Architecture has a long tradition of famous figures working well into their old age but sometimes it's best to know when to stop, writes Catherine Slessor.
Though it seems like only yesterday that the ribbon was being cut on the Bilbao Guggenheim, Frank Gehry turned 95 at the end of February.
Architecture's original enfant terrible, the charismatic scavenger who audaciously ornamented his Santa Monica house with chain-link fencing and propelled Bilbao into the European short-break big league, Gehry might now be better described as un vieux terrible, unrepentantly giving journalists the finger at press conferences and designing fatuous, limited edition handbags for Louis Vuitton.
If Gehry matches Niemeyer, that's another nine years of terrible handbags
Along with others of his generation, Gehry shows no signs of easing up and going gently into that good night. At 88 years young, Norman Foster recently assumed the helm of Domus for 2024 as part of the magazine's centenary project to devolve its editorship to 10 starchitects over 10 years.
Though Foster is no longer able to pilot his own plane, he is regularly pictured on his Instagram feed being choppered over cities, sketchbook in hand, sustaining the impression that he is as engaged and productive as he ever was. Editing Domus is merely another prestigious side hustle.
Historically, architecture is an old man's game: IM Pei was 102 when he died, Philip Johnson 98, Frank Lloyd Wright 91 and Mies van der Rohe 83 (a relative stripling). Who can say how long Le Corbusier (77) may have lasted if he hadn't gone for that fateful dip in the Med?
Famously, Oscar Niemeyer kept going until he was 104, an astonishing span by any stretch of the imagination. If Gehry matches Niemeyer, that's another nine years of terrible handbags.
Around the millennium, American design magazine Metropolis produced a "Nine over 90" issue, a riposte to the more ubiquitous "40 under 40" format, in which there was no shortage of active nonagenarian architects and designers to ponder the contradictions of still working at their age. It included Morris Lapidus (98), Julius Shulman (90), and, inevitably, Philip Johnson (then 94).
Holed up in his New Canaan Glass House, working three days a week in New York and lunching at his corner table in the Four Seasons, Johnson's regime was that of someone at least 30 years younger. His admirers attributed his longevity and spryness to his vampiric interest in keeping a beady eye on successive younger generations in order to burnish his credentials as a tastemaker.
There should be nothing inherently dismaying about older people keeping going
By definition, architects are late bloomers. In the UK, it takes around 10 years to train and qualify, then perhaps another 10 to find your feet. If you've designed and built something by the age of 40, you're doing well.
But once on track and getting work, as Gehry, Foster and others amply demonstrate, it's perfectly possible to chunter on for another half-century. A typical architectural career arc tends to follow the rock star trajectory: youthful anonymity, exploding onto the scene, the difficult second album, cruise control and then, finally, recycling your greatest hits.
In a society rife with ageism, there should be nothing inherently dismaying about older people keeping going. Indeed, as the pensionable age inches inexorably upwards, the fantasy of retiring in your 50s or 60s is now just that.
But if you've done it all and made your pile, why continue hacking at the coalface? The Bilbao Guggenheim could have been a career-culminating moment for the then-68 year old Gehry. Instead he regarded it as a starting gun, going on to deliver a succession of increasingly indulgent and self-parodic schemes, including Seattle's Experience Music Project, described by Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over and died", and the bloated extravagance of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a costly car crash of a building inelegantly hunkered in Paris's Bois de Boulogne.
Like many starchitects of his era, Gehry has become a brand, plugged into the support structure of a huge international practice, which needs its ageing goose to keep laying those golden eggs. Since architecture is a collective endeavour, the old master is perpetually surrounded by scores of assistants, so for any slowing down that might occur, there are always plenty of obliging younger hands and minds to pick up the pace. These days, as Gehry tosses off insults and napkin sketches, you wonder how much of him is actually present in any of his designs.
There is a season and a time for everything
If such figureheads stagger on interminably, it also impinges on the ability of talented younger architects, toiling all hours in their firms, to develop a name for themselves. The starchitect whose genius and reputation might once have been a benevolent impetus to those in their orbit becomes something altogether less palatable by the time they are slapping their name on work performed by an army of underlings.
Unless you have the misfortune to expire prematurely – Zaha Hadid dying at 65 is perhaps the most conspicuous recent example — bowing out gracefully is a rare thing in the starchitect firmament. Some time before he died in 2021, Richard Rogers quietly quit the stage through ill health, and a well-oiled succession plan swung into action.
In 2022, the practice name formally changed to RSHP. "We wanted to avoid the situation where the name of the practice is someone who died 100 years ago," said Rogers. "Architecture is a living thing. If I want to leave something to the future, it has to be able to change."
Ending something is always hard; it takes courage to disengage cruise control. At the end of 2013, design collective FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) announced that it was splitting after 23 years. Rather like the Beatles break up, shockwaves reverberated around the architectural establishment; the Architects' Journal even published a memorial issue, with an ironic funeral wreath spelling out "FAT" on the cover.
Since then, the solo careers of Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, FAT's merry pranksters, have been avidly scrutinised (rather like the Beatles), but in retrospect, it was the right thing to do, as they had outgrown the punk ethos of the original project.
Acknowledging that there is a season and a time for everything has to be more admirable than whirling incessantly and uncaringly on, never knowing when to stop.
Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the 20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.
The photo is by J l Cereijido/EPA courtesy of Shutterstock.
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