In Gehry, a model architect

LOS ANGELES - Surely this can't be Frank O. Gehry talking about one of his museum designs - not the acclaimed architect of the swirling Guggenheim Bilbao, master of the titanium ski jump, chain-link rebel, and special celebrity guest voice on

The Simpsons

:

"The curves were killing the flow," he said during an interview in his hangar-size Marina del Rey studio. "You couldn't hang the pictures properly. So I came in and squared off the galleries."

What Gehry straightened out was Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum, a charmingly quirky, amoeba-shaped, '60s-era building by a little-known local architect. It was the late 1990s, just a few months before Gehry's magical ocean liner docked on Bilbao's waterfront and made him as famous as an architect can be. Gehry reorganized the Norton Simon's galleries into a classic railroad-car format, finished them with fine woods and French limestone, and touched up the exterior with a coat of paint.

In most circumstances, Gehry's work at the Norton Simon wouldn't be cause for discussion. But it was those elegantly understated Pasadena galleries, not the ebullient Bilbao or his swinging Disney Hall, that convinced the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year that Gehry was the right guy to carve a vast new gallery complex from the hillside below its great front plaza, a project that is expected to take a decade and cost around $500 million.

Many in the museum world scratched their heads when the commission was announced. Who would hire this playful sculptor of tumbling forms to design something that could be largely invisible from the outside? And why would anyone hold up the impeccable, but sedate, Norton Simon as an inspiration?

The cynical response was: only Philadelphia, a city that abhors a show-off.

But Gehry, who offered an exclusive first glimpse at the design's progress during a wide-ranging 90-minute conversation last month, suggested that Philadelphians shouldn't underestimate what he might accomplish within the bowels of the Fairmount hill. The snowy-haired, 78-year-old architectural Lt. Columbo, who was dressed in a rumpled black T-shirt, vowed that he would leave his personal tag somewhere on the classical garage that is the Philadelphia Art Museum.

"We will set off a bomb. But I can't tell what kind till the fat lady sings. I think we'll make it memorable. Anne wants it to feel special, not like the remodeling of an old building," Gehry said, referring to museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt. "She wants the project to have the same impact as Bilbao, but underground."

D'Harnoncourt has frequently compared the museum's expansion to the Louvre's subterranean galleries, topped by I.M. Pei's iconic pyramid. The glass structure functions as an entrance sign, a front door, and skylight. Gehry might come up with a Philadelphia equivalent, she suggested.

"How he'll express his Gehry-ness is up to him," d'Harnoncourt said at another point.

After a year on the job, Gehry acknowledged that he is still a long way from detonating a bomb. But he has been working toward it at his own obsessively deliberative pace.

Gehry likes to make models, lots of models. He and creative partner Edwin Chan, who oversaw Bilbao, have been building scale mock-ups of the Philadelphia museum in their California studio, some bigger than an office cubicle. They're so realistic, you might forget the Venice boardwalk isn't far away.

In one of those models, two broad paths run from Eakins Oval and cut deep into the museum's east-facing hillside. The ramped paths, which flank the Great Steps, would offer street-level access to the area below the plaza and an alternative to climbing the steps.

The museum, which declined to release images of the models, intends to capture the space below the plaza, now partly filled with dirt, so it can install new galleries for large sculpture, contemporary collections and Asian art. The excavation would give the overstuffed museum 50 percent more exhibition space. It also would enable the museum to reclaim a gorgeous vaulted and tiled corridor that runs under the plaza, toward Kelly Drive.

But, as Gehry pointed out, providing a direct entrance to the new lower galleries won't be much of an accomplishment if visitors feel as if they're wandering through darkened catacombs.

So he and Chan built a scale model of the plaza, a gathering place that offers postcard views of the Parkway and City Hall. Around the plaza's rim, they inserted a wide strip of glass. It's as if an earthquake had created a crevasse separating the patio from the building. They're now studying the skylight to see how sun would filter into the galleries.

Not that Gehry and Chan are focusing all their efforts on the museum's famous east facade. They've also built a model to study the romantic, arched doorway on the museum's north side.

From the foot of the model's north driveway, a squiggle-shaped bridge spans Kelly Drive and connects the long-closed vaulted corridor with the new Perelman Building annex. Yet another model shows several small, boxy galleries marching away from the museum's west facade.

Gehry said the odds are slim that these ideas would survive the design process. The models are the equivalent of a novelist's early draft, an architect's way of thinking out loud. And no one does as much verbalizing as Gehry. When New York's Guggenheim gave him a show in 2001, it included hundreds of his "drafts," from wads of bunched toilet paper to precision-cut scale models.

In the popular imagination, Gehry is often seen as an artist who sculpts thrilling volumes. But he bristles that the image is too limited. Gehry says he takes pride in being a problem-solver. He also has designed plenty of symmetrical, modernist buildings. Models help him work out the best architectural answers.

While Gehry is sure to construct many more, a visit to the Norton Simon offered some clues about what d'Harnoncourt is expecting. Like the Philadelphia museum, a large part of the Norton Simon is wedged into an earthen bank. In its 1969 incarnation, by Thorton Ladd, the lower floor was a murky realm. The street-level galleries were hardly much brighter.

In keeping with the aesthetic of the time, Ladd designed free-flowing, open-plan galleries. They were intriguing spaces, but a terrible environment for hanging paintings, especially the museum's superb Renaissance collection.

In the early 1990s, Simon's widow, the actress Jennifer Jones, called her old friend Gehry, begging for advice. He ended up completely redesigning the interiors - gratis - as a favor to Jones. The curvaceous spaces were reconfigured with geometric precision, and the galleries flow effortlessly.

And now you never miss the California sun.

Because curators fear natural light will damage artworks, many museums hermetically seal their galleries from the sun. That bothers Gehry. "Ninety percent of museums have gone to sterilized hospital interiors that everyone thinks are so deferential to art, and I think are toxic to art," he complained.

At the Norton Simon, Gehry outsmarted light-averse museum curators by inserting oculus openings over the center point of the galleries The light is sufficient to buoy the spirit of visitors, but the perimeter walls, where paintings are hung, remain out of the sun's range.

It's lovely, though you can't help thinking of other fine architects who might have done a good job. So what prompted Philadelphia's museum to hire Gehry?

"What Frank did was to make the spaces in the Norton Simon hospitable to the works of art," d'Harnoncourt explained. "It's clear that Frank loves the art, and knows the art. . . . He thinks hard about what a space will be used for."

So hard, he intends to spend a week soon at the Philadelphia museum, wandering its galleries and absorbing the inter-relationships among its holdings. D'Harnoncourt compared Gehry to Matisse, and his design for the Philadelphia museum to the painter's Lady in a Blue Dress, which has 80 versions under its visible layer.

At that rate, Gehry still has about 77 more models to go.