Who’s most irked by the Frank Gehry backlash currently underway in press rooms from Sydney to Spruce Street? Why, Frank Gehry, of course. At a press conference in Oviedo, Spain, Gehry replied to one journalist’s implication that Gehry’s architecture was just about spectacle with a spectacle of his own: He gave the journalist the middle finger.
A grumpy Gehry (who later apologized and blamed his behavior on jet lag) went on to explain that “98 percent of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit.” If only every architectural press conference were so interesting!
Gehry’s also ruffled some feathers in Chicago, penning an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune that chides a public skeptical about George Lucas’ proposed Museum of Narrative Art. “Please do not dismiss it because it doesn’t look like something you’ve never seen before,” Gehry admonished from the page—one he shares with Blair Kamin, the Tribune‘s Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic, a design commentator with his own harsh words about the museum as presented thus far.
