Review: In Porto, airbrushing the Gehry legend

“Frank Gehry: The Century of Gehry,” at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, through Dec. 30, was planned as an ambitious late-career tribute by a three-headed team including the museum and its Director of Architecture, António Choupina; the Gehry Partners office; and the Getty Research Institute, which in 2017 acquired a significant part of the architect’s archive. In the wake of Gehry’s death in December, at 96, it has of course taken on new shades of meaning, as some combination of retrospective and memorial.

Maybe the most charitable way to describe the exhibition, which I saw on Sunday, is that it proceeds in a major key. With the exception of brief detours to highlight Gehry’s work in Portugal and Spain and his collaboration with Álvaro Siza, who designed both the main 1999 Serralves building and the 2024 addition where “The Century of Gehry” is installed, Choupina has arranged the show as a greatest-hits tour, filled with work that will be familiar even to the architect’s casual fans.

The 14 built projects on view include Gehry’s own house, in Santa Monica, which he famously sliced open and remade beginning in the late 1970s; Loyola University Law School and Walt Disney Concert Hall, both in Los Angeles; the Vitra Design Museum, in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum, in Paris; and the 8 Spruce Street residential tower, in Lower Manhattan. Most are represented with a single (if often quite large) model, a small number of framed drawings, and a series of photographs, model shots, and plans affixed directly to the gallery walls. There are also smallish and generally unobtrusive video monitors, showing interviews with Gehry, his clients and collaborators, and (less often) critics or historians. (There are also displays on three unrealized projects plus one in construction, in Toronto, along with a rug design and examples of Gehry’s cardboard furniture.) The installation design, credited to Gehry Partners, is straightforward and spare.

There is simply no time in this march through the career highlights, Choupina would have us believe, to ponder the other kinds of work Gehry’s office pursued, especially in its early years. There is no Gemini G.E.L., the modest campus of buildings Gehry designed (or remade), between 1975 and 1979, for the pioneering L.A. workshop and printmaker, a project that in its combination of plainspokenness and subtlety has clear affinities with Siza’s work. There is no Danziger Studio, the deceptively banal-looking stucco box Gehry made for the graphic designer Lou Danziger in 1965 for a corner site on Melrose Ave., which helped announce the architect’s arrival as a determined and independent voice. There are none of the quirky early houses on the west side of Los Angeles, such as the Spiller House (1980), Norton House (1984), or Schnabel House (1989). There are no displays of Gehry Partners’ underrated skills at redesigning or extending existing buildings, as in its work in the late 1990s on Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum—a deft and restrained remake that even some of the museum’s regular visitors haven’t traced back to Gehry.

And, it probably goes without saying, there are none of the controversial, hubristic, or flawed projects that periodically exposed the limits of Gehry’s huge talent. No Atlantic Yards, the proposal for an NBA arena and a clutch of residential towers in downtown Brooklyn that was made public in 2003 and in the end, and probably for the best, went unrealized (or, to be exact, went to other firms, in modified form). No Experience Music Project, the 2000 building that Gehry designed for Paul Allen in Seattle that, thanks to a vague mission and an elastic budget that ultimately exceeded $240 million (including exhibits), turned out to be a flabby vanity project for client and architect alike.

The exhibition appears to exist primarily to reaffirm—to perform the final, careful bits of airbrushing on—a certain vision of Gehry’s work that his firm, and the architect himself, have long worked assiduously to craft. Steering well clear of the range of ways that design practice and the critical framing of it have evolved over the last two decades, to engage with questions of power, money, labor, carbon, authorship, and globalization, to name a few, it offers unapologetic endorsements of the following ideas:

That Gehry was as much sculptor as architect. As the opening wall text puts it, “the chosen works represent the dissolution of boundaries between sculpture and architecture.” The thematic titles given to each room—“Getting the Pieces to Read as One,” for example, or “Placing Things Together and Composing the In-Between”—extend this point of view.

That he worked as much from intuition as expertise. The same wall text argues that the selected projects “highlight the blend of instinct and intellect evident in Gehry’s creative process,” which gave me flashbacks to that Simpsons episode with the crumpled paper. (Gehry to Fareed Zakaria, in 2011: “That was just a fun thing. But it has—it has haunted me.”) Oh, and to the Charles Jencks story about the hammer: “Let me tell you how he finished his house. One day he went up to shave in the bathroom, and there was no light to shave by. And so he picked up a hammer and knocked a hole in the ceiling, into the California sun, and then he shaved by it.”

That he saw context and program as distractions. Near the beginning of the show, in a video discussing Loyola Law School, Gehry says that one of his overarching design goals, in those days at least, was to “get to the white canvas, or as close to it” as possible. Near the end, a model of the 8 Spruce tower is set in one direction against a giant and entirely empty white wall, the more dramatically to emphasize the show’s interest in setting Gehry’s buildings free from their urban and political settings.

That the fitting culmination of his long career was to be anointed the world’s leading starchitect. Gehry, according to the opening line of wall text, “is universally recognized as one of the great masters of contemporary architecture.” (Of the six words in the show’s efficient full title, half are either “Frank” or “Gehry.”) And forget the roles played by Gehry’s partners, younger colleagues, clients, and so forth. Though Jay Chiat and Tom Krens get a bit of video screen time, as do the younger versions of former Gehry staffers Frederick Fisher and Bob Hale, the only collaboration the show celebrates in any depth is between Gehry and Siza, on an ill-fated expansion plan for Art Center College in Pasadena—starchitect to starchitect.

I think the word for all four of these overarching notions is hoary. Given that Gehry was “deeply involved” in planning the show, according to the museum, then maybe I should feel a bit foolish for having argued, as I have in various ways over the years at the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, that his very best designs were in fact carefully—uncommonly—attuned to both human scale and the civic fabric: that he was a genuine humanist and a skilled urban designer masquerading (or easily miscast) as the kind of globe-trotting superstar who preferred grand design gestures to getting the details right.

I stand by this position, and I think history will bear it out, especially where projects like Disney Hall and the early houses are concerned. Still, it’s jarring to see these particular skills—the ones that give even Gehry’s photogenic masterworks such a satisfying inner equilibrium, in contrast to buildings by the committed deconstructivists with whom he was often grouped—tossed aside as another big exhibition spotlights the virtuosity and the form-giving from on high.

The questions I was left with after leaving the show had less to do with Gehry’s work and more to do with the curatorial norms that seem so strictly and unyieldingly to govern certain kinds of architecture exhibitions. Is it even possible to imagine a monographic architecture show that is not, by definition, an exercise in something between cheerleading and hagiography, as this one undoubtedly is? Or does the need to rely on the architectural offices that are the subjects of these shows for access to drawings, models, and other materials preclude a different—more sober, more surprising, more skeptical, or even just more curious—approach? Why is it that museums love celebrating the careers of maverick architects but so often insist on presenting their work in such conventional and hidebound ways?

These are questions that Gehry’s work has been kicking up for several decades, thanks in part to the architect’s unusually keen interest in, and real knack for, shaping his own legend. In 2001, when the Guggenheim was lobbying to build, with significant city funding, a Gehry-designed satellite in Lower Manhattan, riding a wave of post-Bilbao momentum, the museum mounted a monographic exhibition at the FLW mothership designed by Gehry himself (with Edwin Chan). More recently, the Pompidou’s Frédéric Migayrou and Aurélien Lemonier worked closely with Gehry Partners in planning a 2014 retrospective that, as I put it in a review for the L.A. Times, cast Gehry “in a well-worn mold: as one of the Great Men of contemporary architecture, a lone creative genius who has navigated a path from teenage Canadian immigrant in postwar Los Angeles to global superstar, churning out unorthodox houses, museums and concert halls all the while.”

It’s not tough to understand why Gehry Partners, and to a lesser extent curators at the Serralves, would want to mount a show in this vein. But what about the Getty? In what way does an exhibition as dutifully honorific and risk-averse as this one advance the GRI’s mission (“to cultivate advanced knowledge of art and its varied histories”) or open up new ways of understanding the vast Gehry archive? A catalogue, which according to a Serralves press officer, Miguel Conde Coutinho, “hopefully will be released soon,” may help answer those questions.

Or it may not. There is of course little to gain, from the point of view of the collaborators on the exhibition, in digging up old dirt. But dirt can be more revealing than polish. The relationship between Siza and Gehry, for example, was a good deal more complicated, and more suggestive of what it actually means for two titanic figures to try to work together, than the show lets on in highlighting what it calls merely a “friendship [that] has inspired numerous exchanges between the United States and Portugal.”

When I wrote about the Art Center plans for the New York Times in 2004, Siza had left the project, while Gehry was still hopeful that his version of the design would be realized.

I went back this week to look at that piece, which I hadn’t read in years, and discovered this bit:

“Alvaro Siza, of Portugal, was enlisted to build his first United States building for the hilltop campus, a technical center that was to include facilities for prototyping and materials science. But he pulled out after butting heads with Mr. Gehry, said Patricia Oliver, who oversees the school's architectural projects.

“Mr. Siza's first plans were right on the mark, Ms. Oliver said. But then they became more grandiose, and ‘you could see that he was trying to compete with Frank.’”

News & Notes

I’ll be writing the fall architecture preview for the New York Times again this year. Please send potential items my way: [email protected]. The ideal candidate for this feature is a building (or an exhibition, book, or film about architecture) opening this fall or winter (or maybe even early spring of next year), anywhere in the world. Thanks in advance.

The Getty, LACMA, and USC’s Fisher Museum of Art are readying a trio of exhibitions on the prolific 20th-century L.A. architect Paul R. Williams. Vanity Fair has a detailed preview, including the news that Darren Walker, former head of the Ford Foundation, now owns the house Williams designed for himself and his family in L.A.’s Lafayette Square neighborhood. (I might have missed it, but I hadn’t seen that reported elsewhere.) That house was part of the architectural tour I planned for my mother-in-law, starring an L.A. landmark from each decade of her life, for her 80th birthday in 2017.

Kengo Kuma’s design for the Global War on Terrorism Memorial, planned for a site on the National Mall, is drawing (predictable, familiar) fire from three GOP senators.

“Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice … in the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York.”—Félix Guattari, 1989, via Susan Stryker.

See you next week!

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