Frank Gehry’s Architecture, Seen Through the Models That Made It
At the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, a new exhibition is asking visitors to look past the finished spectacle of Frank Gehry’s buildings and into the layered process that produced them. “The Century of Gehry,” organized in concert with Gehry Partners and the Getty, gathers sketches, study models, and other working materials from across the architect’s career.
The timing gives the show added weight. Gehry died last December at 96, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the visual language of contemporary architecture in cities from Paris to Berlin to Los Angeles. His buildings are often read as singular gestures — metallic, fluid, and seemingly defiant of gravity — but the exhibition argues for something more patient and more collaborative: a practice built through revision, exchange, and technical problem-solving.
The installation begins with one of Gehry’s most revealing early projects, the remodeled Santa Monica home he started in 1977. What can look at first like a rough collision of plywood, glass, and corrugated metal is shown here as a carefully considered composition. A model reveals how the windows were angled to open skyward views, including one that frames a cactus in the back garden. The point is not simply that the house was radical, but that its radicalism was engineered.
From there, the exhibition moves through some of Gehry’s best-known projects. His 1985 Chiat/Day design in Venice, Los Angeles, appears alongside the binoculars that helped inspire the final sculpture commission by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The show also includes the unrealized master plan for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, developed with Álvaro Siza in 2000–01, and the ambitious Lewis Residence, conceived in 1989 for Peter B. Lewis in Lyndhurst, Ohio. That project drew in Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Oldenburg, underscoring how often Gehry’s architecture developed in dialogue with artists.
The Guggenheim Bilbao, opened in 1997, stands as the exhibition’s pivotal case study. Its curving titanium surfaces helped transform Bilbao’s skyline and economy, while also making Gehry a sought-after architect for major cultural institutions. The show treats that success not as an endpoint, but as the result of years of formal experimentation that began long before the museum opened.
By foregrounding process over myth, “The Century of Gehry” offers a more exacting portrait of an architect whose work was never only about dramatic form. It was also about the hidden labor of making those forms feel inevitable.
