The “starchitect” responsible for the Guggenheim Bilbao
Frank Gehry, who has died aged 96, was one of the 20th century’s most influential architects. In a globe-trotting career spent defying the constraints of modernism, with its clean, straight lines, he produced a series of bold, exuberant designs that were expressive, fluid and sculptural. With unmissable “wow factor”, these became instant landmarks, said The Times. The most famous, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, helped to revitalise a whole city, and cemented his reputation as one of the modern era’s first “starchitects”. Gehry disliked the term, and was dismayed by the idea that he was creating a spectacle, said the Financial Times. He took pride in being a practical architect, not a “fey dreamer”. Yet he did regard himself as an artist, and did not deny seeking to make an impact. “I want buildings that have passion in them,” he said in 1997, “that make people feel something – even if they get mad at them.”
Frank Owen Goldberg was born into a working-class Jewish family in Toronto in 1929, said The New York Times. As a child, he enjoyed building miniature cities out of the scraps in his grandfather’s hardware store; the recurring fish motif in his work has been ascribed to his memories of the carp his grandmother kept in the bath, to make gefilte fish. In 1947, the family moved to Los Angeles, for his father’s health. After taking a series of manual jobs, Frank enrolled first in art classes, and later in an architecture course at the University of Southern California. He changed his surname in the 1950s, at the behest of his first wife, Anita Snyder, to protect their children from antisemitic bullying.
While working for a firm known for designing early shopping malls, Gehry began mixing with notable West Coast artists. Before long, he’d launched his own practice, and taken “a position outside normal architecture”, said The Guardian. He made his first truly avant-garde statement in 1978, when he transformed his bungalow in Santa Monica by adding to it layers of corrugated metal, plywood, and chain-link fencing. His neighbours hated it, but the leading architect Philip Johnson hailed it as “the freshest creation in architecture”, and it led to him being regarded as a pioneer of deconstructivism.
As Gehry’s reputation grew, his style evolved to “folding, twisting and slanting forms”, said The Washington Post – which were facilitated by his use of CATIA, software designed for the aerospace industry that he’d adapted to make complex calculations about structural loads and stresses in buildings. This enabled him to indulge in “whimsical experiments” such as the Dancing House in Prague – his 1996 collaboration with Vlado Milunic nicknamed “Fred and Ginger”. It also informed the Guggenheim Bilbao – a riot of sinuous, twisting forms clad in 33,000 titanium panels which turned the rundown port city into a major tourist destination. Its success enabled him to complete his “audaciously curvilinear” Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, which had been delayed by financial problems. By 2005 he was so famous, he was invited to appear as himself in “The Simpsons”. He receives a letter from Marge asking him to design a concert hall for Springfield. In disgust, he scrunches the paper up, throws it on the ground – and is so inspired by the shape it forms, he accepts the commission.
Gehry was sometimes accused of spreading himself too thin. His planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was commissioned nearly 20 years ago, and has still not opened. Yet he never stopped working, said The Wall Street Journal – and insisted that he’d never stop pushing at the boundaries. “I cannot face my children if I tell them I have no more ideas,” he said in 2015. “It is like giving up and telling them there is no future for them.”
