This season, the wheel of architectural fashion has swung round to Frank Gehry. To many, the work of this California maverick strikes a note that seems fresh and honest in a field glutted by the studied and slick. A frequently told story from the colorful Gehry legend concerns a neighbor who felt passionately enough about the architect’s Santa Monica house to put a bullet through a window. Such vigilantism is in keeping with Gehry’s image as a wild man of the West, wielding his bag of carpenter’s tools instead of a computer printout and offending refined tastes with his constructions in raw wood, corrugated metal, and chain link.

Now fifty-nine, Gehry has been pursuing experimental design since the Sixties and has long enjoyed a following in the Los Angeles art community. But from the breathless press he has received this year, one would think Gehry had only now been discovered. For 1987 was the...

 

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