Gehry sinuous master of the 20th century
Few architects have transformed the image and economy of a city with a single building. Frank Gehry, who died on 5 December at the age of 96, achieved this in the Basque Country with the Guggenheim Museum, a titanium creature with a spectacular shape that triggered the famous 'Bilbao Effect', studied by economists, marketing experts and sociologists as a model of urban regeneration.
Radical and subversive, yet espoused and absorbed by the establishment, that architectural vision came from afar, from California where Gehry - born in Toronto in 1929 as Ephraim Owen Goldberg - had landed at the age of 16. In the City of Angels, the young man held a variety of jobs - from truck driver to radio journalist - before enrolling in architecture and changing his name to avoid anti-Semitic discrimination. He studied at the University of Southern California (where he learnt to model ceramics: not a minor detail) and then at Harvard, where he was nevertheless impatient with the academic and reactionary snobbery of the East Coast. So he returns to the rougher Los Angeles, where - except for a Parisian interlude - he will live all his life, frequenting artists such as Edward Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha and Ken Price. However, Gehry was also attentive to the Big Apple, forming partnerships with Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, with whom he designed a famous building in the shape of binoculars.
The exploit that makes him famous is his home in Santa Monica (1978): Frank buys a small colonial-style house and rapes it, disrupting it and wrapping it in poor, industrial materials - plywood, corrugated sheet metal, wire mesh, following Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg - folded into crooked surfaces that question the American (housing) model, like the anthem reinterpreted by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.
Thanks to that and other pierced architecture such as San Sebastiano, Gehry was included in Paolo Portoghesi's Venice Architecture Biennial in 1980, and in 1988 in the 'deconstructivist' avant-garde exhibition at MoMA, together with Zaha Hadid, Libeskind, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Tschumi and Koolhaas, names that would dominate the scene in the following years with architecture based on geometric torments of various kinds.
In 1989, Gehry, who meanwhile ventured into design with bentwood and cardboard furniture, won the Pritzker Prize. Thanks also to computer technology, the angularity of his early works moves towards more blunt and sinuous surfaces, close to expressionism, Alvar Aalto and even Italian painting. In Morandi's bottles and the draperies of Bellini's Madonna and Child, for example, he found a model for his architectural folds: from the Vitra Museum (1989) to the extraordinary project of the Lewis House in Ohio, which was not realised. Another curious source of inspiration was the shape of fish, childhood madeleines (the gefilte fish for Shabbat) found in aircraft fuselages, to be calculated with cutting-edge software. Thus was born the enormous golden fish of 1992 in Barcelona.
