewhere, that always looked to me very Venturi in a way. So in a sense, Frank came out of the same instinct, or possessed the same instincts, that were more Venturi. Gehry comes a little bit later, and so did Michael Graves. A lot of people pushed back against the Orthodoxies of modernism. There was a brief moment when his work and their work did seem to be somewhat similar.
-Michael: Thank you for your time.