If you want to know how a magician does his tricks, Manfred Tafuri writes (following Benjamin), it is better to observe him from backstage rather than continue to stare at him from a seat in the audience. Such a perspective has been largely absent from the purplish prose written over the years about Frank O. Gehry’s creative genius, his intuitive method of design, his sculptural sensibility, his playful and irreverent disposition. He himself has headed off the critics, doing everything possible to bolster the myth of himself as an atheoretical practitioner, an "artist in architecture." He has also presented himself as a kind of schlimazel-hero for the cult of personality— spontaneous, unaffected, an ice-hockey jock who admits that he strives to give his work an "edge" by making it look casual and unprecious. In "The House That Built Gehry," a contribution to the catalogue of the current exhibition, Beatriz Colomina correctly draws attention to Gehry’s construction of his own persona. But she misses the crucial point. Gehry isn’t just another media phenomenon, despite the Guggenheim’s recent efforts to turn him into a brand name and his long desire to be taken seriously as an artist. His self-fashioning is also part of a historically specific aesthetic discourse in which the disavowal of theory amounts to a theoretical position in itself.

In his introduction to an extended interview of 1999 titled "The Architect Who Fell Among the Artists," signifying Gehry’s reverse apotheosis, Kurt W. Forster attributes his status as a "late bloomer" to the fact that the practice of normative architecture constrained his artistic creativity for years. It is true that only a handful of the run-of-the-mill projects Gehry executed during the first two decades of his career, mostly for speculative developers and institutional clients, hint at what is to come. Among the significant exceptions are the Schindleresque Danziger Studio and Residence (1964–65), which Reyner Banham included in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and the Ron Davis Studio and Residence (1968–72), with its forced volumetric perspectivalism. Both these projects, for a graphic artist and painter, respectively, demonstrate that Gehry was working through the issues of late-modernist form in sophisticated and original ways.

But it was only in 1978, when he was almost forty, that Gehry burst onto the scene with the modest pink bungalow he renovated for himself in Santa Monica, using materials like chain-link fencing, corrugated metal siding, cinder blocks, asphalt paving (in the dining room), and plywood. This was a full decade after Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s celebration of the ugly and ordinary landscape of Las Vegas as well as of the photos of Ed Ruscha, and in the midst of full-blown postmodernism in architecture. In other words, Gehry was hardly functioning in a theoretical void. Ten years later, when he found himself included in the Museum of Modern Art’s "Deconstructivist Architecture" show, he made sure everyone knew he thought it was a case of strange bedfellows but happily took part in the poststructuralist pillow fight anyway. One would have to go back to Eero Saarinen in the late ’50s to find an instance of a major architect who proved equally, but somewhat more innocently, immune to theoretical discussion; with Saarinen, whose career began and ended early, the "style for the job" was the best framing anyone could come up with. With Gehry, the anti-aesthetic aesthetic, the intensely studied unpretentiousness, continues to be received as a vaguely defined architectural expressionism (sources like Hermann Finsterlin, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun, and inevitably Antonio Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright are invoked) rather than the consciously evolved position that it is. To say Gehry is "an artist" pure and simple is no more illuminating than to say the same of Le Corbusier, Wright, or Louis Kahn.

Gehry’s process has also entered into the current mythography. The introduction of the computer into his practice over the last decade represents an extremely interesting development but also, to some extent, another smoke screen. What is enabled by CATIA— a sophisticated system of computer-aided design and fabrication that the office has adapted from the French aerospace firm Dassault Systèmes— is a rationalization and systematization of Gehry’s empirical design method, which famously begins at the very low-tech level of crumpled-paper models and assemblages of found objects. As such, it translates the master’s quite traditional and inefficient approach to design— based on massing studies, incessantly refined by trial and error— into the smooth logic of contemporary office and construction practice. But Gehry’s process, as opposed to that of, say, a younger colleague like Greg Lynn, has never been technologically driven. To claim that CATIA is what gives Gehry’s architecture its currency (as William J. Mitchell, guru of e-topia and dean of architecture at MIT, where Gehry’s current Ray and Maria Stata Center is underway, does in another essay in the catalogue) is no more or less true than an analogous observation about Serra’s method of fabricating his sculptures.