Some time around 1870 Frank Lloyd Wright (b.1867) was given a set of Froebel building blocks by his mother. He reckoned that playing with them set his imagination on the road his architecture would follow. Some sixty years later the grandmother of another Frank - Frank Gehry (b.1929) - poured out a pile of wood scraps for him to make things with. Today you can see him in Sydney Pollack's documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry cutting and bending sheets of card and sticking them together to make models - inventing on the fly like a child at nursery school. Both men had trouble with received modes of architecture. Lloyd Wright's work was critically sidelined by the version of Modernism that émigré architects brought to America. He didn't like it. Gehry's playfulness comes at the other end of the story. He was one of the postmodern architects whose work challenged the status quo that Frank Lloyd Wright had seen taking hold.

LRB 31 July 2008 | PDF Download