"I've personally spent only one night in jail,” Frank Gehry confessed. “I didn’t like it very much.” Gehry, 88, who has been described as our greatest living architect (and, by an admiring pro-cannabis website, as a Very Important Pothead), said he got his only taste of incarceration when he was busted for possession many years ago. Last Friday in New Haven, that night behind bars was a kind of credential. An invited audience of architects and students, corrections officials and campaigners for criminal justice reform assembled at the Yale School of Architecture for the finale of Gehry’s semester-long “studio” on architecture and mass incarceration. A dozen students would present their projects — designs for a humane prison — to a jury consisting mostly of Friends of Frank.
Gehry, best known for the billowing contours of his concert halls and museums, has never designed a prison, unless you count the episode of “The Simpsons” in which a Gehry concert hall is converted to a state prison when the town of Springfield discovers it hates classical music. He admitted to approaching the subject with some trepidation.
“It’s heavy stuff, and I’m going to be 89, and it’s a little late,” Gehry told me during a lunch break. “I’m on the learning curve with everybody else.”
[For more on this story by BILL KELLER, go to https://www.themarshallproject...son-with-frank-gehry
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