If you want to summarize architecture, all you need is a brick. Lay it flat and you have the standard building; stand it on its long edge and you have the midrise; stand it on end, the high-rise. OK, you can play around with the rooflines — buildings with hats, the architect as milliner — but you’re just playing dress-up with one of the bricks. Unless it’s a Frank Gehry building.
Let me back up for those of you who haven’t been keeping up. Gehry is the one who did the curving, soaring metal walls of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, as well as Disney Hall in Los Angeles. He is the one who lets us walk into “out-of-the-box.” And in the documentary film “The Sketches of Frank Gehry,” out on DVD, we get to learn how a genius works.
Watching Paint Dry
The trouble with studying genius at its source is that it mostly occurs inside the brain, so there’s not much to seeing it in action. I’m told that at Adam Smith’s home, you can still see the spot where the genius who came up with “the invisible hand” would stand and rub his forehead against the wood paneling while he pondered economics. That’s not great theater. As Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say, “It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg you won’t speak to me for 50 minutes.”
But with this Gehry film we get to see his thinking, sort of. Enough so that there are lessons to be learned.
First, we learn that during his early career he spent his time hanging out with artists rather than fellow architects. The house he bought at the time was rumored to be haunted, and he decided that he was living with “the ghosts of cubism.” So he began to experiment with bringing that sense of chaotic rearrangement to a building. From there, he went to buildings with curving walls, eventually attaining a style as flowing as his sketches. No T-squares for him. His hand was free.
However, the bigger lesson we can learn from Gehry is not from his drawings but from his paper models. He works by taking sheets of heavy paper and making models out of them. Not blocks, not wood or styrofoam, but paper. Curving, folding, crumpling paper. So he can work in three dimensions rapidly and cheaply, doing dozens of variations in an hour.
Breakthrough Moments
He works with a partner, so we hear him talking as he’s playing with paper/ideas. We see him with a model on a Lazy Susan, studying it from angles, adding bits here and there until he declares, “That is so stupid looking, it’s great.” Then he smiles at his creation and says, “It’s just …” as he raises both arms over his head in triumph, “Yah!”
But he’s nowhere near finished. He’ll come back to the idea and perhaps toss it out — the investment in time is slight and in materials, well, it’s just so much paper. Then, when one of the models becomes an idea worth pursuing, it goes through an evolution, a series of models of increasing sophistication.
So while genius takes place inside the brain and none of us is in Gehry’s, we can learn something from him about generating and implementing ideas. If we were to attempt to apply Gehry’s work style to a business issue, what would that look like?
If we wanted to apply his style to, say, working on a new sales presentation, we wouldn’t use other sales presentations for ideas, we’d use novels or plays, movies, paintings … maybe even, I don’t know, zoos or airports. And not just one, but dozens. Some would become rough models, several going at once. And some of those would evolve into better, nicer models. We’d settle on one, then set it aside and do another, working from a higher plane of knowing.
Doing so, we wouldn’t try to force our attention on one idea, but rather, we’d have ideas competing for our attention. That style of working doesn’t insure that we have a one-in-a-million idea, but it gives us a lot of tickets in the genius lottery, many chances to raise our arms and say, “That’s just … Yah!”
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success”.
