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This is the story of how a demanding, idiosyncratic, corporate chieftain who couldn't make up his mind had a profound influence on one of the world's great architects.
The executive is Peter Lewis, the flamboyant CEO of Progressive Corp., the insurance company based in suburban Cleveland.
The architect is Frank Gehry. Gehry has won world renown for his shimmering, titanium-wrapped Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997. He also designed the new Experience Music Project, which just opened in Seattle, for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen -- another radically new design, whose red, gold, blue, and silver metal shapes are meant to be a celebration of Jimi Hendrix and rock-and-roll music.
The exec and the architect first met in 1983, after Lewis attended a talk Gehry gave in Cleveland. Much impressed, Lewis asked Gehry to design a new house for him. Over the course of a decade, from 1985 to 1995, Gehry designed and redesigned the project, constantly making blueprint changes at Lewis' behest.
MAO CHIC.
Destined for a wooded, nine-acre site next to a golf course in Lyndhurst, Ohio, it could have been one of coolest houses ever built anywhere. But costs kept skyrocketing and Lewis could never bring himself to give the final O.K. So the house was never built.
By any reckoning, Peter Lewis isn't your typical buttoned-down corporate type. He has been interested in art and architecture since he and his ex-wife, Toby, started collecting three decades ago. He is chairman of New York's Guggenheim Museum, while she is curator of Progressive's contemporary art collection -- and with his backing has made it one of the most daring corporate collections in the U.S (see BW Online, Dec. 21, 1999, "A Corporate Art Collection That's Aimed at Outrage and Enjoyment"). Lewis has a set of Andy Warhol prints of Chairman Mao in his office -- a sharp contrast with the Winston Churchill busts that are more typical CEO fare -- along with a papier mâché model of one of the fish sculptures Gehry uses in his buildings.
EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE.
As a homebuilder, however, Lewis was anything but an easy client. At first, he wanted to remodel an existing house, which he later tore down to make way for a new one he commissioned Gehry to design. He also brought in Philip Johnson, another renowned architect, to design a guesthouse. He abandoned the whole project for a time, then revived it, and then wanted to abandon it again when its projected cost neared $60 million. Gehry agreed to scale it back by half, but then it was too austere for Lewis. At each meeting Gehry had with the CEO, Lewis brought along a film crew. "If I sound like a flake, it wouldn't be the first time," Lewis says. "I am what I am."
But Gehry now looks back on the Lewis project as a turning point in his career. Gehry calls the sizable fees Lewis paid him during the design period "a sort of several year MacArthur [the foundation's "genius award"]. People just don't usually support architecture in that way. He would come out [to Gehry's Santa Monica offices] and get joyous. Then he would egg us on: 'Let's push this, let's push that. Is this state-of-the-art?'" Lewis won't say how much he paid Gehry in fees, except "it was between $1 and $10 million." Gehry puts the number at "several million dollars."
Whatever the amount, the funding provided Gehry a crucial learning experience on the computer. Gehry is one of the first architects to use computer-aided design techniques to incorporate weird, distorted, and sometimes whimsical shapes into his buildings -- making sections resembling a giant crumpled wad of paper or a fish or the prow of a ship. A lot of this was made possible by Gehry's experiments with a French-developed computer design system called Catia, originally used in the aerospace industry.
MELTDOWN.
From 1989 to 1995, when he worked intensively on the Lewis house, the architect says he used the project to experiment in the use of free-form shapes that since have shown up in many of his most famous buildings. "We took computer modeling further than we had before," Gehry says. "Some of that ended up in Bilbao. We experimented a lot with glass technology that ended up in the Condé Nast [cafeteria in New York City that Gehry designed]. Some of the things we did with shaping materials ended up in the project we're now doing in Berlin."
It's hard to know exactly what the Lewis house would have looked like. It can be seen only in models prepared during the design process, photos of which are in a book called Gehry Talks: Architecture & Process. It was to have been a series of interconnected outbuildings, that at various stages involved molded clay forms hugging the ground and stubby huts that looked as if they had melted a bit in the sun.
Another model looks like a post-nuclear-holocaust dwelling that might serve as the set for a Samuel Beckett play. A fish shape comes into the design, as well as a horse's head. At one point, Gehry experiments with an exterior building skin that's creased and folded in some sort of dark red resin that looks as if it's melted over the structures.
NO RETURN.
Far from being upset that he spent so much money on a house that was never built, Lewis is overjoyed. "I inadvertently had a major role in the museum at Bilbao," he says. "I'm very proud of that." He remains one of the architect's biggest boosters. The two say they're now good friends, and Lewis has donated to some of Gehry's new projects. For instance, he's the main mover-and-shaker and donor behind a new business school the architect has designed at Case Western Reserve University, the alma mater of Lewis' mother, father, and sister. Lewis also plans to push for another Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim Museum, to be built at the base of Wall Street in New York.
Why not revive the Lewis house project, I prodded both men. "No," Gehry said. "It was fun. We had a good time together working on it. But no." Lewis, 66, says he now lives alone in a condo near Cleveland, though he also has places in Aspen and New York. He says he realized by the mid-1990s that he had no interest in building a big house. "I've become a much more private person," he says. Given all the good things that came out of the last house Lewis tried to build, it's a pity he won't try again.
Peterson is a contributing editor to Business Week Online based near Chicago
Copyright 2000 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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