I finally had the chance last night to sit down and watch Sketches of Frank Gehry (thankyou PBS), and without a doubt it was one of the most inspirational things I've watched in a long time. I'm a big fan of his architecture but there are so many things covered in the movie that are so applicable to the day to day job of making stuff for brands: the challenge of turning the three dimensional into the two dimensional (and vice versa), his acceptance (as he describes it with 'maturity') that his best work came from collaboration, his sources of inspiration, his belief that the biggest impact on any project is made by the client (they get the work they deserve, so choose your clients wisely).
Three scenes in particular have stayed with me:
1. The opening scene where he talks about how hard it is to start a project and the tyranny of the blank sheet of paper - avoidance, delay, denial as he's scared he doesn't know what to do. And then you start and look at what you've done and think that wasn't too bad. It's all about the importance of doing not thinking.
2. His description of why he admires painters: the moment of truth where you have the canvas on your easel, you have a brush with a palette of colors and what do you do? What's that first move? I love that dangerous place.
3. His three ingredients of what makes something 'wrong' - it's too easy, falling into some cliche or we already did it.
I watched this last night as well... kind of stumbled across it... and was mesmerized. The process he goes through with architecture is what we've been talking about in developing interactive projects: planning and modelling (in our case, design and implementation) need to go hand-in-hand, not one after the other.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who saw the video. You can catch a preview of the video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu9orvtStdY
Posted by: Stephen Landau | September 28, 2006 at 12:15 PM