Written By | Fashion and Design Desk
Running through December, the exhibition assembles original models, drawings, furniture and archival material spanning seven decades
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PORTO, Portugal
Frank Gehry liked to say that buildings should feel like they were still moving. Today in Porto, the buildings stand still and the world moves around them: "The Century of Gehry," the first major retrospective since the architect's death last year at 96, opens at the Serralves Museum — inside the wing designed by the man Gehry called "my brother."
Running through December, the exhibition assembles original models, drawings, furniture and archival material spanning seven decades: from scrappy early experiments in Los Angeles to the titanium whirlwind of the Guggenheim Bilbao — the building that minted the term "the Bilbao effect" and taught every city that architecture could be an economic strategy.
Nineteen Buildings, Eight Chapters
Curated by António Choupina and developed with Gehry Partners and the Getty Research Institute, the show is organized into eight thematic chapters. Nineteen projects anchor the galleries: the 1978 Santa Monica house (Gehry's chain-link-and-plywood manifesto), alongside the Vitra Design Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the LUMA tower in Arles, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Seen together, the models tell what photographs cannot: how radical the leaps were. The distance between a suburban house clad in chain-link and a billion-dollar concert hall sheathed in stainless steel is, in the gallery, a matter of a few meters — and a lifetime of convincing skeptics that the impossible shape could actually stand up.
A Brotherhood of Architects
The venue gives the exhibition an emotional charge no other museum could match. Serralves was designed by Álvaro Siza, Portugal's Pritzker laureate — one of the few contemporaries Gehry regarded with open reverence. The two men represented opposite poles: Siza the master of white, silent, monastic restraint; Gehry the conjurer of exuberant, billowing excess. That the showman's posthumous retrospective unfolds inside his friend's serene galleries is the kind of curatorial poetry architecture rarely allows itself.
Beneath the spectacle, Gehry insisted to the end, was rigor: the fish forms studied for decades, the aerospace software that made the unbuildable buildable, the furniture experiments (bentwood chairs, corrugated-cardboard seating) through which he tested ideas at the scale of the body before risking them at the scale of the skyline.
The First Draft of History
Posthumous retrospectives are where reputations get renegotiated. The flamboyant icon-building Gehry embodied has been out of critical fashion — displaced by an architecture of carbon, reuse and modesty. Yet the exhibition argues that the caricature (starchitect, maker of expensive sculptures) was always too small. The early Los Angeles work was cheap, improvisational and ecological by necessity; the late work solved problems now standard across the profession. For Porto, landing the first great Gehry retrospective — over institutions in Los Angeles, New York and Bilbao — confirms Serralves as a destination on the global design map.
What This Means for You
If a trip to Portugal is plausible, this is the cultural event to build around: the show runs through December, Porto in autumn is a great underrated city break, and the museum itself — Siza's masterwork set in a park of camellias — is half the reason to go.
For everyone else: the strange museum on your waterfront, the concert hall that looks like a ship's hull — all of it traces to a man in Santa Monica who wrapped his house in chain-link and waited for the neighbors to complain.
The Century of Gehry insists the century just past was his. Walking through these galleries, you suspect the influence has at least another century to run.
