HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO FRANK
A certain someone turned 80 on the last day of February, and 500 of his nearest and dearest were dispatched to the closed-until-Eli-Broad-writes-another-check Geffen Contemporary, including Brad Pitt, Arianna Huffington, and Laurence Fishburne. Frank Gehry had a cake designed like Disney Hall, a building he is no longer self-conscious about visiting, according to Paul Goldberger, who wrote a "Talk of the Town" piece in The New Yorker about the festivities. But the most provocative birthday wishes came via Frances Anderton’s KCRW show DnA: Design and Architecture, where stars from Ed Mosesto to Esa-Pekka Salonen revealed what they’d like to give Old Frank for his 80th. But we have to say it was Cindy Pritzker’s answer which, um, aroused the most interest: “Viagra.”
POSTOPOLIS POST-OP
Two years later and 2,462 miles away from its New York origins, Postopolis (sorry, Postopolis!) made its second appearance on the left coast. The five-day blogathon was held on the preposterously chilly roof of Andre Balazs’ Standard Downtown, where it was so cold that fingers froze to laptops and the Belvedere greyhounds were served hot in mugs. Meanwhile, about half of those watching the string of architects, designers, and the odd counter-terrorism detective paraded onto the Astroturf by bloggers Geoff Manaugh, David Basulto, Regine DeBatty, Bryan Finoki, Dace Clayton, and Dan Hill, surely felt another version of the cold shoulder: Out of the 62 people on the podium, only 13 were female. You’ll be happy to know that the only panel with a healthy male-to-female ratio featured both your faithful Eavesdropette and fellow AN editor Matt Chaban.
OH, THE THINGS WE KNOW
We’ve heard Michael Rotondi is hard at work redesigning the Flea-founded Silverlake Conservatory of Music, a job that’s apparently on the hush-hush… Students at SCI-Arc have designed a shimmery pavilion for this month’s Coachella Music Festival. Perennial pavilion-makers and class instructors Benjamin Ball, Gaston Nogues, and Andrew Lyon assured us that mushrooms will be administered on-site to truly appreciate the structure’s nuanced detail… And then there were three: According to our sources, the Broad Foundation has narrowed its list for their new museum in Beverly Hills down to three firms: It’s now a face-off between Christian de Portzamparc, Thom Mayne, and Shigeru Ban, and nary a single Renzo.
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