Gehry Special

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By Newsweek Editors

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In the early 1970s, long before the Guggenheim Bilbao and Disney Concert Hall made Frank Gehry the world's most famous living architect, he was considered a renegade. A cutting-edge Californian who loved to use everyday materials like plywood and chain link, he designed a series of witty, surprisingly comfortable chairs, made of corrugated cardboard, called Easy Edges; you could buy your very own Frank Gehry chair at Bloomingdale's for about $35. But that was then, and now is now.

This month, Vitra, the innovative Swiss furniture company, is reintroducing the Easy Edges line--this time splashed with color on the edges--as well as a series of spectacular lighting fixtures called Cloud. If you want to perch on one of Gehry's chairs today, it'll set you back at least $850. The 76-year-old architect talked with NEWSWEEK's Cathleen McGuigan. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Easy Edges were once populist chairs you got in a department store. Now they're fancy chairs at the Vitra showroom. What's changed, and how have the chairs changed?

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Frank Gehry: The chairs have the same intent--to be people's chairs. It's just that the cost of producing them has gone up. When they make them in Switzerland, they're more expensive, apparently, I don't know.

You get asked to design things all the time, and most proposals you turn down. Why did you agree to reissue the chairs?

Basically, I love Rolf Fehlbaum [the chairman of Vitra and a renowned design patron]. When he said, "I want to make them," I said, "Sure." That's how it started. I had no idea how much it was going to cost. Years ago, he'd asked me to design a chair for him. I never answered his letter [ laughs ]. When I don't know what to do, I do that. He wrote me several times. I'd say to myself, "He sounds like a good guy," and I'd put it in my hold box and go about my business. Finally, through the Oldenburgs [husband-and-wife artists Claes and Coosje van Bruggen], he reached me and asked if we could meet, and he told me about the idea of creating a museum. A building was something I could get my arms around more than being commissioned to do a chair, right? Up until that point, I always did chairs for myself, like the cardboard ones. That was mine: I financed it, I did it, I made them and then I sold them to a company. It was always a sort of a self-starting game. If somebody asked me to do a chair for them, it was really hard for me to do it.

But you did bentwood plywood chairs for Knoll in the early '90s.

That's because Knoll agreed to set up a small factory next to my office in Santa Monica, so I could have some people in play and work on the design and prototypes.

So you ended up making a chair museum [the 1989 Vitra Design Museum in Germany] instead of a chair.

Rolf and I became good friends. He liked the building and it worked and I go there and everybody's happy. He started a few years ago making the Easy Edges--the Beaver chair--in a limited edition. And from time to time, he asks me to do things, and we try and it rarely works out. The Cloud lighting thing was the first thing that really connected. That's new, that was done all with me and them.

How did you work on the design of the Cloud? Did you make a series of models, as you do when you're designing a building?

We did more than that, we made mock ups. We made lamps, they're hanging in my house. But I made them out of kraft paper--they're brown. They're not flameproof or anything, so I wouldn't want to sell them. I was just making 'em for myself. If you drive by my house now, you seem 'em--people think they're Halloween things, they look like Halloween decorations.

Your house used to be so controversial that your neighbors probably thought it was Halloween all year round.

I know. So we made the lamps in various colors and materials, and Rolf was here and I showed them to him and he got all excited and said he'd like to make them. So he started working with me, and they developed the technology and the right paper [actually, a polyester material] so it's fire-resistant and you could get approved. I call it my homage to Isamu--Isamu Noguchi. I knew him really well, He liked my work, he used to come to the house. We really got along. I loved his paper lamps.

You had already done something vaguely Japanese in lighting with your translucent fish lamps. Those also came out of your own head.

Right, right. My madness.

So in the last couple of years, you've designed a vodka bottle for Wyborowa and wrist watches for Fossil. And now you're designing jewelry for Tiffany's, of all things. What attracted you to that?

Well, I'm attracted to women. [ Laughs .] I like looking at them, and so the idea of decorating them in some way was very appealing to me. I'm also fascinated with diamonds and precious stones--architects don't get to play with stuff like that. And [Tiffany's] made it easy--I didn't have to have a staff to work on it. I could do it myself, with their staff. They spent a lot of time in my office working with me. You know, there are certain strains or directions in developing a formal language for architecture, right? We were able to identify some of those directions, and created several categories of stuff--they named them funny names.

Like what?

I forget. Like there are flowerlike forms in my buildings, right? So they called it Orchid. And we've played with those kinds of shapes and we did a lot of them. They've taken the essential ones and made a first shot at a line with them. I've taken those much further than they have, into candlesticks and all kinds of other things like silverware. The sticks, like, in my house--the big chunks of wood that crisscross and interlock, they took that--I forget what they call it--and we played with that and we made bracelets and rings. Once you get a language going you can start making things. There are the obvious ones they asked me to play with. We started with the fish. We made some beautiful little fish shapes, very abstract, very Brancusi-like, I would say, and they started making them in all kinds of sizes for me to look at, and we picked a size for a necklace that's really beautiful in sterling silver. And they made one for me, and Berta [Gehry's wife] wears it. She wore it out, and we got a terrific response. [Laughs.] So they made earrings with that. They're showing me the way into jewelry. I would guess after I do this for a while, I'll show them the way.

Just to digress for a moment, there's been quite a bit in the press about how Brad Pitt is really into architecture and is working with you on a big seafront residential development in Britain. Is that true?

We were--I don't know if we are any more--working in Brighton, England, and the guys at Brighton knew I knew Brad Pitt and knew he was interested in architecture. And they asked me if he would like to participate and design the bar, or an apartment or something. So I called him and asked him and he said maybe. And he came by the office and looked at it, and somebody here took a picture of him leaning over the model next to me. I don't know how it got into the press. My guys didn't do it. Somebody took that picture--he must have sent it to somebody or we must have inadvertently sent it to somebody. From that day, I've never heard from him.

You've never heard from him?

Never. [ Laughs .]

Well, he's been busy. And hadn't he been in your office before that for some period of weeks, sort of apprenticing?

Nope. He's been to my office twice. Once he called and asked if he could come, and somebody gave him a tour, and I met him for two minutes. And then this time, this second time. And I went to dinner with him after that, with Jennifer [Aniston, Pitt's former wife].

Back to the Tiffany jewelry for a sec. I gather the first Gehry pieces launch in March? They'll probably put you out there like Elsa Peretti or Paloma Picasso.

Yes, just say I'm the next Elsa.

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