Here we look at some of the architectural highlights from THE ARCHITECT.

Frank Gehry

"98 percent of what gets built and designed today is pure shit."


Amen, brother, amen.


I’m talking, of course, of Frank. Fucking. Gehry.

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​You may know his work best for The Guggenheim in Bilbao, undoubtably the star of the Bond film, The World Is Not Enough.

That made the architect a "starchitect", a title Gehry loathes, and gave its name to the “Bilbao effect” – a phenomenon whereby cultural investment plus showy architecture is supposed to equal economic uplift for cities down on their luck.

Gehry is from Toronto, but is the quintessential L.A. Architect. Consider his own home in Santa Monica, which gave an early showcase of his unique style…

A great way to get to better know Gehry and his work method is via filmmaker Sydney Pollack’s 2006 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry. The film follows Gehry over the course of five years - it's worth a rent. 

I admire his work with chain link fencing, his championing of cardboard in making his eponymous furniture, his use of metals like lead-copper and zinc cladding.

Tin House, or Ron Davis house, Malibu, celebrates another Gehry obsession: corrugated iron. He is a champion of materials that are overlooked because it’s used in great quantities and there’s denial about it - people hate it, so that draws him to it. Like Jasper Johns, Gehry is adept at using junk material to make wonderful works of art.  

What he achieved there is stunning - and, it worked. That’s so often an oversight by architects, who favour their own design ambitions over the needs of their clients. Tin House burned down in the Woolsey fire of 2018, so I addressed that tragedy by way of putting the project front and centre in THE ARCHITECT - it's the first place that my lead characters, Sawyer and Charli, go to.

In my story, a benevolent arts patron rebuilt it to exacting detail from Gehry’s plans. I paused briefly about doing that - eg Meis' Barcelona Pavilion, which was reconstructed in the 1980's by a group of Catalan architects, based on historical drawings and rediscovered footings on the site. While the reconstruction has been a popular tourist destination, it's also has been controversial among architects, critics, and historians. Some hailed it as a revived masterpiece, some condemned it as a "fake". “This building is not supposed to exist,” asserted Paul Goldberger at the time. During planning, Philip Johnson wondered, “The problem before us is should a dream be realized or not? We have made such a myth of that building. Shouldn’t it be left in the sacred vault of the memory bank?” 

After all, I could have set that sequence between my two lead characters in any number of architecturally significant locations around LA. But I chose it for the reasons that it showed a kind of respect for the architecture, a sense that no matter the costs we can rebuild, that legacy mattered, that memory, significance, hope, and obligation could co-exist.

In every city I visit, Gehry’s works is among those I seek out to experience. It takes a lot for me to say, that of the time of this writing, the 92 year old Gehry is my favourite living architect. Prior to that it would have been I.M. Pei (died 2019 , aged 102), and before that Oscar Niemeyer (died 2012, aged 104) was my previous favourite until he passed.

That’s not to say Gehry is the best right now, nor that there are others (Ando, Koolhaas, Foster, et al) with a long and incredible body of work, but looking over such a long career, and what’s been produced, and his approach and method, that’s why I’d put him at the top. Gehry is not a natural fit for my own design aesthetic. I must say I have form and function front and centre in every aspect of my thinking (“The house,” Le Corbusier famously said, is a machine for living in.”). Same goes with my tastes in literature - I’m firmly in the Harold Bloom camp of literary criticism that asks “is this good?”… Mentioning Bloom reminds me, who would be my favourite living author? Cormac McCarthy, aged 88 - and for the same reasons as I gave for Gehry. Are there better, younger, authors out there? Sure. But judging a lifetime body of work, right now, it’s Cormac. But more of that another day. 

​Gehry’s won every award, frost the Pritzker, to the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He’s got like 20 honorary doctorates. A giant. He loves to fail, and follow his intuitions and mistakes and discoveries to find architecture that works. Being told he can’t do something excites him, and he’s always conscious of context of place - something many architects merely pay lip service to, in favour of designing for how it will be photographed and magazined.

I.M. Pei photoshopped finger to support Gehry.

For me, Gehry straddles a curious divide. He’s shown with limited budgets what he can do with everyday materials, and he has the courage to push his designs for massive budgets. He's a design legend, which is why the first place that Sawyer and Charli visit in THE ARCHITECT is a Gehry. 



As the President of the University of Southern California told Gehry "...After George Lucas, you are our most prominent graduate”. I mean, how many architects have been immortalised on The Simpsons? (Gehry voiced himself in the 2005 episode called "The Seven-Beer Snitch", in which he designs a concert hall for Springfield.) May he design until he nods off at the drawing board.

Oscar Niemeyer photoshopped finger to support Gehry.

The Farnsworth House.

Designed by one of my all-time favourite architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, between 1945 and 1951, the Farnsworth House is 55 miles southwest of Chicago, set on a 60-acre estate site adjoining the Fox River, near the city of Plano, Illinois. 

​The design inspired much of the international and modernist movement - that whole notion of paring back and editing when analysing necessary form and function. As far as architectural aphorisms go, Mies's 1947 'Less is More' seems to succinctly define the modernist ethic. Mies confessed that he had "learned the great form" from Behrens, the quest for which had become a leitmotif for art at the turn of the century, promising to unify all modes of cultural expression. Influential on design that followed, and certainly my own aesthetic as both a designer and writer. Along with Meis's Barcelona Pavilion, and Johnson's Glass House, Farnsworth is one of my favourite pieces of small-scale architecture. Here's a good book about the Farnsworth House.

Some of you may think it looks familiar - the film JUSTICE LEAGUE built their own version. I like that they gave it the Bruce Wayne/Batman treatment with all the dark tones, which works as a kind of inversion, reflection, and shadow of the original.

This reminded me of what ARM did with their design of the west wing of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, which is a near exact replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, except that it is black. Proof that architecture, like novels, films, music - any art - is constantly being reinterpreted and inspiring the next creators.