Frank Gehry: Under the Radar?

If you visit Making a Classic Modern, the Frank Gehry exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you'll discover that it's no more an art exhibit than a Hyundai kiosk at the Philadelphia Auto Show. 

Complete with an eager sales representative, a few pixelated photographs of Frank Gehry's work are paired with an enthusiastic guide who might as well be saying, "I want to put you in a Daytona time share unit today!"

Each photograph is accommodated by quotes from critics - notable academics who don't need to endure Frank Gehry's architecture on a daily basis - raving about the man's genius.

A streaming video shows a man who's been practicing his craft for far to long, and a man immune to criticism. Speaking about himself, he says, "What I like about it is you're going to pass by and you're not going to know Frank Gehry was there. I love that, I love being under the radar like that."

Aside from the smugness of a third person narrative, the absurdity of Gehry "being under the radar" is solidified in a gift shop dedicated solely to the man himself.

Gehry has managed to transform architecture into a marketing machine, a big box department store full of twelve dollar Kandinski prints that would look great hanging over your living room sofa. He's IKEA. 

He uses the same modern technology that creates Hollywood sets to allegedly create feats of modern artistry, but just like the Colonial Street backlot at Universal Studios, his buildings are hallow illusions. 

Whatever you think of Frank Gehry's most notable designs, he may do the most damage flying "under the radar." Instead of erecting one of his signature balls of foil along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Gehry will be toying with one of Philadelphia's most iconic landmarks, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and its Great Steps.

As you weave your way through Making a Classic Modern, no marketing gimmick can prove the man's genius. Displayed on the walls are various incarnations of his plans for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, juvenile experiments that cut the steps in half or simply ask, "how many skylights should I embed in the plaza?"

While his larger projects may be controversial in their own right, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the EMP Museum in Seattle are at least interesting to look at. But the plans displayed within Making a Classic Modern show a lack of skill when it comes to integrating interior and exterior spaces, especially when a space already exists. 

It's not surprising. His otherworldly exteriors are often met with unnecessarily claustrophobic interiors retrofitted to accommodate an aerodynamic skin. So we should expect the opposite to be true when he designs an interior that will find its way beyond the confines of a building's existing walls.

Unfortunately for Philadelphia, we aren't getting a Jetsonian building masking an anxiety inducing warehouse like his Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. His thoughtlessness will be exposed on the Great Steps of the Museum.

But Gehry's arrogance may be even more astounding than his inexplicable success as a starchitect. Even Lex Luthor knows who he is and his place in Metropolis. Frank Gehry, who had admittedly never been to Philadelphia until he was asked to remodel the museum, knows as little about our city as he does his own reputation. A fact made clear by a man who thinks that demolishing part of the Great Steps is "under the radar."

The Great Steps

I appreciate a good underdog story, particularly one that uses our city to demonstrate what a true underdog can become. And whether or not you like boxing movies, Sylvester Stallone, or worn nostalgia, Philadelphia has been that underdog for a very long time and we've just recently started to win.

There's a very real reason Rocky was set in Philadelphia. The city was chosen for Twelve Monkeys, Philadelphia, and Cold Case for the same reason. For so long Philadelphia was the bleak and downtrodden embodiment of something that was once great. More than that, Philadelphia continued to fight through its darkest days because it knew it could succeed.

So why now, that we're finally beginning to see the success enjoyed by New York and Chicago, are we so willing to allow one man to eradicate a pinnacle of absolute perfection, a light of stone that kept a struggling city alive throughout the Dark Ages of modern Americana?

Would you paint the White House blue?

Despite our place in Revolutionary history, Philadelphia was a smog ridden haven for crime, poverty, and corruption during our nation's Bicentennial. When Rocky Balboa ran up the Great Steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he wasn't just using a civic structure as gym equipment. He conquered seventy two daunting steps that led him to the one edifice that made Philadelphia a great city even in our worst hours. 

He turned back to the city below the Great Steps, a city faced with struggle and doubt from a point of unmolested innocence, overlooking a tarnished skyline desperate for what he had just proved he could achieve. The Philadelphia Museum of Art isn't just a museum that holds paintings. It's a Temple, in all its parts, to greatness and purity. You only need to climb its Steps to know that.

It was a symbolic feat shared by anyone who has ever visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, even those long before Rocky was a household name, one that continues to be shared by today's visitors who know nothing of the movie.

But Frank Gehry's plans to carve out one sixth of the Great Steps for a picture window isn't about history. If it were, Horace Trumbauer's greatest work of art would be granted the same reverence as a historically designated row house in Society Hill.

This is pure pomp. The Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art is coupling the hype of Gehry's mere presence with an aging and irrelevant connection to a forty year old movie to encourage people to embrace anything new, regardless of what it looks like.

Cinematic history aside, the Great Steps are as relevant to the building as the collection within. The banners flanking the columns of the museum call out the title of Frank Gehry's current exhibit: Making a Classic Modern. The title doesn't just insult the posterity of the building by implying historic architecture should be altered, it insults art itself, suggesting that the Mona Lisa might be better if part of it were painted over to include an iPhone.

Making a Classic Modern

Would we allow Starchitect Michael Graves to install his postmodern columns on City Hall simply because he's known throughout the world? 

The city pitched a fit when Conrad Brenner halfheartedly proposed a mural on the windowless wall behind the PSFS Building. A grassroots organization staved off the demolition of the Boyd Theater's auditorium for more than a few years and has expanded its efforts to save the historic NFL Film Exchange on North 13th Street, a simple building in a forgotten corner of Center City. 

In a city that is so vested in preserving every last crumb of our history, where is the fight to save the gateway to our most internationally recognized cultural institution? 

While Philadelphia holds an abundance of architectural history, preservationists tend to fight fights they think they can win. We fight to save historic row houses and theaters because we know that those financially vested in the demolition don't have the city's historic interest in mind. They have no respect for the bricks and mortar, just their potential profit. 

But they're also fightable. 

Frank Gehry

When it comes to institutions like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we assume those in charge know better. Cultural institutions are not powerhouses of profit, they're repositories of posterity. But those managing the Philadelphia Museum of Art have been mesmerized by a Lord Voldemort, a Starchitect with the power and prominence to blind us from the fact that he doesn't understand our city.

Faced with a marketing campaign masquerading as an art exhibit, Philadelphians are not asked, "Could our city's artistic legacy be better served in a truly modern museum elsewhere on the Parkway?" Instead we're being told to tolerate what Frank Gehry wants to do to the history we already have.

I'm going to keep asking until the jackhammer hits the first Great Step.

Save the PMA