Tomkins, Calvin

Bio Sketch

American journalist and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker (joined 1960). Known for his profiles of artists and architects, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Frank Gehry. His 1997 profile of Gehry, "The Maverick," published just before the Bilbao Guggenheim opened, documented Gehry's design process, the Disney Hall controversy, and the pre-opening hype around Bilbao.

Key Works

• "The Maverick" (1997) — Profile of Frank Gehry for The New Yorker.

Key Concepts

• iconic-architecture
• star-architecture

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Tomkins's Gehry profile provides a before-the-event perspective on the Bilbao Effect — capturing the pre-opening anticipation and Gehry's own ambivalence about the term before it became a global phenomenon. His documentation of the Disney Hall disaster also illuminates the architect-patron tensions at the heart of iconic architecture production.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• tomkins-1997-the-maverick