'A Constructive Madness,' Architecture Documentary, Narrated by Jeremy Irons
by Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times
February 7, 2004
"A Constructive Madness," an hourlong documentary directed by Tom Ball and Brian Neff, from a script by Jeffrey Kipnis, available on DVD (information can be found at www.aconstructivemadness.com)is one of several vivid architecture movies screened last year at the Museum of Modern Art, documenting Frank Gehry's design of the Lewis House, an $82 million folly that ended up on the shelf of unbuilt brainstorms.
Mr. Kipnis, surely the most adventurous architecture curator we have in this country (he's based at the University of Ohio, in Columbus), contends that the Lewis House was the incubator for the voluptuous, curving forms with which Mr. Gehry has been associated in the public mind since the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997. I'm not convinced that this is accurate. Fluidity had already entered Mr. Gehry's vocabulary by the time he exhibited lamp designs modeled after fish and snakes in the early 1980's.
But never mind. In "A Constructive Madness," his first film, Mr. Kipnis reveals something far more important than the genealogy of forms. He documents the birth of a concept that has led Mr. Gehry to the position of leadership he holds in the profession.
Narrated by Jeremy Irons in what appears to be a parody of BBC pompousness, this is a personal, semisatirical look at architecture behind closed doors, including the deceptively composed facade of Mr. Gehry himself. The film doesn't claim to show what makes genius tick. Mr. Kipnis relies heavily on metaphor and analogy: ocean waves, birds in flight and, above all, classical music.
Mr. Gehry would be quick to deny that he is any kind of philosopher. He sets great store by expertise. Yet he is hardly the first artist in history to have found an intuitive path to places that philosophers, scientists, doctors and other specialists are helping to carve out and interpret. This movie shows us Mr. Gehry and a small group of supporters (including Mr. Kipnis) feeling their way toward what Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, has termed "the second modernity." This concept holds out hope of deliverance from indefinite decay.