Frank Gehry: The Guggenheim Bilbao and Beyond

This lecture surveys the long and productive career of recently departed Canadian-American deconstructivist architect Frank Gehry (1929-2025), examining residential, commercial, cultural, and other educational buildings in cities located in both North America and Europe. Beginning with Gehry House, the suburban California home that the architect renovated for his own family in California in 1977, this conversation will illustrate by example the original and forward-looking contributions that Frank Gehry made to the built environment in North American and Europe. In retracing the evolution of Gehry’s unique postmodern trajectory, we will study a selection of his buildings for their innovative structural and sculptural forms, focusing on a selection of projects, including Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (1989), the Olympic Fish Pavilion in Barcelona (1992), the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), the Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland (2002), the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), the expansion to the Art Gallery of Ontario (2008), the “Core Project” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021), Weisman Museum in Minneapolis (1993/2011), the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014), the Luma Foundation in Arles (2021), and more!