Frank Gehry Changed the Face of Museums. A Potent Survey Shows How

Before the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Fondation Louis Vuitton rose into the sky, there were countless sketches and meticulous models, as the imagination of Frank Gehry took flight.

These in-process materials are making a rare appearance in “The Century of Gehry,” an illuminating new exhibition on the late Canadian-American architect at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, that was organized in concert with Gehry Partners and the Getty. It unpacks how Gehry dreamt up some of the world’s most recognizable cultural landmarks, while teasing out the ideas that underpin his groundbreaking buildings. 

“Yes, Gehry’s forms are spectacular, but he was also building for people to feel something,” the show’s curator, António Choupina, told me during a tour of the exhibition. “There are all these carefully thought-out layers of his work that people ignore and just look at the final form. To me, it was important to convey that all of these steps are happening on deeper layers.”

A Rebellious Architecture

When Gehry died last December, at 96, he left behind a legacy that spans Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and far beyond. Mergers of sculpture and architecture, his buildings deconstruct traditional forms, seeming to defy gravity. They are instantly recognizable. One of his final designs, for the forthcoming Dar Al-Funoon performing arts hub in Abu Dhabi, has an exterior of undulating, fabric-like waves that appears almost to float.

The Serralves show opens with the architect’s infamous Santa Monica home, which he began remodeling in radical fashion in 1977. At a glance, it looks like a chaotic jumble of plywood, glass, and corrugated metal. It is not. A model shows how the windows were cut obliquely to allow for skyward views, with one offering passersby a glimpse of a cactus in its back garden. Still, the final building appears defiant, as if resisting construction itself.

That maverick spirit endures throughout the exhibition, which eschews tedious biographical detail to instead trace Gehry’s evolution through his greatest hits. His experimental cardboard furniture gets a nod, as does his 1985 design for the Los Angeles offices of the advertising agency Chiat/Day. The entrance of the firm’s campus is dominated by a giant sculpture of binoculars created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Gehry placed an actual pair of binoculars—a gift from Oldenburg—into the study model, an aha moment that helped unify the scheme and led to the sculpture commission.

“Frank often joked that the pair of binoculars—this black sensuous piece—was so good that it forced him to elevate the architecture, so he could keep up with the art,” Choupina said.

Friends and Partners

Gehry’s collaborations with fellow architects and artists appear throughout the show, which unfolds in Serralves’s new wing, designed by fellow Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza. The two were friends and collaborated on a master plan for the ArtCenter College of Design (2000–01) in Pasadena, California. It was never realized, but its massive model reveals how Gehry adapted his typically fluid forms to meet Siza’s more angular vision.

“We all have something to put in the pie to make it better,” Gehry said of collaborations. “I’ve never found it has denigrated me in any way… In fact, it’s been pure, straight-line growth at a high, steep angle.”

Gehry’s monumental Lewis Residence also resulted from a fruitful collaboration. Conceived in 1989 for the Ohio-based businessman Peter B. Lewis, an ambitious plan included contributions from artists, including Richard Serra, who designed a fountain; Frank Stella, who envisioned its gate house; and Oldenburg, who consulted on site-specific sculptures. The wooden model for it is sprawling.

Though unbuilt, the Lewis compound offered one of the earliest glimpses of Gehry’s now-signature curvilinear forms. At its center was a structure whose billowing facade resembles a horse’s head. Gehry would later repurpose the design for Berlin’s DZ Bank (2000), but not before introducing this sculptural vocabulary with the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The Bilbao Effect

The impact that Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim building had on Bilbao—and the cultural world—is, by now, the stuff of legend. After opening in 1997, the $89 million project transformed the city’s skyline and economic fortunes, landing it on the international map. Other cities and museums rushed to emulate the “Bilbao effect,” harnessing an architectural icon to revitalize an area, though rarely with comparable success.

The model for the Guggenheim Bilbao is a masterpiece in itself: its swooping curves neatly rendered, its ramps meticulously calculated, and its integration with the neighboring La Salve Bridge well-deliberated. An image of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect of the Guggenheim New York, is attached to the rear of the model as an homage of sorts. 

Gehry had designed museums before Guggenheim Bilbao—perhaps notably the Vitra Design Museum (1989) in Weil am Rhein, Germany—but it was Bilbao that made him a go-to for ambitious cultural institutions.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton, a soaring glass edifice, followed in Paris in 2014, and Luma Arles in 2021, with a stainless steel facade that was designed to capture the light that so entranced Vincent van Gogh in that city in southern France. The Guggenheim also commissioned him to make a massive building in Lower Manhattan, which went nowhere, and for its Abu Dhabi outpost, a breathtaking assemblage of asymmetrical cones slated to open later this year. 

But it was not just Bilbao that attracted museum clients, Choupina believes. “It’s Gehry’s philosophy that architecture is a service, but it’s also art,” he said. “In a way, if you’re a cultural institution, you’re going to go for an architect who believes in art, who approaches the building as an art form and understands that the wish to visit a building comes from the same source as art.”

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles encapsulates that approach. “Century of Gehry” features dozens of iterative models, acoustic tests conducted on the concert hall, and designs for its majestic, unconventional pipe organ—a process that stretched from 1987 to 2003. “There’s this whole evolution of studying just a simple auditorium,” Choupina said.

Working on the concert hall, Gehry pioneered the architectural use of CATIA, 3D software used in aerospace engineering, to render the facade’s iconic sails, inspired by Gehry’s love for sailing. They were supposed to be constructed in stone, but the Guggenheim Bilbao’s metallic exterior inspired an eye-catching alternative.

The 16-year journey to build the hall makes plain what drove Gehry throughout his career: an insatiable curiosity and a determination to keep seeing architecture anew. “He’s striving for the future,” Choupina said of the architect’s work on the project. And though it relied on digital tools, the curator was quick to note its analog aspects, like the small notes and markings on its model. That intimacy ultimately found its way into the final, spectacular form, he suggested.

Gehry “doesn’t want it to be just another building in the city,” Choupina said. “That’s the difference between construction and architecture. Anyone can build something, but not everybody can do architecture. For it to be architecture, it needs to be something more than just construction—it needs to have a soul.”

“The Century of Gehry” is on view at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, R. Dom João de Castro 210, Porto, Portugal, through December 30.