Frank Gehry, one of the giants of contemporary architecture, has died at the age of 96 in his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness. Famous for the billowing titanium sails that revolutionized cityscapes from Los Angeles to Bilbao, Gehry was a twentieth-century Borromini: a sculptor as well as an architect, whose masterpieces, in visceral force and ability to arouse emotion, unconsciously competed with the masters of 17th-century Baroque architecture.
Gerhy will be remembered for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, an exuberant titanium-clad construction in what was then a declining industrial city on Spain’s northern coast: it was a sensation when it opened in 1997, making the Toronto-born Canadian the most recognizable North American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. A composition of curvilinear volumes of shimmering silver that seemed to explode from the ground, the Guggenheim seemed to defy gravity, playing with fluid shapes, broken lines and industrial materials: in addition to titanium, steel and glass. Considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century, the museum triggered the so-called “Bilbao effect”, the urban planning model according to which a single iconic building can transform the image and economy of an entire city. But there was not only the Bilbao museum in the portfolio of the Pritzker prize and Praemium Imperiale (the two Oscars of architecture). Among his best-known works are the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, a building so ethereal that it seems to be made of blown glass, the Dancing House in Prague (nicknamed Ginger and Fred), but also the restyling of the Museum of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which he tackled from the inside, in the spirit of the heart surgeon who removes the obstacles that block circulation.
Gehry was also an innovator on a technological level: his studio developed the use of software derived from aeronautics for digital modeling which made daring geometries possible. A creator of “landscapes” rather than buildings, capable of transforming matter into movement and bringing art into the heart of urban space, Gehry had burst into the world of architecture in 1978 with the completion of a house in Santa Monica: a ‘Cape Cod style’ bungalow with a wooden structure, which he dismembered and wrapped in a new skin of plywood, corrugated metal and wire mesh. The collision of forms, crude and even violent, seemed to capture the political and generational fractures that had torn apart American society – and particularly the family – since the 1960s. That house, where Gerhy lived for four decades, established him as an innovative force in architecture. The architect created others in the following years, evoking half-built structures. “It’s neither beauty nor ugliness,” Philip Johnson told the New York Times Magazine, describing in 1982 with the New York Times Magazine the sensation of being inside “a sort of disturbing satisfaction that you don’t feel in any other space.”