12/06/2025
FRANK GEHRY: AN APPRECIATION
When I was a student in the Critical Studies Program at UCLA 20 years ago, Frank Gehry wasn’t often discussed. Despite being America’s most prominent architect, and one of its most prolific, his work did not seem to be appreciated by my colleagues and faculty. At that time, his portfolio of projects included the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. But despite having dozens of innovative and celebrated works to his credit, Gehry’s architecture was largely absent from the lectures and seminars of my graduate alma mater.
This was due to the fact that Gehry was not a theorist. While he taught and lectured at several colleges and universities, his practice was not rooted in academia or the discourse of architecture. Frank Gehry was a builder. Creatively, he was an expressionist—but not one who subscribed to the philosophy of expressionism. For Gehry, expressionism was a method. He surpassed the formal limitations of expressionist architects like Mendelsohn and Taut, and was not constrained by the engineered elegance of Saarinen’s Dulles Airport Terminal or Utzon’s Sidney Opera House. His work was driven by experimentation, materiality, craft and memory. For Gehry, memory as a wellspring of personal meaning and fulfillment.
Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, the only other American architect who can hold a candle to Gehry’s oeuvre, the younger architect did not seek to systematize his work. There was no Frank Gehry project to reshape city planning (Broadacre), or transform American housing (Usonia). Where Wright categorized his work as Organic and created a polemic to support it, Gehry resisted classifications and labels. His practice spanned the late modern, postmodern and deconstructivist periods. While aspects of those styles are all evident in his work, Gehry’s buildings are distinctly his own.
There are similarities between the two men, however. Their highly personal and somewhat idiosyncratic work is uniquely American. Wright’s thinking was rooted in the midwestern farms and expansive prairies of the late 19th century; Gehry’s in the vast decentralized urban space and explosive postwar growth of Southern California. There is a strong strain of cultural optimism in the work of both men. Each had an affinity for art and artists, and their creative endeavors included sculpture, furniture and graphic design. Where the work of European Modernist masters like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier translated broadly to other cultures and laid the groundwork for subsequent developments, the buildings of Wright and Gehry are too personal to have had a similar, formative impact. In the case of Wright, several of his innovations were subsumed into residential architecture, and much was lost in translation. It remains to be seen what, if any, long-term influence Gehry will have.
Perhaps Gehry’s most important contribution to the practice of architecture was his early adoption and adaptation of the CATIA software; a product developed by the French company Dassault, initially for the design of fighter jets. But unlike the computer-driven forms of architects like Zaha Hadid and the legions of Blobitecture practitioners of the early 21st century, Gehry’s work was not a dependent on digital technology so much as it was perfected by it. The master’s hands are evident in every one of his buildings, and Gehry never strayed from his use of physical models consisting of wood blocks, paper, cardboard, wire mesh and fabric. CATIA only rationalized the curved forms of Gehry’s creations and closely translated his physical models into digital ones ready for engineering and documentation.
When the Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997, I was an intern at a large architecture firm in New York. We were working on several projects with Ove Arup & Partners, a global engineering company. I worked closely with the Arup’s principal engineer on the design of their New York office, and recall him decrying Bilbao as a “stage set” made possible only by a complex and layered structural frame, designed of course, by an engineer. I liked and admired this person very much, but disagreed with his critique. At the time, I wasn’t able to articulate my appreciation for that building. It was only years later, after moving to Los Angeles and spending hours in Disney Hall did I realize where the greatness of Gehry’s work resides, and I believe it is the same thing that made Philip Johnson cry when he first visited Bilbao: delight. Unrestrained, fully realized joy. You cannot walk into a Gehry master work and not hear your favorite music in your head. In a profession that depends on control and predictability to ensure success, Gehry’s best projects delight with surprises for which he made space, but did not control. If abstract expressionist painting has an analog in architecture, it is Frank Gehry. If the 2,000-year-old Vitruvian formulation of firmness, commodity and delight remains an adequate measure of architecture, Gehry mastered all three in a way that no architect ever has. But it is delight, the immeasurable product of firmness and commodity, that informs our experience of Gehry’s architecture; delight in touch, vision, movement and sound that is so uniquely and beautifully expressed in his work.
Gehry was an artist who never forgot himself. He established a viable commercial practice and then used that professional credibility to advance the boundaries of his work and fulfill his creative potential. I’ve tried to model my practice after his, without as yet, much success. But his journey, as much as the artifacts of that journey, remain an inspiration for me, and I hope for generations of architects to come.
May his memory be a blessing to us all.
Photo credit: Alexandra Cabri
