While Frank Gehry is a fairly renowned contemporary architect, he is certainly not a conformist. It is illustrated in Sketches of Frank Gehry that he had a spirit and vision more akin to artists (who he tended to get along with well) than to other architects (who as a community would often be very critical of his work).
Sketches of Frank Gehry is Sydney Pollack's first and, as far as I can tell, only documentary to date. Many people had approached Frank Gehry with the idea of filming a documentary about him, but when he decided he would do a documentary, he turned to his friend Sydney Pollack and asked him to film it. Sydney Pollack was hesitant, explaining that he hadn't done documentaries before and didn't know anything about Architecture. Frank Gehry responded that that's why he was the perfect one to film it.
Sketches of Frank Gehry tells the tale of a very imaginative and creative individual whose gift in creating architecture stems from being able to readily determine what he likes and what he doesn't like... the ability to "play" with design in an artistic manner. He has initial concept sketches of designs that look very much like the final product and final products that look very much like fanciful sketches. While I found a lot of the details of his personal life to be interesting, for me the most interesting parts were where his buildings were shown alongside his sketches - both of which have such feeling and a sense of flow that it is difficult to believe them as real.
Another interesting aspect of Frank Gehry's practice which is illustrated in Sketches of Frank Gehry is his interaction with his partners / team members. The have gotten to the point that they understand each other so well that ideas are conveyed with very few words and the models are changed in a rapid-fire succession of "I like this"s and "this isn't quite right"s. Frank Gehry is to Architecture what Extreme Programming is for software development; it's entertaining and inspiring to watch a session that follows the "ready... fire... aim... aim... aim..." philosophy of agile design.
I would recommend Sketches of Frank Gehry to anyone interested in Architecture and the design process... or for that matter, anyone who wants to see the true value of "play" in design.
