This is what architecture could look like: with his exuberant shapes and surprising materials, the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, who died yesterday at the age of 96, opened people all over the world’s eyes to what a building can be.
He was one of the most innovative, influential and productive architects of the twentieth century in particular. It suddenly became apparent that a building can consist of more than right angles, including an accumulation of joyful curves, convexities and sloping volumes. In 1989 his work was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the most important architecture prize, and he won, among other things, the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects and Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.
Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in the Basque city of Bilbao, northern Spain.
Photo Luis Tejido / ANP / EPA
Gehry grew up as Frank Owen Goldberg in a working-class neighborhood in Toronto, Canada, where his father ran a grocery store and sold pinball machines. His fascination with fishing also dates from that time, inspired by his grandmother who bought carp and let them swim in the bathtub until they gefillte fish were processed. He would continue to use the fish as a motif throughout his life, including for sculptures.
In 1947, the family moved to Los Angeles for health reasons, where Gehry got a job as a truck delivery boy and attended the local college. He thought he wanted to become a ceramist, but his teacher there put him on the track of architecture: “The first thing I excelled in,” he said later.
In 1954 he graduated from the architecture program of the University of Southern California. He did not complete a further study in urban planning at Harvard when he discovered that his professor was secretly working on a palace for Fulgencio Batista, the strongman of Cuba who was deposed in 1959 by Fidel Castro and his supporters. (He later went on to teach at Harvard and Yale, and received honorary degrees from both universities). Back in LA, Gehry went to work for a company that made cardboard furniture, but he soon discovered architecture. When he founded his own agency in 1962, he changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry at the advice of his wife to avoid anti-Semitism.
Plywood, corrugated iron and mesh fencing
The first project that attracted attention was his own house in Santa Monica, a simple single-family home that he renovated in 1978 with unusual materials such as plywood, corrugated iron and chain-link fencing. In 1989 he received his first assignment in Europe, a museum building for design manufacturer Vitra. His buildings would be built in many places around the world. He turned his back on what he considered bloodless modernism and, with his own unique style, navigated between recent movements such as deconstructivism, in which buildings are taken apart into parts and reassembled, and postmodernism, which gives historical forms and references a new look.
Top left The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, top right and bottom The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and bottom left Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica.
EPA, ANP, Getty Images
His big break came in the mid-1990s with the glittering titanium-clad Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, then a moribund city where disappearing industry had left the population impoverished. This project showed that a city could put itself back on track economically through special architecture: ‘the Bilbao effect’.
His sculptural design was subsequently used more often for cultural buildings that also served placemaking had to do (improving the quality of public space). The Walt Disney Concert Hall, for example, which was completed in 2003 after a difficult fifteen-year construction process, was intended, just like ‘Bilbao’, to contribute to the recovery of downtown Los Angeles (unfortunately the financial crisis that started in 2007 intervened). The Los Angeles Times enthusiastically called it “the most effective answer to doubters, naysayers, and grumbling critics an American architect has ever produced.”
His only building in Paris, the American Center, was also intended to help put the Bercy district on the map. That too was a process of trial and error: the Center closed after two years due to financial problems and remained closed for nine years, but the building has undergone a successful reincarnation as Cinémathèque. Since 2013 he has worked with Norman Foster + Partners on the transformation of Battersea Power Station in London. His Guggenheim for Abu Dhabi is expected to open next year after twenty years of construction.
The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park.
Photo Jakub Porzycki / Nurphoto
Paper, cardboard and model foam
Gehry was one of the first to recognize and utilize the possibilities of the computer. In doing so, he paved the way for successors such as Zaha Hadid, who took digital design to new heights. At the same time, the model workshop of his office in Los Angeles was and remained the heart of the company. Everything was carefully worked out in many variants in paper, cardboard and blue model foam. But if he doesn’t like it, he comes and breaks models into pieces in a frenzy.
The world-famous Gehry increasingly became the architect of choice for large and expensive cultural projects, but also for residential construction, such as his first skyscraper, a sleek, undulating apartment building for Manhattan. But gradually – the pitfall of fame – recognizability began to win out over innovation. For the major Spanish wine brand Marqués de Riscal in Rioja he designed a hotel, restaurant and bodega that are in fact a collection of boxes, decorated with large, colorful metal bows. His contribution to Chicago’s prestigious Millennium Park was high-tech tire standan open-air stage, again with typical Gehry decoration.
Opinions varied widely about one of his last buildings, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for the art collection of Bernard Arnault (2014). While one person became lyrical about the large glass sails that seem to lift the building (according to the Fondation it is inspired by glass architecture from the nineteenth century), the other mainly saw a large box with the now well-known loose decorations on the outside.
The original of the iconoclast from Santa Monica gradually turned into a predictable style for the world of wealthy and established culture. You could say that he became trapped in the striking imagery with which he had become world famous. But that does not alter the fact that it is precisely with this visual language that he has thoroughly opened up and renewed the architecture.
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