It seems appropriate that Paul Goldberger meets me for an interview in a conference room with a window looking out on midtown Manhattan. Goldberger’s latest book is about Frank Gehry, an architect who has done much in recent years to reshape the New York City skyline: he designed the residential skyscraper at 8 Spruce Street (completed in 2010), which towers over lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as the billowing white IAC Building in Chelsea (which opened in 2007). Goldberger’s Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry will be released by Knopf in September.
“Gehry was always interested in complexity,” Goldberger says. “He wanted to reintroduce a richness he felt had been driven out by the false simplicity of minimalism. If you look at the Fisher Center, the little concert hall he did recently at Bard College, those amazing curling metal pieces are decoration not all that different from a 19th-century false front or a Victorian facade.”
Goldberger himself has celebrated the decorative instinct in architecture, though books such as The City Observed (1979) and The Skyscraper (1983) show his appreciation of more austere styles as well. As an architecture critic—first at the New York Times, then the New Yorker, and now at Vanity Fair—he has been less interested in espousing a particular school than in assessing architecture as it relates to the broader culture. In Why Architecture Matters (2009), he credits eminent Yale professor Vincent Scully with opening his eyes to this crucial relationship, and with inspiring him as a student to “channel my love of architecture into a life’s work.”
Joining the New York Times as a junior editor fresh out of Yale in 1972, Goldberger was promoted to junior architecture critic when the formidable Ada Louise Huxtable (“who for all intents and purposes established this profession,” he notes) was named to the Times editorial board and had to limit her writing on architecture. “She and Vincent Scully were my two professional mentors,” Goldberger says. “It was funny, because they didn’t particularly like each other. I used to look at them and think, ‘this must be what it’s like to grow up with divorced parents!’ ”
A voluble conversationalist with a quick wit and a ready laugh, Goldberger boasts a wide-ranging backlist that includes The Houses of the Hamptons (1986) and Up from Zero (2004), which reported on the tortuous process of creating the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “Within architecture it’s been possible to do a lot of different things as a writer, this biography being the latest and the most different,” he says.
Building Art is Goldberger’s first full-scale biography. “I wanted to go in new directions but still make use of my expertise,” he explains. “Biography was a way of pushing myself without leaving architecture, and of all living architects, Frank Gehry is certainly the most compelling character. He has a compelling personal story and also inspires enough interest in the general public to make this a viable trade book. I didn’t want to do a book just for architecture people. I thought about doing a nonliving architect, but most of them are taken; I don’t think the world needs another biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Also, I liked the challenge of trying to come to terms with the architecture of this moment.”
It was also something of a challenge to gain Gehry’s cooperation, Goldberger acknowledges. “We had a long talk before I took on this project. I said, ‘I can only do it if you cooperate, but if you will not agree to certain terms, I’ll find another project; I don’t have to do this.’ I asked him for access to his archives and for a commitment in writing that he had no editorial control. I also asked that these commitments extend to his estate, which was not an easy thing to ask, but he was over 80; I couldn’t take the risk of working on this for a couple of years and then if he died have his heirs say, ‘Sorry, go away.’ Ultimately he agreed to all that. The only thing he asked was the right to read it once before publication solely for fact-checking.” Goldberger agreed to this, “and I have to say he read it with amazing care: he picked up punctuation errors as well as some minor factual errors. I said to him, ‘If you get tired of being an architect you could become a copy editor.’ It was clear that he did not like certain things, but I was very pleased that he didn’t try to get around our agreement and suggest that I make changes. It was the best reaction I could have hoped for, because if he’d told me he adored every word, I would feel that I had not done my job. I felt a responsibility to be honest.”
For example, Goldberger says, “There’s this funny war inside Gehry between his ‘I’m just an ordinary guy who grew up in Toronto’ shtick and his wanting to be a very special person and create unique works of art. He wants to have it both ways. Clearly he doesn’t like to think of himself as the kind of person who craves fame—but he is, and he’s smart enough to know that’s part of who he is, even though he tries to play it down. I felt it was important in this book not to let him get away with that.”
At the same time, Goldberger points out, “the book is mostly very positive.” It expresses vocal and infectious enthusiasm for Gehry’s two best-known creations: the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. And it makes palpable for readers the marriage of radical newness and unabashed visual pleasure that renders Gehry’s work so distinctive.
Another building that Goldberger likes nearly as much, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, gave the biography a natural point of closure. “It’s an extraordinary public building that pushes some things even beyond Bilbao and Disney,” he says. “Gehry took the idea of these panels of glass that curve in all those amazing ways in his Condé Nast cafeteria and built it up so that with the Fondation Louis Vuitton they define a monumental building. But I was also struck by other elements, like all the exposed wood structure that seemed to me to recall his earlier work. It was like seeing early and middle Gehry wrapped in late Gehry, as if he unconsciously made this building
a retrospective act. It made for a climactic, cinematic moment around which I could conclude the book. Because one issue you don’t necessarily think about when you begin the biography of a living person is, how do you end it?”
Goldberger has already begun a new project—“an architectural history of baseball parks and their connection to American cities”—and generally writes a few online pieces for the Vanity Fair website each month, as well as several articles annually for the print edition. “I don’t ever want journalism not to be part of the pie,” he says. “When you grow up in newspapers like I did, you never fully shake the notion that if your byline doesn’t appear every so often, everyone will think you’re dead.”
Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at the American Scholar and reviews books for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Daily Beast.
