Frank Gehry: a tribute
Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa
Frank Gehry died on 5 December aged 96. He was one of the most famous architects of the late 20th century, best known for astonishing buildings such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Disney Hall in LA and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The New York Times called him “A Disrupter of Architecture and Art”. In an article called “Architecture in the Age of Gehry”, Vanity Fair called him “the most important architect of our age.” He received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the United States. He was so famous that he even became a character in The Simpsons.
Frank Owen Gehry was born in Canada on February 28, 1929. His American father, Irving Goldberg, was born in New York City to Russian-Jewish parents, and his Polish-Jewish mother, Sadie Thelma (née Kaplanski/Caplan) was an immigrant born in what was then Lodz or Lemberg (now Lviv). In 1954, in his mid-Twenties, he anglicised his surname to Gehry, when his then-wife Anita expressed concern about anti-Semitism during the McCarthy period. His family had already experienced anti-Semitism in Canada in the 1930s.
In 1947 his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, which became his lifelong home. In 1954 Gehry graduated from the University of Southern California‘s School of Architecture. In 1957 he designed his first private residence and in 1962 he set up his own practice (named Frank Gehry and Associates from 1967). His first well-known buildings were the two-story Danziger House in LA (1964-65), a pair of grey stucco cubes, blank facades, around an interior courtyard, followed by the Ron Davis House in Malibu (1968-72), commissioned by a Californian abstract artist. This was Gehry’s first building to feature in a national magazine. But Gehry’s career really took off in the 1980s, with pioneering buildings such as the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium (1981) in San Pedro, the California Aerospace Museum (1984) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (1988-2003).
Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA
He started to receive larger national and international commissions, including his first European commission, the Vitra International Furniture Manufacturing Facility and Design Museum in Germany, completed in 1989, with its references to Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Guggenheim Museum on 5th Avenue in New York. It was soon followed by other major commissions, including the Frederick Weisman Museum of Art (1993) in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Cinémathèque Française (1994) in Paris, originally the American Centre in Paris; and the Dancing House in Prague (1996), known as “Fred and Ginger,” mixing comic elements of Hollywood with references to Prague’s traditional 19th century architecture.
“Fred and Ginger” was one of the hallmarks of Gehry’s commissions in central Europe after the Fall of Communism. Along with Norman Foster’s famous design for the new Reichstag building, with its famous glass dome, and Daniel Libeskind’s astonishing design for Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Gehry revolutionised Berlin’s landscape. His buildings included the Pierre Boulez Saal, devised together with Daniel Barenboim, and the DZ Bank near the Brandenburg Gate, just a few blocks from the Reichstag.
But his most famous building was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1991-97) on the city’s waterfront, which made the city attractive to art-and-architecture tourists from all over the world. The legendary architect Philip Johnson called the Guggenheim “the greatest building of our time.”
Other notable buildings included the Stata Center (2004) at MIT, and the Peter B. Lewis Library (2008) at Princeton University; museums such as the Museum of Pop Culture (2000) in Seattle; commercial buildings such as the IAC Building (2007) in New York; and residential buildings, such as Gehry’s first skyscraper, the Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Street (now known as 8 Spruce) in New York City (2011), clad with more than 10,000 differently shaped steel panels.
Tributes poured in after Gehry’s death. The artist Charles Arnoldi said, “He’s not just going to make houses for people, he’s going to make architecture art.” Rolf Fehlbaum, charman emeritus of the Vitra Art Museum, said, “This realm of shapes was so new… You see the beginning of a new architecture.” Paul Goldberger, author of Why Architecture Matters, told The New York Times, “His career represents one of the very few times in all of American architecture and definitely in our lifetime where serious and cutting-edge architecture that had historical and academic interest also ignited an enormous public interest.”
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