The museum was widely praised for its breathtaking and sinuous profile and dramatic relationship to the Nervi\u00f3n River at its feet. Just as important, it helped reenergize and bring new media attention to architecture. Still looking for direction after the breakdown of the Modern movement and the repeated false starts of a historically minded Postmodernism, the profession badly needed a boost.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Guggenheim Bilbao in October 1997, when it opened to the public.<\/p>\n
(Santiago Lyon \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The new Guggenheim suggested a fresh, dynamic direction: architecture whose appeal resided in the ravishing large-scale curves made possible with digital design software and almost perfectly suited to architectural photography and display in the pages of newspapers and magazines. Suddenly cities and museums were clamoring to hire Gehry \u2014 or some other member of the growing class of top-tier star architects, or \u201cstarchitects\u201d \u2014 to try to replicate the windfall of attention and tourism dollars the new Guggenheim had produced. That windfall even earned its own nickname: the Bilbao Effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the heels of the Guggenheim came a series of other triumphs for Gehry. They included the opening in 2003 of the long-delayed Disney Hall<\/a>, designed before the Bilbao museum but completed after it, and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts<\/a> at Bard College in New York.<\/p>\n Some critics complained that Gehry\u2019s firm, which had turned into a global powerhouse, was spreading his talents too thin, leading to disappointments such as the Experience Music Project<\/a> in Seattle, finished in 2000. There were also whispers that Gehry, in an effort to recapture the Bilbao magic, was chasing ill-conceived museum commissions around the world. <\/p>\n In projects like the Guggenheim branch in Abu Dhabi, commissioned in 2006, it was suggested that the huge budgets had raced past a clear idea of what the building would mean culturally or even what kind of artwork it would hold. It came as little surprise when the building was plagued by delays. Originally scheduled to open in 2012, the Guggenheim pushed back the opening date on multiple occasions, with 2026 currently serving as the target opening \u2014 20 years after the project was announced. <\/p>\n Frank Gehry in his Playa Vista office in 2015. <\/p>\n (Richard DeAratanha \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n But Gehry always seemed to have a project waiting in the wings to silence his detractors. Disney Hall was his answer to the charge, repeated frequently over the years, that he was more skilled at producing architectural sculpture than answering to practical or functional requirements. The concert hall is a brilliant, eye-catching piece that helped fill a literal and symbolic civic hole at the top of Bunker Hill. It also holds an auditorium that functions superbly in acoustic terms and gave the Los Angeles Philharmonic a new visibility. The hall is at once a luminous public landmark and a workhorse.<\/p>\n Similarly powerful was another late-in-life triumph, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, a museum built to hold the collection of the French business magnate and art collector Bernard Arnault. When it opened in the fall of 2014 in a quiet corner of the Bois de Boulogne, the large park on the west side of Paris, it suggested a newly refined, even urbane direction in Gehry\u2019s late work.<\/p>\n The dramatic forms are still there, this time in glass, wrapping the body of the building like huge transparent sails, but they are part of an architectural composition as notable for its balance and elegance as for its boisterous energy. This time it was the notion that Gehry\u2019s work was visually chaotic, not merely unresolved but undisciplined, that was exposed as a severely limited reading of his work.<\/p>\n What the best of Gehry\u2019s late projects have in common is not only virtuosity in their form-making, but also a remarkable kind of humanism. This was the best-kept secret of Gehry\u2019s career: how dedicated he was to, and how skilled at, the basic task of architecture, which is to create spaces that respect and accommodate human scale.<\/p>\n In the architect\u2019s finest work, proportion as well as attention to light and shadow are expertly handled, taking advantage of skills honed over many decades. His most memorable rooms are as carefully and intelligently put together \u2014 and in their charismatic and forward-looking energy, as quintessentially American \u2014 as the most fluid descriptive prose by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most freewheeling artwork by Robert Rauschenberg or the most stirring fanfare by Aaron Copland.<\/p>\n Walt Disney Concert Hall is masterful in both function and form.<\/p>\n (Kent Nishimura \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on Feb. 28, 1929, in Toronto. (He would change his last name to Gehry in 1954.) Gehry\u2019s father, Irving, was a salesman and truck driver who had trained as a boxer and moved to Canada from New York, his hometown, as a young man. His mother, Thelma, was born in Poland and immigrated to Toronto with her family as a child.<\/p>\n He was not close to his father, but his mother exposed him to music and art. Her parents, Leah and Samuel Caplan, spent extended time with Gehry in Toronto as a child.<\/p>\n \u201cGehry says his urge to reinvent order was born in the back room of his grandfather\u2019s hardware store in downtown Toronto,\u201d Leon Whiteson wrote<\/a> in The Times in 1989. \u201cThere he tinkered with dismembered clocks and toasters, and the pathos of dismantled gears, springs and wires infected him with a tenderness for mechanisms that spill their guts for all the world to see.\u201d<\/p>\n After finishing high school in 1947 at age 17, Gehry decided to move with his parents to L.A. Gehry\u2019s father, who had suffered a heart attack that year, had been advised by a doctor to move to a gentler climate and ease up on physical labor.<\/p>\n \u201cLos Angeles when I got here was brash, raucous, frontier,\u201d Gehry told journalist Barbara Isenberg, whose book \u201cConversations With Frank Gehry\u201d<\/a> was published in 2009. \u201cCarney business. The movies. The development was vast and rampant. Whole neighborhoods seemed to spring up instantly in desert locations.\u201d<\/p>\n For Gehry, this seemingly chaotic cityscape \u201crepresented a kind of openness, and freedom because it was risk-taking somehow. There was an edge to it. Some of it was greedy and awful, and some of it was positive and moving.\u201d<\/p>\n Frank Gehry takes a construction tour of his Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood in 2020.<\/p>\n (Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Gehry enrolled in night school at L.A. City College, where he took art and architecture classes, then went to USC, where he studied ceramics with artist Glen Lukens, as well as architecture.<\/p>\n In 1951 Gehry became a naturalized U.S. citizen. The following year he and Anita Snyder, whom he met when he delivered furniture to her parents\u2019 house while working as a driver for the Vineland Co., were married. He was 22 and she 18. They divorced in 1966.<\/p>\n It was Anita, Gehry said, who convinced him in 1954 to change his last name from Goldberg to the less Jewish-sounding name of Gehry, which is of Swiss German origin. Gehry said his wife and her mother helped him select from a group of names beginning in G. Gehry liked his initials, F.O.G., and didn\u2019t want to give up the acronym.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned I was passed over for an architectural fraternity because I was a Jew,\u201d Gehry told Isenberg. \u201cI didn\u2019t care, but it was evidence of anti-Semitism to me. Then a guy I knew came to me and said, \u2018Change your name and we can start a partnership.\u2019 That kind of stuff is what pushed my ex-wife to lobby for a name change, and why I finally gave in to it.\u201d<\/p>\n Gehry earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in architecture from USC in 1954. After a stint in the Army in Atlanta from 1954 to 1956, he returned to L.A. to take a job in the office of Victor Gruen<\/a>, a Viennese-born architect known for helping invent the American shopping mall. He left to study urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design, came back to L.A. to work again for Gruen and the prolific firm of Pereira & Luckman, helmed by William Pereira<\/a> and Charles Luckman<\/a>, and then spent a year working in Paris.<\/p>\n He returned to L.A. for good in 1962 and, at 33, opened his own firm with a partner, Greg Walsh. At first his projects were fairly well-behaved and faithful, at least outwardly, to the Modernist principles he had learned at USC: flat roofs, restrained geometry. But he began to absorb important cues from the postwar commercial landscape of L.A.<\/p>\n The first design to gain wide attention, a 1965 loft and studio<\/a> for graphic designer Lou Danziger on a busy stretch of Melrose Avenue, was typical of this combination: A spare, even self-effacing stucco box, plain outside and filled with light and surprising spatial complexity inside, it looked Modern but also suggested sympathy for the postwar visual chaos of L.A. evident in the work of artists such as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.<\/p>\n Indeed, relationships with visual artists, more than with architects, sustained Gehry during the early years on his own and began to lead the way to bigger commissions. A house in Malibu<\/a> for painter Ron Davis, completed in 1972 and featuring a trapezoidal frame, was among his first efforts to break from the Modernist box and move toward a more expressionistic architectural language.<\/p>\n As the office grew, Gehry took on more houses and larger commissions, including a series of store interiors for the Joseph Magnin chain. But it was the way he remodeled the Santa Monica house he shared with his second wife, Berta Aguilera, a native of Panama he married in 1975, that first brought him national and international attention.<\/p>\n An architectural model of Frank Gehry\u2019s residence on view in the architect\u2019s retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015. <\/p>\n (Carolina A. Miranda \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n It was a small, pink, two-story bungalow built in 1920 that he and Berta bought it in 1977. Gehry quickly set to work remaking it \u2014 taking off huge sections of its facade and replacing them with glass, corrugated metal and exposed wood framing. (A later reworking added chain-link fencing.) His inspiration was not any architectural theory or school so much as the workaday landscape of Southern California itself, the brash free-for-all he had noticed as soon as he arrived in L.A.<\/p>\n The house attracted critics and fellow architects throughout the 1980s. The attention it brought him led to a string of significant commissions in that decade. Gehry designed several buildings for the Loyola Law School<\/a> campus near downtown L.A. He turned a warehouse in Little Tokyo into the Temporary Contemporary, later renamed the Geffen Contemporary, for the Museum of Contemporary Art (a building that was better received than the design of MOCA\u2019s more formal main museum building<\/a> by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.)<\/p>\n Throughout his career, Gehry would continue to show a knack for sensitively repurposing old buildings. His Pierre Boulez Saal<\/a> in Berlin, which opened in 2017, transformed a historic warehouse once used to store opera sets into a beckoning communal performance space. And in 2021, he transformed a drab 1960s bank branch in Inglewood into a graceful rehearsal and performance space for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not a precious building,\u201d he said of the YOLA project upon its completion<\/a>. \u201cBut it\u2019s precious in what it does.\u201d<\/p>\n Frank Gehry\u2019s team reimagined a Security Pacific bank branch in Inglewood as a performance and rehearsal space for Youth Orchestra Los Angeles.<\/p>\n (Myung J. Chun \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n But it was his firm\u2019s design for Disney Hall that served as the professional tipping point. In 1988, Gehry won a high-profile competition to design a new home for the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Grand Avenue in downtown L.A., an expansion of the Music Center campus next door. As the only L.A. architect in the field, he beat out a group of finalists that included several of the biggest names in 1980s architecture, including Hans Hollein of Austria and London-based James Stirling.<\/p>\n The victory was at least partial vindication after years in which Gehry struggled to earn many significant commissions, particularly for civic and cultural projects, in L.A.<\/p>\n Though construction of the concert hall would be delayed, the achievement helped him win the Pritzker Prize<\/a>, architecture\u2019s top honor, in 1989. Gehry was the first L.A. architect to win a Pritzker. The jury citation read, in part, \u201cRefreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his populist Southern California perspective, Gehry\u2019s work is a highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Disney could be realized, the transformative Bilbao design helped make Gehry a household name. In the early 1990s, New York\u2019s Guggenheim Museum, beginning what would become a global expansion, commissioned Gehry to design a branch in Bilbao. The building, clad in titanium panels and almost impossibly beautiful in photographs, opened in 1997. A review that appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, written by the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, carried the headline \u201cThe Miracle in Bilbao.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Frank Gehry peers through a model of his Grand Avenue Project in his architectural studio in May 2019.<\/p>\n (Jay L. Clendenin \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The opening of the building was almost perfectly timed for maximum impact within the profession. Architecture was in a funk, aimless and beaten down by the recession of the early and middle 1990s. \u201cThis building\u2019s design and construction,\u201d Muschamp wrote, \u201chave coincided with the waning of a period when American architecture spectacularly lost its way.\u201d He called the museum not just \u201cwondrous\u201d but \u201ca Lourdes for a crippled culture.\u201d<\/p>\n That rave notice and the many others that followed, along with the rapturous reports sent back by artists and tourists alike, helped shame L.A. into reviving the floundering plans for Disney Hall.<\/p>\n By 1998 construction on the hall had resumed. And five years later, in 2003, the Gehry building that was supposed to precede the museum in Spain, clad in shimmering steel panels in place of Bilbao\u2019s titanium, had opened at the top of Bunker Hill.<\/p>\n Confetti rains down on the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the conclusion of a gala concert at Disney Hall in 2019. <\/p>\n (Francine Orr \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n It was a startling symbol of architectural talent. It was also a reminder of how long it took L.A. to fully recognize the brilliance of an architect who since his teenage years had called the city home \u2014 and indeed had put a little bit of Southern California, its looseness and tolerance, into almost every building he designed.<\/p>\n Gehry is survived by his wife, Berta, and four children. <\/p>\n Hawthorne is The Times\u2019 former architecture critic. Former Times columnist Carolina A. Miranda contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Architect Frank O. Gehry, who brought an alluringly new kind of shape-making to his profession even as he…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":427307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[52529,2513,648,1032,11286,198856,1033,171,87082,198855,178662,6276,2444,198857,8744,6620,8790,67,132,68,8066,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-427306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-architect","9":"tag-architecture","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-attention","13":"tag-complex-building","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-frank-gehry","17":"tag-gehry","18":"tag-guggenheim-museum","19":"tag-l-a","20":"tag-los-angeles-times","21":"tag-new-kind","22":"tag-project","23":"tag-time","24":"tag-toronto","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-unitedstates","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-work","29":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115669021340801500","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n
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