Portrait of an Architect as and Old Man: Part One

For those who know Montreal, you probably know the Cinema du Parc. It was one of Montreal’s most important repertory cinemas, and it screened everything from obscure documentaries to classic films to modern award winners. Admission was cheap, popcorn wasn’t served in torso-sized sacks and you could actually get an 8-ounce soft drink.

The Cinema du Parc is now closed - or at very least in some kind of limbo. From now on every time I go see a movie I will have to risk having my teeth shattered by infrasonic vibration blasting at me from 7.1 different directions at 110 decibels. Hurray.

Anyway, I managed to get down there on closing night to catch one final flick before they shut the doors. I saw The Sketches of Frank Gehry, a documentary about the life and work of the architect made by director Sydney Pollack. I thought it was a pretty solid film in its own right, though far from the best doc I’ve ever seen. It did, however, offer a starting number of tantalizing little ideas that got me thinking about different things.

In particular, the things it got me thinking about are these:

• How artists are often inspired by other art, and how they often see their art all around them.
• How artists working in a highly commercial field deal with that reality.
• How artists are often driven to make a lasting mark and to be remembered.
• How what we end up doing in life often seems so coincidental and in some cases, lucky.
• How computers have impacted the work of such a diverse range of artists (and how they have enabled some forms of art to exist at all)
• The difference between media-based art and artifact-based art and how the singular nature of a work of architecture often (tragically) separates the creator from his work.

Because my last post about GRAW seemed to have hit the limits of what TypePad can handle before it starts stripping out carriage returns and turning my posts into something unreadable, I’m going to put together individual posts to get down my thoughts on each of these things. Of course, that will mean everyone is going to see them all in reverse order, but so be it.