A very young version of the future Pritzker winner turns the classroom into Kid City Before Frank Gehry won a Pritzker Prize, before he created defining projects such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao or the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and even before his home in Santa Monica, California and early projects in neighboring Venice began establishing his signature vision, he was just a mustachioed architect teaching kids about design.
In 1971, filmmaker Jon Boorstin shot a short documentary about then-42-year-old Gehry?s efforts to help his younger sister, schoolteacher Doreen Nelson, test out an architecture-based curriculum on Los Angeles school children. The program took students out of Westminster Elementary School in Venice every Wednesday to build their own city. Gehry felt that unless kids learned something beyond rote skills, by sixth grade ?the faucet was off and they were no longer open to ideas.?
During the course of the short film, children build a city, called Purium, out of blocks and cardboard, then debate planning issues and even elect a mayor. As he prompts and directs the students, Gehry touches on issues of planning and land ownership, the same issues central to any large-scale architecture practice.
The teaching method, called City Building Education, was short-lived at Westminster. The class proved too chaotic for the children?s regular teacher, who fired Gehry and Nelson. ?The point she missed,? Gehry says in the film, ?is that the conflict, when the...