I love this! Jeff Skilling speaking about Frank Gehry on May 18, 2001:
“The uniqueness of Frank Gehry’s work is the blending of the functional with the artistic to create an innovative product,” said Jeff Skilling, Enron President and CEO. “This is a quality Enron relates to every day as we question traditional business assumptions and embrace innovative solutions. We are pleased to help showcase Frank Gehry’s genius.”
I realize that I could be said to be a little … perhaps… biased in favor of Jeff Skilling but I love this statement and I absolutely agree with it. As someone who once seriously considered architecture school, I’ve always seen or conjured a weird association between architecture and Enron, but unlike Skilling, I think my association comes from the ability to fluidly create a shocking, functional, product that appears on the landscape as if it had always been there. EnronOnline, for instance, should have always been there and it remains, actually, though it’s called something else now. The Broadband Operating System and the Gas Bank both seem organic business elements, the same way a well-made home can appear to have simply grown out of the ground one day and been there ever since.
After his sentencing, Jeff Skilling famously uttered, “Some things work and some things don’t.” Well, some things belong and some things don’t. Architecture is partially the exercising of discipline to remove the superfluous. Deleting, deleting, deleting until the form meets the standard the architect has set for herself. Enron’s products arrived fully-formed and necessary to the business landscape.
They are recognizable as the shocking, modern, disruptive, whimiscal buildings built by Frank Gehry, with all the grace and technical acumen as Frank Lloyd Wright and the modernist pioneering of Mies van der Rohe.
