Ideas - Pt 2 | Architect Frank Gehry on how to exit life

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

There’s a constant mantra Frank Gehry would always hear from his mentors who have since died – “Don’t you dare ever stop working.” It’s a sentiment he lived by right until his death at 96. In fact his last major cultural building, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, will open in 2026. So how does his fierce, creative drive square with his mortality?In an expansive conversation from 2017 with IDEAS producer Mary Lynk, Gehry shares his thoughts about death and his life, from growing up Jewish in Toronto, to his complicated relationship with his father, to his move to L.A. at 18, to how his career flourished. *This is the second episode in a two-part series.Listen to Part One: The architecture that brought Frank Gehry to tears

This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. You know, a lot of very wealthy people love minimumism. I'm curious what that means, but it may be soul cleansing or something to them. Frank Gary has often been called the greatest architect. of our time. I have tried to find substitute for decoration by expressing movement, but it's not

minimalism. It's not cold and difficult. Ideas producer Mary Link had the rare opportunity of interviewing the media shy Gary in the summer of 2017 at his office in Los Angeles, California. I think that it takes a while to become secure and leave. things alone. He was born in Toronto with the name Frank Owen Goldberg, but his first wife feared the potential impact of anti-Semitism on his career and convinced him to change his last name.

It was a common tactic back then, but something he has always been a little embarrassed by. Could Frank Goldberg made it, or do you think couldn't have made it like Frank Gary did? Without the name change? Wow. I've thought about that, but since I always tell everybody, I think I, I blur that line a little bit. I don't know. Who knows? This episode explores Frank Gehry's childhood and the complicated and at times explosive relationship with his father. He was fixated on business. You know, he had to be a business person.

He had to know the value of a dollar. They always say, you don't know the value of a dollar. And somehow I was a dreamer, and he couldn't get it. I was scared of him, but I also loved him. Gary also talks about facing his own mortality and how he will keep creating until the end, which he did. Frank Gary passed away on December 5th, 2025. This episode is called Becoming Frank Gary.

Do you understand where that intuition, where creativity comes from, or is it just something? It is the second and final part of Frank Gary's conversation with Ideas producer Mary Link, recorded in 2017. Gary was 88 at the time. I can tell you where it comes from. I know everything. I mean, I was raised in the Jewish family, and my grandfather used to read Talmud to me. And the Talmud starts with why, the word why. And so the Jewish religion, the base Jewish religion, that all those guys come out of,

even the funny guys with the hats, sit around table and ask why, rabbi, this guy did this, and why that guy, and then they argue with whether he did it or not. And they do that for weeks and months and years of their lives. That curiosity of asking why about everything is embedded in our lives from childhood, if you're in a Jewish family that talks about Talmud or teaches Talmud. So I think a lot of creativity in the Jews comes from, that basic beginning. It's sort of built into

your life from those days. There's a funny scene with you, and Sydney Pollock did a documentary on you, the late, great Sydney Pollock, he was a good friend of yours as a filmmaker, and he was asking you about how you're always changing things. You start something, and you're on a project, you're constantly changing, changing, changing.

Craig and I'll go home tonight, end of it separately and we'll agonize about this and he said is it partly the why thing or is it partly neurotic well I suppose it's a little of both

what's wrong is what's wrong is if it's too easy we think we're falling into some kind of cliche or we already did it oh we already did it that's different that's different than too easy right too easy is that it's not I guess I got to suffer a little before him. Oh, God.

That's neurotic. How do you tell the difference between an aesthetic discipline and neurosis? If you've ever been a client of Franks, it's a frustrating situation, you know, because you hire Frank because you just love him and you want him to do whatever he wants to do. And people are real encouraging, oh, be far out. But he starts getting far out and they all fall in love. Oh, I love that. Yeah, but he doesn't. He wants to change it.

until it becomes a frustration game where, God, Frank, when are you going to finish this thing? It looked good 40 times, and you're still going. I think that it takes a while to become secure and leave things alone. You start out and you look at some of the first iterations, I guess. And yeah, you think that doesn't look right. I haven't seen that before. That looks weird, right? I mean, if you looked at the first fish I did, the 35-foot-long one for the passion show,

and you look at it and you say, Jesus, get rid of this guy. You know, it was kitsch and everything. So my own feelings were strongly seeing that. I saw that, and I was upset about it until I realized it was moving. and then and I wasn't the only one that realized it there was an art the head of the art museum

in Turino or somewhere in Holland I think was standing beside me and he said how did you do that other people got it I think you have to have the confidence to go forward I don't know what gives you the confidence I don't know where that happens

and I think it's just that I I never could think of an alternative, so I just stick with it or something. The confidence to go forward, to keep asking why, was something Frank learned early on. He had to. His relationship with his parents was difficult.

They often told Frank he wasn't going to amount to much that he was a dreamer. But he found refuge with his maternal grandparents. Frank would escape to his grandparents' house on Beverly Street right in the heart of downtown Toronto. to play with wooden blocks with his grandmother. They would create cities, or listen, as he's mentioned, to his grandfather reading the Talmud.

It wasn't very religious. No? No. He ran a hardware store. He was president of the shul. He officiated at all the services, high holidays and everything. He sort of ran the business up the place.

He had a hardware store. Saturday morning, I went and kept it open while he was in shul. He wasn't that religious. He was, he was, he believed in it, you know, but my grandmother was religious. She was into it, and she prepared the gifilta fish and did the fish at the market. And she also was kind of a, she went around to people's houses and wrote with a quill on their arms when they were sick. She did, she was kind of a medicine thing that she did, and she prayed. and I would go with her

where she did, you know, the little suction cups they put on your... She used to do that. She was kind of a... She did things. And she... She was kind of a healer. Yeah.

But not a... You know, she wasn't nuts. She wasn't California healer. No, no. She wasn't crazy. These would just be friends would hear something and she would go and help them.

And I don't... She didn't get paid for it or anything. The folklore on her was that she ran a foundry when she was a kid in Poland. And when I started working in Poland and got into the government people there, they did an analysis of family for me, and they found that she was, in fact, a foundry operator in LODZ. So they verified that.

There was evidence of that. Frank's family leaned to the left of the political spectrum. He recalls clandestine meetings at his grandmother's home in Toronto when he was young. She was politically involved, too. She had meetings with her. So her cousins, her first cousins were all in the schmata, they all worked at the factory. They were tailors.

And so they belonged to the unions. And so they were always having trouble with the owners. And so they would have union meetings at my grandmother's house. where they'd close the drapes. I remember it was very secretive. This tiny little house, I mean, they had these things. This is in Toronto. Toronto, yeah. They just tore the house down.

15 Beverly Street. 15 Beverly Street was only a short bike ride for young Frank from his parents' rent at home. When Frank was eight, his father moved the family to Timmons in northern Ontario for yet another business attempt, leaving behind his beloved grandparents, his refuge in Toronto. Frank at least mastered hockey up north,

which turned into a lifelong passion. But being the only Jewish boy in school was tough to say the least. He had to endure regular beatings from his schoolmates. Eventually his father's business, selling slot machines, went bust. The family had to move back to Toronto when Frank was 13.

So it was at his grandfather's synagogue where he had his bar mitzvah. Can you remember when you did your bar mitzvah, what passage it was that you did from the Talmud? Parcispora. Vahedavadanoi Elah Le Mour. And that's all I remember. What does it mean?

I can't remember what it means. Well, I did a little investigation and called a rabbi in Halifax, where I live. She told me Frank was reading a passage about atonement prior to Passover. It concerns the sacrifice of a rabbi. rare red heifer or para aduma, one without blemishes or defect. According to tradition, in order for a new temple to function with God's blessing,

a red heifer has to be sacrificed. It's an act of restoring purity in the world. In a way, you could say it foretold Frank's future, he would find redemption through the creation of new temples, or in Frank's case, secular temples. It wasn't long after finishing that reading that Frank began to question his faith. Do you remember when you stopped believing? Yeah, kind of.

I was religious until I was 13th, till the bar mitzvah. Not like the guys with the little hats and the pious and all that. I wasn't that kind of religious. You know, I was respectful of my grandmother and what they were doing. So my mother was kind of into it, my father not. My father would bring all kinds of people to the house for dinner, for lunch. He was very generous. He didn't have a lot of money, but he shared it with other people.

Sometimes to his detriment, he would get hurt for it. But my father was not involved with religion at all. But he was nice about it. He was respectful and went along with it. He didn't complain about it. So the bar mitzvah day when I went, did the moffter, and then afterwards, the old Jewish guys hanging around. I started talking to them about the mofter and the meaning of it, what I had just said, and thinking that they understood it so we could discuss it. They didn't know what the fuck I was talking about.

And they were just waiting for the schnapps. And I really got pissed off, and I went home, and I said, forget it. And you stopped believing then, do you think? I stopped being involved. Yeah. Do you ever... I don't know about believing. My closest friend in high school, Ross Honsberger, who just passed away,

was when we were in 11th grade. So what would that be from? Bar Mitz, I would have been just in high school. So I'd say a couple of years later. He was Christian, not religious. It came from a quasi-german. His mother and father were dower. He never really talked to them much. He loved coming to my house. He loved my mother. He used to hang out with us all the time. And so he and I decided to challenge religion, atheism versus theism, and we

wrote a thing. He wrote it mostly, and I have a copy of it somewhere. We went through the Bible and found inconsistencies and contradictions. We listed them. I think we had 135 or something. I suspect it was New Testament we were jamming with. So we became known for that. The word got around. And so none of the girls would go out with us.

You couldn't get them to go to the dance with us or anything. Luckily, Ross found a girlfriend in that period. They finally did get married and went to the University of Waterloo and he became a math teacher and wrote books on idiosyncratic math, really beautiful mind that he had. But he became a recluse. I could never get him to come to Toronto from Waterloo. And he got to be religious. He was teaching at church.

And I could never figure out why. And I asked him. And he's, oh, you know, I grew up or something. He said, I forget what he said. So I think it was in that period between Bar Mitzvah and starting to talk to Ross and finding my own way in physics. We were inventing all kinds of contraptions. We did a perpetual motion machine.

We decided we could make a lot of money if we could figure. and so we built stuff and how old were we 14, 15 I wonder to do physics teacher was great he went along with the whole gag and the math teachers

were so special they really supported us that was wonderful time in high school in my high school in Canada was five years so in my 50

year. It was when my father got sick. Shit hit the fan. We had to move. We were really poor by then. He just really lost everything. In fact, it was a physical confrontation between Frank and his father that precipitated that move. Frank has rarely ever spoken about that incident.

But before we hear the story, I'd like to give a little more background on Frank's father. Irving Goldberg never had it easy. He grew up, one of nine children in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. His father was a tailor who died when Irving was only nine. Irving eventually moved to Toronto to become an entrepreneur, but most of his businesses went bankrupt and the family struggled financially. Irving's health was also fragile, both physically and mentally. He had erratic mood swings. Irving could be warm and generous at times and then also be gripped by

intense rage, which would often, irrationally, get directed at his young son. Frank. He was complicated, right? He was a complex man. He was a good man. And he also, your sister says in your biography, the biography on you, that she thinks he might have been bipolar and that he was, and he picked on you emotionally and physically that he picked on you. And, I mean, that's an illness more so than the man, I would imagine. Describe your relationship with you, you were young. Were you afraid of him? Oh, we had a good relationship most of the time. somehow I was scared of him but I also loved him and we did travel together we went to

Chicago and spent time together he was fixated on business you know he had to be a business person you had to know the value of a dollar they always say you don't know the value of a dollar you've heard that and somehow I was a dreamer and he didn't couldn't get it and it bothered him and so he would take it out on me how well he did it physically

he did things hurt hit me stuff like that in Frank's biography his sister recalls an incident in the middle of the night when Frank got up to go to the bathroom tripped in the dark and broke something

and for that he was brutally beaten by his father. But Frank continued to love Irving, although he had no idea, as he said, that the shit was about to hit the fan. Can you tell me that confrontation that happened just before you had to go to L.A.?

I mean to pride too much, but it was sort of when you stood up to him. Can you tell me about that story, what happened? Oh, God. Well, he was on me about something. and he and I were alone at the house and he was just

being very difficult and very threatening and he started to hit me and I hit him back and then I got scared after I hit him back so I ran I ran out the door and ran down the street and I just assumed he'd come following me and he didn't and I went down the street

and I was cowering behind a tree or something and slowly I inched my way back and looked in the window and I saw him lying on the floor so I think my mother got home by then or something anyway we called paramedics he'd had a heart attack and

well it was pretty threatening because he was losing his business and so there was a lot of reasons for him to have a heart attack other than me hitting him and my hitting him wasn't very hard I didn't

you know I didn't sock him in the jaw or anything his his business was going in bankruptcy and it was going to be sold at auction and I think he couldn't take it was that the first time that you ever stood up to him yes yeah

because that's one thing I admire about you is that you do stand up at times I mean that is obviously very difficult that situation and painful but standing up is a brave act I suppose I didn't think of it that way at that time. For a long time, Frank blamed himself for his father's heart attack. Irving did recover, but given his fragile health, the doctors advised him to move to a warmer

climate. And so he got in the car with his brother and just left, came to California, that was it. And later, Frank and his mother and his sister joined him. At this point, the family's finances were even more dire. They first lived in a cramped two-room apartment, riddled with bedbugs. Irving's health began faltering, and soon he was unable to work at all. I think he was really an artist and wasn't a businessman himself. He was a total failure as a businessman.

There were two vectors in his family. One was the arts, and the other was something business, I guess. His sister became a fairly well-known dress designer in Florida. And if you think back to what he was doing in the evenings, he would stay up all night and paint these little horses, paper-mache horses that he was selling. And he was struggling. He was a street kid, so he only knew the slot machines

and stuff from New York, from his family. from his life there. Frank's hard childhood, especially his difficult relationships with his parents and their lack of faith in his ability to amount to anything, all coupled with his father's fits and abuse,

would lead Frank to engage in lifelong therapy sessions with L.A. psychoanalyst Milton Wexler. It's been said that Milton gave Frank a second childhood. I mean, I had anger, a lot of anger when I went to him. My anger was

Portrait was keeping quiet. I wouldn't say things. And so in the group thing they got me to explode one day and realize that. And it was a big turning point.

that's why group therapy is so good because 14 other people attacked me at the same time because I hadn't said a word for two years and they said, you're just sitting there in judgment of us and I looked at them and I thought to myself, yeah, I have been. So Frank has spent most of his adult life

working on his anger and other issues and by all accounts he's in a happy relationship with his second wife, Berta, and their two grown sons. But you get the sense, that while Frank works at being more at peace, his father is never really far away. In 2011, a party was thrown both for Frank, who'd turn 82, and for yet another one of his critically acclaimed buildings, the 74-story Manhattan skyscraper, simply called New York by Gary. There, before a crowd of cosmopolitan elites, and with his voice breaking, Frank spoke

about his father, pointing note the window toward Hell's Kitchen, a few blind blocks away where Irving was born. Irving died without ever seen any of the buildings designed by his dreamer's son, and Frank was wishing his father was there that night. There's a birthday party you have when you're 802 and you're in the building and you talked about your father

and hoping that, wishing that he could have seen that you did amount to something. Do you think he's still, is he still within you and that, do you still have that kind of relationship with him? Yeah. Yeah, I think about what he would think of all this. Yeah. I think he'd be right in here working with me. Oh.

I think that's where it comes from, from him. In the eight years following this interview, Frank Gehry continued introducing the world to his visionary architecture. The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Frank Gehry's last major cultural building, will open in 2026. You're listening to CBC Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specksavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night

drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little.

You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. To mark the astonishing achievements of Canadian-born architect Frank Gary, Ideas is presenting our 2017 series Master of His Own Design, produced by Mary Link in conversation with Gary at his studio in California. Misfortune and tragedy may have been the impetus for the Goldbergs to move to L.A.,

but I wonder if Frank Goldberg would have become the world-famous Frank Gary if they hadn't moved there. L.A. was vibrant, a young city then erupting with new buildings and pioneering designs. Frank began taking odd jobs, like installing kitchen nooks for 75 cents an hour. Then he began taking free night classes and drawing at Los Angeles City College. And eventually, he was accepted into the University of Southern California School of Architecture, skipping first year and going directly into second year. After years of being told by his parents that he had never been,

amount to anything. Frank says this was the first time people were saying good things about him. But his education was somewhat limited. The mantra was modernism. The past was barely and rarely considered to have any value. You were taught by the modernist in California at architecture school and architectural history was, I guess, not even taught really. We had one hour a week in architectural history and the slides were terrible. and so the buildings were not seductive in the slides that we were shown and you know sort of it's after the war we all we'd been through the war and it was time to make a new beginning and that was in the air

everybody was trying to find a new beginning we had a lot of industrial capability because of the war that we didn't have before We could fabricate glass and steel and mechanical equipment and mechanical systems that were unheard of before. And to build it, it was easier to build them as just boxes. I think that one can build a box, but I think you can have heart and soul in them. And somehow the modern movement took off

with some people worrying about humanity and then 98% of the world didn't care. Just wham-bam. Thank you, ma'am. It created a cold environment. And luckily, you know, we had plants, so we soften things up with plants, Mother Nature. People fill their homes with chotchkes and art,

and so they make them more livable that way. And some style, Modelistic models prevail or find their way into the modernism and warm up in the case of some housing they put hip roofs on with cute little details.

I think either people don't really care and we're flogging a dead horse and maybe that's where we're at. I think if you look back, Frank Lloyd Wright had issues with the world around him and was trying to his best to do humanity. He developed a language of it.

Whether he liked it or not, it was a model for a livable environment and an exciting and beautiful livingable environment. Very few others did it. Corb did it in Rochamp, but in the housing he did, it was still rather cold. I mean, we are in modernism, whether you like it or not.

You know, the buildings are boxes, and they're covered with glass, and for the most part. The glass is reflective and helps with the heating and Title 24 and all that stuff. You know, a lot of very wealthy people love minimalism. I'm curious what that means, but it may be soul cleansing or something to them. But it's very interesting phenomenon to me that they do that. Because some of the best examples of it, I'm not going to mention names, but have done extraordinary, beautiful sculptured buildings that are minimal, deadly minimal.

And that overpowers the art. You put a painting in it, and it just, for me, it kills it. And I've had other people say the same. And it's the paradigm that's most sought after by museum directors, There's a minimal environment, just white walls, box, simple details, rectilinear for art. And that's kind of... And there's something to that. I'm not dismissing it.

It's like I've done it. At AGO, we did it. The Lauren Harris Gallery is about as good as I've done in that genre of them. Because the light is perfect. and we really worked with it to make it like that. It's just what goes with it in these galleries is it doesn't all have to be like that. There can be some relief.

Frank also wanted relief from the minimalist approach to architecture when he graduated from University of Southern California. He was restless, craving something more, and that yearning set him on a new career, path. City planning. Well, I was a do-gooder. I came out of school, you know, I wanted to solve the poor people's problems. And so I thought if you could become part of the city government, you could have an impact on the city development. And I always believe and still do that it doesn't cost extra

to do that, to make it more humane. You just have to say, I want to do that. That's like I'm going to have hot water and cold water. I've got to have hot water and cold water. I got to have drinking water. And I've got to have architectural beauty. It's part of the same. You've got to have it. It's how you live.

You've got to be able to go, get up in the morning, sit at your dining room table or wherever you do and have breakfast and feel good about it and feel like you're in some kind of friendly place with your family. You want to do public housing too, right? Yeah. So I was doing public housing at Gruen's office. Victor Gruen, the widely acclaimed Austrian-born architect based in L.A.

So Frank decides to leave Gruins and pursue studies in city planning, a move also encouraged by two former professors. My teachers at SC, Garrett Ekpo and Simon Eisner, Simon Eisener was city planning, Garrett-Ekbo's landscape, said, your interests are more humanity and not about doing capital. A architecture that has, you know, for rich people and whatever. I forget how they characterized it. But I always said, I don't want to really do rich people's houses

because you're not solving anything, you know. And little did I know that the couple of rich, so-called rich people's houses I did, and I didn't do too many of them, allowed me to experiment with language that I wouldn't have been able to. Anyway, the feeling was architecture school was okay, but if I could get into city planning and get behind the curtains, I could be more effective. So I applied for city planning.

City planning, Harvard was a big deal. They had a separate department, Reginald Isaac's, well-known government planner. He did big projects in Chicago. He was an art collector. He was a close friend of Jackson Pollock. He collected his works. He had all the right stuff for me to connect to,

except he was a real asshole. He was pompous. I didn't find that out until I went to the school. And I couldn't relate to him at all. Then this class was doing a project in Worcester. the town center in Worcester. And so I approached it like an architectural design project, very much based on what I had done at Gruen's for Texas.

We did it downtown in Texas. There was a famous project at Gruen's office that I worked at, where you closed the streets and made the downtown walk a bowl. Because Victor came from Vienna, and that's what they did around the cathedral in Vienna, and he was bringing that to, with the US and I worked on that project

and now I'm in city planning and we're doing downtown Worcester and so I started doing that instead of the government thesis and all that stuff so we had a presentation

of our work each student presented their work and they had Jose Louis Sert who was the architecture dean at the time Corb's best friend. We were all impressed. We were going to present to Jose Luis Sert.

I got up and showed my master plan for downtown Worcester and Elliott, Charles Elliott, the third, the great-great-grandson of the Elliott that founded Harvard, looked like Charles Lawton, kind of. He said, Mr. Gary, you obviously missed the point. Frank's design was idealistic. He wanted pedestrians back in the city center. It's now a design norm in city planning.

But back then, Frank's professors at Harvard had no time for revolutionary designs. And Charles Elliott III told him, Would you please sit down, next student, please. He insulted me in front of cert, in front of this class and everything. And his office was up like a ship's ladder. He opened the door, there's ships there, and then at the top. There was Charles Elliot. The third, looking like, Charles Lawton.

I was pissed. I opened the door and started screaming at him. And I said, don't you ever fucking do that to me again? You know, and I let him have it really badly. And I slammed the door. When I turned around, there were about 50 students there watching me. I then walked into Mr. Sert's office and said, that was egregious thing he did.

you must help me get out of city planning into architecture and he said I'm afraid you'll have to apply and take your turn I'm there with a wife and two kids and I know money I'm on the GI Bill going back all the way back to California and it wasn't going to happen so he was an asshole so I slammed the door on him and walked out

I then went to the school and said can I get out of this thing no you have to pay the tuition you're committed I said can I just audit classes and they said sure and they gave me a little pass that I could go for the rest of the year audit

classes which is the best thing I ever did I suggest people that go to Harvard should do that instead of taking the classes because I heard some great talks by Oppenheimer the Prime Minister of England

Frank of course never did become a city planner but he did enjoy that year of auditing and feeding his sensationalable curiosity. Socialist guy who ran for president. So Frank moved back to L.A., opened up his own architectural firm and started making a name for himself. Frank Gary was 68 when the Guggenheim and Bilbao opened and he continues to design spectacular buildings all around the world,

yet the shadow he casts can be a burden for other architects. Frank, there was an architect told me once he said, you know, he gets tired of people always coming to him now and asking for iconic buildings. And I think he's referring to your work and that he can't, that's not him and that he's sick of being asked about that. Do you understand what he's talking about?

Sure. I think there's a couple of words that have hit the general public they love to use. One is iconic. So I get called and said they want an icon. iconic building. But the Greeks must have had that. You know, they built a temple. That was an iconic building. So Bill Bell had a special need for a museum, and they wanted it to be special. They asked me if it could be like Sydney Opera House. Could I build a building that would help them

with their, the economics of their city? And I said I'd do my best. I didn't know. If I could do such a thing, but, you know, it didn't mean spending money. It meant doing a design, a kind of special character. I don't think it's fair to ask architects to do that if they're not tending to do stuff like that. I don't think architecture should all be like that. I think every city should have a nice library, a nice city hall, a nice courthouse. house, the hospital, a museum that are special so that people know these are the symbols of that city, right? And that's kind of historicist done in the Romans. They did amphitheaters. So a concert

hall merits that kind of attention. I think that the rest should be humane and pleasant and worry about where the sun angles are and how it deals with light. And all of that is keeping it kind of simple, not, hey, Mom, look at me. There's beauty in ordinary, do you think? Sure. Many would say that Frank's own home, known famously as the Gary residence, embodies this idea of beauty in the ordinary. It was a fairly plain suburban bungalow in Santa Monica when he bought it in the 1970.

But with only $50,000, Frank transformed it into well a piece of modern art with odd protruding structures, metal wrapping, and yes, chain link. The day I drove by the host, I couldn't help but notice that it's also a little run down. But it continues to be a mecca for architecture fans the world over, who often come there on kind of a pilgrimage. Frank has lived there for 40 years, even though from time to time he talks about finally designing a home for his family. He's even bought a lot in Venice.

He told the New York Times in 2005 that he was emotionally trapped in the house because he had become this icon. So I was surprised when he told me the big news. Are you really moving out? Well, my son designed a house for us because he wouldn't go to architecture school. school. So we gave him this project to do. And it's designed as a spec house, but it turned out

really great, and I think we're going to move in for a while. I don't know if we'll be able to, it's pretty big for two of us to rattle around, but we thought for a year or so we try it. We're going to keep the other house, so it's close by, so we can crawl back if we need to. The new house, we've been going there now. We go there for dinner. We haven't slept there yet. I think we're going to try it this week. The beds are made.

It's already. It's crazy. I think it's going to be nice to be there for a while because it's got grounds. It's big and has a nice spa. But the million-dollar question is, does the new hosts have chain link? There's chain link in the front temporarily

until the plants come up and then it goes away. The front gate is going to be an artist done chain link thing where it's going to be a tapestry in chain link and in metal. And then there is a requirement around the pool so the kids can't get in. There's legal, so we have to put up a fence. the chain link. Good for you. You're not abandoning the chain link. There's a thing in the Simpsons, which I love. It's a great, great show on you. And then sometimes... I live next door to

that guy now. Oh, Matt, what's his face? He's two doors away from me. From your new place? Yeah. From your big, new fancy place. Yeah. My new rich guy placed. Um, it was, it was brilliant. But did you really regret doing the Simpsons because... No. When did I say that? Your biographer said that, and I said, how could he regret it doing the Simpsons? Because you were making fun of yourself, but in a really beautiful, funny way.

I don't know where... I don't remember. I mean, who knows? I say things. Yeah. Sometimes. But, no, I had fun with it. I've got pictures of it up.

You know, I tell everybody. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill. Snoopy, stationary. Dear Mr. Gare, would you please build a concert hall for our town? We may not be the biggest city or the prettiest, but we were the first city in America to abandon the metric system. At this point, Frank, in disgust, has crumpled up Marge's letter and throws it to the ground. But then he looks at the crumpled piece of paper and sees the design for the Springfield Concert Hall.

Most of us viewers just see the crumpled paper, mind you. Frank Gary, you're a genius. Behold, the new Springfield Concert Hall. Do you think sometimes genius is a loaded word because often with your name is genius? I don't know if it's their pressure associated. Is it too big a word for a mortal or do you just ever? I never think of myself as any kind of genius. But that was written into the script.

I didn't write that. Oh, I know that it was for fun, but it's because people often call you that. But are you genius to death sometimes when people are always calling you a genius? I mean, it's a huge compliment. No, I don't pay attention to that. I don't hear it. If they say it, I don't hear it. Do you also have to have the confidence, or even when people sometimes say that you're insecurity,

you've talked about insecurity, but you have to have the confidence to be ridiculed because if you're different, you're going to be ridiculed. And Frank, Gary, as great as you are, and it's sort of a given that you are very well respected. People love to go after you. But that's what you have to accept, don't you? I surely get a lot of people saying funny things about me. Do you know what I've got to find in my notes here.

There was one that was one of my favorite things, and I've got to find it, hold on one sec. This probably was in this, that something said that, your biographer found. Where was it? Okay. So once you were asked, supposedly you have this letter in your archives here,

you were asked by a watch manufacturer fossils to design a watch. Oh, is that it? No, that's it. Oh. That's it. It looks like, okay, so it's one of those fancy kind of computer watches.

But you didn't continue doing it, right? No. They made a bunch of them, And I don't know why they stopped. You stopped it. I did. You stopped it, and they were really angry. They wanted to do big, huge, lots of watches and make you tons of money.

I did a bunch of sketches thinking I would pick one and I would refine it, like I did this one. And they just took it and went to China and made it. They made three or four different ones, and I got upset. I said, you can't put my name on that. I didn't really do it. It's just the big first idea, you can't do that. And so I guess we had a sort of a, it wasn't as big falling out. I just said, if that's the way you only work, I can't work that way.

So you have a letter that they wrote, and I can't believe you said it, and this is in your biography, and they wrote somebody, an agent with the fossil company, said, quote, the opportunities you dismissed could have created a well-known worldwide icon. We do not believe that a building in Spain, no matter how famous, will place you in the same genre as perhaps Armani or Ralph Lauren. I don't remember that. You could have been to somebody. I could have. I could have been a contender.

Yeah. If you look at the history, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright was beat up a lot, the Corp was beat up a lot. All the great architects were left out of the big decisions in city building. There aren't a lot of great city Frank Lloyd Wright buildings or Corbusier building. So I think probably mediocrity is the... theme of the day for most people is that to do with developers too do you think it's about greed and money and just not yeah but it's used as i mean if you can build anything and get away with it and rent it and it's a business deal and why would you waste your time that the difference is that

we've developed this software and and way of doing things and it's now very much used in the in the field we can eliminate change orders well that's you know on a building we eliminated 18% in in china in new york we did all the skin for zero change orders and the structure for seven change orders that's saving money so that that's the money makes the difference if you're responsible, you can save and make the building architecturally interesting. So you've got to want to do it, and you've got to want to have a construction industry and clients that want to do it. Most them don't. It's easier. I mean, I've confronted them, some of the biggest developers. They'd rather pay the 15%. They know what it is. It's pro forma. Okay, we got it. We don't have to think about it. And we

get a Schleppy building, it's okay, we can rent it and blah, blah, blah. They don't believe, I mean, there's, I get it all the time. People look at me and say, you can't do that. You don't know what you. You know, we've been doing this for years. We know how to do it. And we, once we get in and do it, we, they see it. We prove it. But even after you prove it, they sometimes just go back to the old system because it's easier for them. They don't have to think. that's sad so what does that say about our society it's not

about me or anything it's about the world we live in and what we think about for someone who has always look forward in your creative ambitions and designs how does that square with mortality at 88 what are your thoughts

about that final deadline Well, I can't deny that I think about it. And miraculously, I'm still walking and swimming and working. I have a lot of friends that hit my age that aren't, and a lot of them aren't here anymore. I was close to Milton all through the years. He told me keep working. He lasted until 98, so. that was a good role model

and Philip Johnson as well kept telling me just keep working don't you dare stop and so I think that kind of encouragement from two people I really loved and respected

and they're kind of ventures I figure skyrockets that's how you go out we took Milton's ashes to see. It was beautiful evening.

And I told him that's what I want. I think about all the things I'm going to miss. Because I know what's, you know, if we get rid of this Trump guy, who may in the end have done something good, who knows, by shaking up the establishment. We needed that. If we didn't have to take the hatred stuff here, he energizes that comes with it.

I'm not planning a wind down for the office. I'm planning just the opposite. We're talking about an expansion. So that's how I'm thinking about it. So sky rockets. Frank, Gary passed away at age 96 on December 5th, 2025. This is the second and final part of our 2017 series, Master of His Own Design,

conversations with Frank Gary, conversations he had with Ideas producer Mary Link over a couple of days at his Los Angeles studio. We also have a few videos of that visit, which you can watch on our website, cbc.ca.ca. slash ideas. Technical production, Dave Field and Sam McNulty. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.