Frank Gehry first gained public attention in 1978 when he purchased a common bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif., and surrounded it with skewed walls of corrugated iron, chain-link fence, and a kitchen framed in raw timber and glass.

People found it offensive. In fact someone (exercising a peculiarly American form of architectural criticism) took a shot at it. If the Santa Monica house seems stunt-like in its ad hoc use of ordinary construction materials, it proved to be liberating for Gehry, who had been working, unhappily, for a mall developer. Today the rough, idiosyncratic Santa Monica house seems the antithesis of the billowing metal forms of Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, for which Gehry has become world-famous. How did this remarkable transformation take place?

In “Conversations With Frank Gehry,” Barbara Isenberg, a Los Angeles journalist and longtime friend of Gehry, has assembled a highly engaging account of his life and work through interviews conducted over several years.

Her Gehry-on-Gehry approach is especially valuable because, unlike the other “star” architects working today, Gehry eschews theory, doesn’t write manifestoes, and has no interest in projecting a stylish personal image. His avuncularity, plain-spoken manner and passion for hockey (he was born and raised in Ontario) would seem part of an elaborate ruse if they were not so genuine.

In short, Frank Gehry is all about work. He is one of those rare individuals, like Mozart and Picasso, through whom creative ideas flow in torrents. Art, music, nature, everything, he tells Isenberg, triggers formal and spatial ideas that he transforms into these extraordinary cloud-like buildings.

Under Isenberg’s incisive questioning, Gehry reveals that he was jolted awake at age 15 by his family’s move from Toronto to Los Angeles; indeed, he has said that if they hadn’t made the move, he might never have taken up architecture. While the family struggled initially, he drove a truck, eventually entered USC to study architecture, joined the U. S. Army in World War II, attended graduate school in city planning at Harvard, and took a job with pioneering mall developer Victor Gruen.

In 1962, Gehry returned to Los Angeles, where he fell in with a group of young artists around Venice Beach who were interested in new and unconventional materials and in dissolving the traditional barriers between various art forms. Gehry designed houses for the painter Ron Davis and actor Dennis Hopper, but success did not come easily. Owing to his unconventional approach to architecture — especially as it was manifested in his Santa Monica house—he was branded as “flaky,” a tag that continues to dog him even today.

Nevertheless, his practice grew as clients began to recognize Gehry’s unique combination of artistic freedom and good business sense. In 1992, a second pivotal moment in Gehry’s life occurred. He enlisted some young, computer-hip designers who figured out how to adapt CATIA, a French computer program created for designing jet aircraft, to the complex task of designing and economically constructing buildings with curvilinear walls. Using this knowledge, he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a building that so transformed the declining industrial city in northern Spain that it spawned the term “Bilbao effect” — the notion that a great building, especially a Gehry design, could turn an entire city’s fortunes around.

As a result, Gehry has been so swamped with work that he doesn’t enter competitions anymore and refuses to design houses (particularly after spending 18 years on a house for billionaire Peter Lewis that never materialized). His buildings are being constructed all over the world, and he recently used his city planning background in such vast multibuilding projects as the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and the Grand Avenue project for downtown Los Angeles.

Among the many ways that Isenberg draws insights from Gehry, none is more revealing than the discussions of work, for it is there that the notion of Gehry’s “flakyness” is dispelled. He complains that “People look at the building finished, and the implication is that it had to be designed as a figment of my imagination, and that it has nothing to do with function or respect for neighbors or anything. And then, miraculously, I’ve been lucky enough to push the program into it and somehow gerrymander it so it works, after the fact. That is the perception. And they don’t acknowledge the fifty or sixty models, the agony about meeting budgets and time schedules, the technical issues and all those things that are part of the mix of work going into the finale.”

Isenberg presents a warmly human Gehry whose intuitive approach to design begs to be experienced. Now, with the completion of his renovation and expansion of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Gehry’s first work in Canada, Buffalonians can see what the fuss is all about.

Still, as he nears 80, you look at the man and you look at the work and you can’t help but wonder how he does it. The beauty of Isenberg’s book is that it all makes sense. Underneath the guise of everyman, Gehry is a brilliant person who has found a way to exercise the unfettered freedom of an artist in a business that is fraught with bottom line developers, fickle clients, politics, unions, critics and a swarm of competitors.

Jack Quinan is a professor of art history at the University at Buffalo and the curator of the Darwin Martin House.

NONFICTION

Conversations With Frank Gehry

By Barbara Isenberg

Knopf,

290 pages

Illustrations in color and black and white, $40