Can Gehry’s reputation survive Atlantic Yards?

Has Frank Gehry been fooling us all along? First came the leaks and cracks in one of his buildings that led to lawsuits in Boston, and now comes a biography that reveals the 'starchitect's' other-worldly, arty persona to be a self-conscious front.

Since his triumph with the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, Gehry's swooping, anarchic forms, defying straight lines and conventional balance, have made him perhaps the most popular contemporary architect. At 80, Gehry (pictured above with a model of his Los Angeles Grand Avenue project) appears to be at the top of his game. He is better known than any of his rivals; his buildings give pleasure to people who know nothing of architectural niceties.

But there are doubts. Gehry designs are deemed high maintenance, and people question whether they will endure. Is he capable of doing more than his signature swoops without getting silly, or simply dull?

The $4.2bn Atlantic Yards project in New York's Brooklyn - a sports arena surrounded by office towers and apartment blocks on reclaimed industrial wasteland - should be the Rockefeller Centre of our times and his crowning glory. Instead it has been stalled by local opposition, unrealistic costs, and complaints that the apartment blocks are stodgy, conventional and lazy. Gehry is at the centre of controversy again.

A new book on the great man, Conversations with Frank Gehry by Barbara Isenberg, reveals a different - and surprising account - of how Frank Gehry became what he is today. "Architects in New York were kind of attracted to me as long as I was subordinate to them," he tells Isenberg. "As soon as I came out with work that got attention, there was a kind of backlash from them. They think I'm an 'awshucks' guy and then I turn out to be every bit as ambitious as they are."

When he moved from Toronto, where he was born simply as Frank Goldberg, to Los Angeles, he reinvented himself not just as Gehry but as the diffident Woody Allen of architecture's cut-throat world. He got noticed when he divorced, re-married, and then transformed a conventional LA bungalow into the prototypical Gehry building, with strange shapes, eccentric materials, and wonderful light.

Gehry played the bumbler but he knew just how to tiptoe around large egos. So he proved just as congenial to the Hollywood crowd as he did to the New York architects. Gehry was as bedazzled by the stars as he was by the free-form Los Angeles vernacular, and he schmoozed his way into relationships with all the skill of a Renaissance master cosying up to the Medicis.

Commissions started small. "One night we saw Jennifer Jones get out of a limo," he recalled for Isenberg, "and I thought how elegant she was; years later, when I was doing her house, I told her that story."

And then they got big. Isenberg describes a trip to Bilbao on which Gehry was recruited by Thomas Krens, the developer of his Guggenheim masterpiece, to join a celebrity motorcycle expedition with Jeremy Irons, Diane von Furstenberg and Diane's husband, Barry Diller.

They all got chatting, and Diller duly commissioned Gehry to build his IAC corporate headquarters by the Hudson River in Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood, another dazzler clad with translucent panels shaped like the sails of river barges.

Not long before he died suddenly of cancer, I interviewed the Hollywood producer, director and actor Sydney Pollack, who had just made a documentary film of his friend, titled Sketches of Frank Gehry. I could see that he too was a mogul taken in by the schtick. "There is something about Frank that struck me as being absolutely genuine and authentic," he told me. "He is not manipulative in terms of your opinion of him. A straight shooter."

Pollack would meet him at parties, and talk about ordinary, everyday life. It did not occur to him that Gehry was anything other than a modest architect struggling to find work.

But then Pollack's wife persuaded him to divert his private jet - Pollack was a pilot - to Bilbao for the opening party of the museum. "I was not prepared to be as knocked out as I was," Pollack remembered. "'My God,' I thought, 'this little guy who's been my friend all these years is a genius.'"

Not everyone bought it. Gehry told Isenberg a story of how he met Dorothy Chandler, the society queen from a great LA family which owned the Los Angeles Times, at a birthday party for David Niven. Chandler was choosing the architect for her own Chandler Pavilion at the time. "I don't like his work," declared Chandler. "And he will not be considered to design a concert hall."

Gehry got the last laugh: Chandler built a hall of unremarkable design with dead acoustics, while Gehry got the commission for the Disney Hall nearby, a building rated second only to Bilbao and loved by musicians for soaring acoustics. It doesn't just look good, it works.

But what happens when it rains? Gehry's reputation was first challenged by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a formidable opponent when it comes to an argument over engineering quality.

The college had commissioned his Stata Centre, and they are still suing in the Boston courts, claiming that the outdoor amphitheatre cracked because of bad drainage, that snow and ice cascaded dangerously from the roofs and windowboxes, mould grew on the outside brickwork, and there were leaks everywhere. The suit alleged: "Gehry Partners breached its duties by providing deficient design services and drawings."

It must be comforting that Frank Lloyd Wright, the only American architect still considered greater than Gehry, also designed buildings with roofs that leaked and soaring concrete terraces which sank and cracked for lack of support.
 
Perhaps the greater blow to Gehry's triumph lies in the Atlantic Yards of Brooklyn. While the critics condemned the uninspired outer buildings, no one doubted that his sports stadium and signature office tower were Gehry beauties. But there was no thought for budget, and even before the Wall Street meltdown the developer had abandoned the Gehry stadium for a cheaper, conventional design from another architect.

Gehry's ego could not cope with the rejection, and he complained that the complex would now never be built at all.

It looks as though the 'starchitect' has reached the end of his glory road. ·