Frank Gehry, the architect who revolutionised museum design and popularised institution-building as a form of civic marketing in the modern era, has died.
The US-Canadian architect’s 1997 design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, with its undulating deconstructivist facade of titanium and glass, was intended to catch the light. More akin to a work of sculpture than building, it caught the media’s attention and was showered with critical praise. Fellow architect Philip Johnson called it ‘the greatest building of our time’. The public followed the laudations, and flocked to the previously unappreciated Spanish industrial city, bringing in an estimated $400m in spending. Museum building therein became heralded as a means globally to revive any other previously moribund region, though not always with the same spectacular results.
Born in Toronto, Gerhry established his own firm in Los Angeles in 1962, winning an early commission to build a studio for graphic artist Lou Danziger. He started to hang out with artists and the influence of friends including Larry Bell, Carl Andre and Richard Serra was paramount to the evolution of the architect’s style.
The sculptural curves of the Guggenheim Bilbao had precedent in the interlocking volumes of Gehry’s 1989 Vitra Museum and Factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany; and the exuberance and fun of the design can be found too in Gehry’s 1996 Dancing House in Prague. In 1991 Gehry collaborated with artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen to incorporate a giant vehicle entrance, shaped as a pair of binoculars, to a project in Los Angeles that inevitably became known as the Binoculars Building.
After Bilbao, Gehry was tapped to produced more cultural centres, not least the colourful 2000 Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2014.
