The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a building for which architect Frank Gehry (above) will be remembered most. Istock
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I first saw a Frank Gehry structure in Chicago’s Millennium Centre — a surreal stainless steel open air theatre, with proscenium panels billowing out like sails of a ship. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion stands out for its fluidity and abstract metal shapes that resonate with the power of live music.
For an architect from Chandigarh, the city of Le Corbusier’s orthogonal geometry and cuboid concrete and brick forms, the sight of gleaming free-flowing forms was an architectural epiphany.
Frank Gehry (1929-2025). Reuters
Frank Owen Gehry passed away on December 5 at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy of iconoclastic architecture. Many tributes hailed him as the “most important architect of our age”. After Frank Lloyd Wright, his name is associated most with American architecture.
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The building that he will be really remembered for, and one that made him popular the world over, is the “wildly exuberant” titanium-covered design of Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Located in an industrial city of Spain with a rusted economy, it brought about a Cinderella-like transformation in its fortunes. The avant garde museum turned the city into a tourism hub, boosting the local economy.
The iconic Dancing House at Prague. Istock
Other cities tried to follow the transformation — branded as the ‘Bilbao effect’ — where audacious art could spur a city’s economy. This put Gehry in high demand, and he went on to design iconic structures across the globe: the Gehry Tower in Germany; the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris; Prague’s Dancing House, finished in 1996; his Hotel Marques in Spain built in 2006; and his design for a business school in Sydney, among many others. His fount of irrepressible creativity and unpredictable style made each work look uniquely different.
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One of his key projects was the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with Bilbao-like layered metal facades. Its completion dragged on till 2003, but when finally completed, it gave the city its emblematic landmark, just as Eiffel Tower is to Paris and Chrysler building to New York. But it was not without its critics. One described it as a “pile of broken crockery” and a “fortune cookie gone berserk”.
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However, Gehry shrugged off the critics: “At least they’re looking!”
How did Gehry evolve his unique style? It happened when the architectural world, bored with the regimen of straight lines and no-fuss functional architecture of the 20th century modernism, was looking for an emotive charge. Thinker-architects like Robert Venturi had begun to parody modernism as “less is bore” as a counter to the dictum “less is more” — giving birth to a movement called post-modernism. And Gehry was always a rebel who despised minimalist modernism. For him, architecture was essentially sculpture: “I always thought that architecture was, by definition, a three-dimensional object, therefore sculpture.”
He was also one of the first architects to grasp the creative potential of computer design, and used 3D modelling to shape complex curvaceous buildings, with colliding surfaces that defied manual calculations. But, soon enough, computer-aided designs called parametric architecture, inspired by the Deconstructivism art movement, impacted mainstream architecture too.
Other star architects like Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster also began experimenting with mind-beguiling, organic, free-flowing forms, made possible by the parametric design approach.
The recently inaugurated Zayed National Museum at Abu Dhabi by Norman Foster is defined by soaring ventilation towers, modelled on the wings of a falcon.
Similarly, the late Zaha Hadid “liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity”, wrote The Guardian in a tribute. Her major works include the London Aquatics Centre, Rome’s MAXXI and the Guangzhou Opera House.
The Guggenheim at Abu Dhabi by Gehry is still a work in progress; it is set to be completed next year. Other fascinating Gehry projects include the Stata Center, built on the MIT campus in 2004. But when you tell the cabbie to take you there, the inevitable answer is, “Oh! You want to go to the funny house!” That indeed is how it looks. The walls are tilting dangerously, like a house of cards about to collapse anytime. “But that’s the point. The Stata’s appearance is a metaphor for the freedom, daring, and creativity,” explains Robert Campbell, an academic.
The building’s critics say that architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder ceases to be architecture.
Gehry built his first skyscraper in New York; the 8 Spruce was completed in 2011. It’s fully visible only on a boat cruise around Lower Manhattan. The metallic skyscraper rising up to 76 storeys, with curved walls clad in stainless steel panels, whose arrangement suggests draped fabric, is a tribute to the nearby historic Woolworth Building.
Frank Owen Gehry received numerous awards and honours, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, considered the field’s highest honour. The jury said his work possessed a “highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic… his designs, if compared to American music, could best be likened to jazz, replete with improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit”.
Surely, his architecture will rock on.
— The writer is the former principal of Chandigarh College of Architecture
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