Frank Gehry: maximalist master who created instant icons like the Bilbao Guggenheim | Frank Gehry

FGehry rank once had a cameo on The Simpsons He designed buildings by crumpling pieces of paper. There was little more to it than that, but its crumpled lines were instantly recognizable, expressed in the exuberant parade of buildings from Prague to Panama City that cranked and collapsed as if struck by a wrecking ball, or twisted and spun like dervishes, defying the laws of gravity and structural logic. Gehry, who died at the age of 96, seemed physically incapable of drawing a straight line, even though he came of age in the age of modernism.

At its best, Gehry’s architecture was a reaction against modernist emperors like Mies van der Rohe and his arrogant injunction that “less is more.” American postmodern theorist and architect Robert Venturi turned the issue around, saying “less is boring.” It perfectly summed up the maximalist Gehry.

As the millennium approached, in 1997 Guggenheim changed the game with his design for the outpost of his modern art empire in the unfashionable northern Spanish city of Bilbao. Plagued by post-industrial decline, this unlikely recovery has been catalyzed by a building of refreshing complexity, encased in an epidermis of 33,000 thin sheets of titanium that glisten like rippling fish scales. This was not neutral ground for art, with gallery spaces being as impressive as the works they were designed to house.

Located in a prominent waterfront site on the Nervión River, the Guggenheim became an instant icon and propelled Gehry, then in his late 60s, into the “starchitect” firmament, a moniker he despised. And, as its backers hoped, it also transformed Bilbao’s wider civic fortunes, attracting 1.3 million visitors in its first year, creating the “Bilbao effect” that has become shorthand for development through cultural tourism based on “iconic” architecture.

Bilbao was followed by the 2003 Walt Disney concert hall in Gehry’s adopted hometown of Los Angeles, designed as a clutch of stainless steel-clad volumes resembling billowing sails or giant metal shavings. He encouraged his client to use stone, but they wanted a Bilbao. The wood-lined auditorium was warm and welcoming, like being inside a musical instrument. Even the organ bore Gehry’s stamp, its stack of pipes resembling a can of exploding fries. For Gehry, whose family moved from his native Toronto to Los Angeles when he was 17, it represented the culmination of a long and formative relationship with the city.

The dynamic forms of his buildings were achieved through an ingenious but laborious working method, which initially involved the creation of hand-made models. These were then digitized using computer software capable of modeling complex curves originally designed for use in the aerospace industry. In fact, sculpture has evolved into architecture, which always strives to create impact. Everything was possible.

As computers liberated form creation, architecture became increasingly, and often irrationally, limitless. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, architects and their patrons, under Gehry’s leadership, tried to outdo each other with projects such as the Dancing House in Prague, nicknamed “Fred and Ginger,” where two disparate towers meet in a swirling, ballet-like embrace, and the Jay Pritzker pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, an open-air amphitheater framed by a halo of torqued stainless steel. steel strips.

But as time went on, in an effort to emulate Bilbao’s success, Gehry began pursuing poorly designed museum projects around the world. Expanding its footprint to the Middle East, Guggenheim commissioned him to produce an Abu Dhabi satellite in 2006; This satellite has been delayed due to delays and is scheduled to be launched only next year, twenty years after its creation. Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “A clear idea of ​​what the building would mean culturally, or even what kind of art it would house, was suggested to have been surpassed by huge budgets.”

Seattle’s overgrown Music Experience Project (known since 2016 as the Museum of Pop Culture) was a chilling disappointment, while the 2014 Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, designed to house the collection of French businessman and art collector Bernard Arnault, was a bloated car crash with some appallingly shoddy workmanship. By then Gehry was also designing luggage, yachts and cognac bottles; this was a side hustle that began more casually with furniture made from layers of corrugated cardboard.

Such late-career hubris was a far cry from the project that first made his name; His own home in Santa Monica, California, was a two-story pink stucco house he bought in 1977, which he then proceeded to gut and enlarge, incorporating pieces of corrugated metal and chain-link fencing. “I was trying to use the stupid, normal ingredients of the neighborhood,” he said at the time. Filled with a sharp and bold populism, his early works bore parallels with the artistic practices of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

LA provided the scope and impetus for experimentation, as Gehry gradually found his rhythm in a frontier town where sprawl and impermanence reigned. Filmmaker Jane Spiller’s 1980 home, where she reveled in exaggerated geometries and juxtapositions, featured a plywood interior encased in a shell made of corrugated metal. American architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote that where timber occasionally broke the exterior walls, “the house was like the architectural equivalent of a couple fighting in the kitchen.”

While Gehry built extensively in Europe, particularly in Germany, with residential towers hunched like drunkards in Düsseldorf and a design museum for the Vitra furniture campus that symbolized his shift from industrial bricolage to more poised, sculptural spectacle, the United Kingdom proved more resistant to his charms.

In 2003 she designed Maggie’s Center for Ninewells hospital in Dundee, part of a network of centers for those affected by cancer. Surprisingly plain and simple, this house is modeled after a traditional Scottish “but and I” dwelling, with a white cottage topped with a metal roof folded over like an origami piece.

He later became involved in making the environment around the Battersea power station habitable, designing silos of luxury housing that, for all their ingenuity, were clearly formulated. He was also invited to design the Serpentine pavilion, London’s annual architectural fair. festival, we reconceptualize it as a tornado in a lumberyard.

In a career spanning 60 years, Gehry has become the quintessential grand old man of architecture, prone to occasionally shouting at the clouds as the world changes around him. At a press conference in Spain in 2014, when he was accused of designing “spectacle architecture” on the occasion of another award, he quietly pointed his finger at the audience. He later apologized. He also stated: “In the world we live in, 98% of the buildings built and designed today are complete nonsense. There is no sense of design, no respect for humanity, just fucking buildings.”