Architecture, Literature and Hebraism: Frank O.Gehry and Isaac Bashevis Singer

Gehry, like the Singers brothers, hails from a family of Polish Jews. His world has nothing to do with literary architecture; but even we could say with literature in general. Indeed, it is well known that he had always been more interested in painting, sculpture and the whole universe that revolves around contemporary art rather than the literary world. Nonetheless, there is certainly a hidden bond that is transversally linked to this world. That is to say, an understanding based on that conceptual analogy capable of indirectly bringing us back to literature through the parallelism between what Gehry realizes in architecture and the role carried out by the Singer brothers in Yiddish fiction. The architecture created using the contribution by the artist couple Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen, whose works characterize many of Gehry’s works, although we would like to be able to read them as a sort of return in the guise of Pop to that ancient tradition in which the sculpture covered a legitimate function within the architectural work, in fact highlight his great interest in Pop art, which in a certain way he interprets through architecture. It is certainly true that with the advent of the Modern, architecture had already exposed the "skeleton" of the building and the substance of the materials: yet to sublimate its essence. Gehry, on the other hand, by assembling miserable materials, uses the slang of black ghettos to make current truths speak. He does not use cultured language but the slang of the slums. Miserable materials, destined for precarious constructions, are no longer relegated to secondary roles but brought into view and assembled with mock haphazardness; The indignant reactions that aroused the contents of Singer’s first novels, makes us understand just how much these were similar to the reactions that punctually accompanied the projects of Frank Gehry. Indeed, with regard to the latter, they were probably even worse. However, the feeling of deep aversion that some come to nurture towards him, as those of Singer, is naturally aroused precisely by the peculiarity that characterizes the works of both and which conceptually is what unites them in some way. That is to say, the audacity to put into play with coherent lucidity, in different fields, unconventional topics and materials; so much so that we can say that the latter does in architecture what Singer had done many years before in literature. In fact, even if Gehry, sublimating, inserts "trash" into his works, we cannot forget that it was precisely the Singer brothers who introduced into Yiddish literature, which was always characterized by moral teaching and a romantic vision of the Ashkenazi Jewish world, with uncomfortable themes such as sex, criminals, and the outcasts of society.