Starchitect Frank Gehry has died at the age of 96

During his long career Gehry designed some of the most iconic works of world architecture. Among his most famous projects are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997), considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the contemporary era, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle (2000). Added to these are the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), the Frederick R. Weisman Art and Teaching Museum in Minneapolis (1993), the Center for the Visual Arts in Toledo (1993), the American Center in Paris (1994), the headquarters of the Nationale-Nederlanden in Prague, known as the “Dancing House” or “Ginger & Fred” (1996), the New World Center in Miami Beach (2010), the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas (2010), the Beekman Tower in New York (2011), the Panama Biomuseum (2014), the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (2017) and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington (2020). Among the numerous awards, the Pritzker Prize in 1989 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008.

His theoretical and formal research has found fulfillment in a path that has redefined the language of architecture starting from the breakdown of the building into independent volumes, reassembled in an apparently illogical way, but capable of narrating entirely new spatial dynamics. The use of unusual materials – corrugated sheet metal, raw plywood, metal mesh, industrial panels – has become a distinctive feature, as has the use of advanced software, borrowed from the aeronautical industry, which in the 1990s allowed him to model free and complex surfaces, anticipating the digital revolution in architectural design.

Training of Gehry began at the University of Southern California and continued at Harvard University, where he approached the themes of urban planning. After his experiences in Victor Gruen’s studio and the opening of his atelier in Los Angeles in 1962, he embarked on an independent path which in the 1980s revolutionized even the single-family house, transformed into a laboratory for material and spatial experimentation. The private home in Santa Monica, built between 1977 and 1978, represents one of the turning points: a radical intervention on a modest existing house, wrapped in a skin of raw and decomposed materials, destined to spark discussion and relaunch Gehry as a disruptive figure on the international architectural scene.

His production in those years includes projects such as the Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro (1979), the Loyola Law School (1981) and the California Aerospace Museum (1982) in Los Angeles, as well as the Museum of Art in Santa Monica (1988). The path continues uninterrupted in the following years, with a series of works that consolidate his vocation for sculptural and dynamic architecture: from the headquarters of Vitra International in Birsfelden, Switzerland (1994), to the administrative structure of Team Disney in Anaheim (1995), up to the bold forms of the Dancing House in Prague (1996), where two towers intertwine as if in a choreography.

Il point of maximum visibility comes with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbaoinaugurated in 1997. The building, defined by many critics as one of the most influential architectures of the last fifty yearstransformed a declining industrial city into an international cultural center, generating the media and economic phenomenon known as the “Bilbao effect”. Its fluid forms, covered in titanium, have inspired a generation of architects and an entire trend of urban design based on the idea that an iconic work can trigger the rebirth of an area.

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a Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angelescompleted in 2003 after a design process that lasted over a decade, is considered one of his symbolic works: a steel casing with soft and enveloping lines that encloses an interior with unique acoustic and spatial qualities. For Gehry, that building represented a return to his origins, being located a few kilometers from the apartment where he had lived as a teenager.

Alongside the large museums and cultural complexes, Gehry continued to develop residential projects, public spaces, monumental sculptures and installations. Attention to context, the ability to play with perception and an almost pictorial sensitivity in modeling light define an approach that has often divided critics: for some too spectacular, for others the expression of a creative freedom that architecture seemed to have lost since the 1960s.

Il relationship with Europe has been constant. In Italy, Gehry designed the Venice Gateway, the nautical terminal that will connect Marco Polo airport to the historic center, conceived as a large infrastructure capable of communicating with the aquatic nature of the lagoon. A seminal retrospective of his work, Frank O. Gehry from 1997, was hosted by the Milan Triennale in 2009.

In the recent years the architect continued to work at full speed, designing the Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin (2017) and the Luma Foundation tower in Arles (2021), a building with jagged geometries that recalls the limestone rocks of the Alpilles. He was also involved in new projects for the LVMH group, including a large Louis Vuitton flagship store in Beverly Hills and a multipurpose building in Paris, as well as a new concert hall for the Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Gehry he has always denied being a “starchitect”a label often applied to the most media-oriented designers. “You enter architecture to make the world a better place”, he repeated. “The ego comes later, with the press and everything. It’s all very innocent at first”. A statement that returns the deepest dimension of his work: an architecture conceived not as a narcissistic gesture but as a space capable of welcoming, surprising and involving the public. (Of Paolo Martini)