arts & life architecture The Fondation Louis Vuitton A final-concept model for the Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art I-low The Talmud Helped Shape Frank Gehry And other insights about the famed architect, the subject of a retrospective exhibition in Los Angeles. details The Frank Gehry exhibition at LACMA runs through March 20, 2016. For ticket information, visit lacma.org . 58 Barbara Isenberg Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. F rom his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles to his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Frank Gehry is an architect people think they know — until he surprises them again. Among his newest reveals have been Paris' innovative Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum and, a touch closer to home, a new Facebook headquarters build- ing in Menlo Park, Calif., which includes a large, open work space and a nine-acre rooftop garden. A career retrospective of Gehry's work opened Sept. 13 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), offering close looks at the creative process behind these and other highlights from the Canadian-born, 86-year-old archi- tect's lengthy career. Exhibited last fall in somewhat different form at Paris' Centre Pompidou, which organized the show in association with LACMA, the exhibition chronicles Gehry's work from the early 1960s to the present, offering more than 60 mod- els and more than 200 drawings, many made public for the first time. The architect's process starts in the huge Playa Vista-based Gehry Partners office complex, a cavern- ous former industrial space where architects, designers and others work on projects in development and taking shape all over the globe. Inhabiting the large studio these days are drawings and models for such current projects as high-rises in Toronto, a concert hall in Berlin, an arts complex in Arles, France, the renovation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art — and a possible new home for Gehry and his wife, Berta, designed by their son Sam Gehry. I recently visited Gehry Partners to chat with Gehry about the exhi- bition and its subject. BARBARA ISENBERG: The opening of LACMies career ret- rospective and your receiving the third annual J. Paul Getty Medal recently coincided. How do you feel about being so celebrated in your adopted hometown? FRANK GEHRY: I had a very good reception with Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was pretty exciting, and we've done a few other things people here seem to like. BI: Gehry Partners has designed 11 of LACMNs exhibi- tion installations, including six you personally have done with LACMA Senior Curator of Modern Art Stephanie Barron. Yet, when it came to designing LACMAs presentation of your work, which Barron also curated, you stepped aside, and David Nam, a partner in your firm, oversaw it instead. Why? FG: I did not design this one because I cant go backwards. It's nice to have a show, believe me. I'm flattered. I love it. I'll go to events and be happy and proud. But I didn't spend a lot of time with the show here or in Paris. My head won't let me spend time looking backwards. BI: The exhibition includes several of your early Los Angeles projects. You set up your first architecture office here in the early '60s and have, essentially, been based here ever since. What impact has that had on your work? FG: When I opened my office in LA, the American architectural world was focused in New York and not paying much attention to what we were doing here. We were under the radar, which allows you a lot more freedom. I valued that, and I think it's still true. Most people here aren't getting attention, and there's not much focus on the LA archi- tectural scene. So, we can function without a spotlight on our work. BI: You, however, seem to always wind up in the spotlight. For instance, you've been in the news a great deal about your pro bono involvement in what LA Mayor Eric Garcetti calls a "master plan" for the Los Angeles River. How did that happen? FG: I was selected because they were looking for somebody who has experience with changing the city, as I did in Bilbao, and doing things at that scale. The LA River is, first and foremost, a project for water reclamation, and the amount of water lost that goes through the river into the ocean is enormous. If you reclaim it and can later use it, it reduces the amount of water we need to take from the San Joaquin Valley. It's a big deal, economically important and politically feasible. This study, which is formatting the basic problem, would lead to a bet- ter understanding of how to do that. It will enable other people to work on designing parks and such. It's not precluding anybody. BI: We've talked in the past about how your interest in such diverse projects reflects the curiosity you've had since you were a boy growing up as Frank Goldberg in Toronto. You've traced that inquisitiveness back to the many hours you spent with your grandfather, a Talmudic scholar, in his home and hard- ware store there. FG: It seems to me that the Talmud spurs curiosity. That's what "why?" does: Why is this? Why is that? The Passover seder is also about why: "Why is this night dif- ferent from all other nights?" It's built into the Jewish culture. I'm an atheist, but I believe in the culture. I grew up with it. So it was natural that I question everything. BI: How is that reflected in your work as an architect? FG: I'm never willing to settle. I make a model, look at it, find some value in it and save that value. Then I move on to the next model. It's an iterative process and, ultimately, I come to a conclusion. But all the questioning and constantly trying to up the ante result in the best expression for the client. The Talmud also talks about peo- ple and relationships — about how we should talk to each other, how we should live together, why it has