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Review: In Porto, airbrushing the Gehry legend
“The Century of Gehry” opens a lengthy run at the Serralves Museum. Plus: Calling all fall preview items; three linked Paul R. Williams exhibitions on the way; and possible trouble for a Kuma design in D.C.
Christopher Hawthorne
June 26, 2026
Frank Gehry in front of the Santa Monica house he remade beginning in the late 1970s. © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
“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 tribute.
Maybe the most charitable way to describe the exhibition, which I saw on Sunday, is that it proceeds in a major key.
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