Frank Gehry talks Talmud

Frank Gehry, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed some ridiculously iconic buildings, like the Gehry Tower in Germany and the Walt Disney Concert Hall right here in Los Angeles and is at work on the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, turned 80 last week. In his honor, the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic posted the above video in which Gehry talks about Talmud from his grandfather who, like many of his generation, was both a scholar and a small store owner.

“The image of a young Gehry sitting at his grandfather’s knee, sorting nails and screws into piles as he answers questions about free will and the mysteries of human experience, seems to suggest something oddly, wonderfully important about the work Gehry went on to do—particularly about the combination of workaday materials and probing, nearly existential curiosity that has been at the heart of so much of his architecture. I asked him how those discussions in the hardware store usually unfolded, and this is part of his response,” the Times’ Christopher Hawthorne writes. “The ‘Eisenman’ he mentions is Peter Eisenman, an architect of Gehry’s generation who has long put complex theoretical questions at the forefront of his work.”