There is something deeply revealing about the architect’s biography that resonates in his work. This doesn’t happen to everyone: it’s easy to hide behind a building. But this always happens with great people. The vicissitudes of life are translated for them into certain dimensions, into spaces for coexistence, into winding facades, into layouts that reveal few doubts and the absence of fear, or into facades that aspire to become evidence of strength.
Frank O. Jerry (Toronto, 1929 – Los Angeles, 2025), who died on Friday in California at the age of 96, stopped being Ephraim Owen Goldberg in 1947 when his family, fleeing poverty and anti-Semitism, settled in progressive, then almost uninvented, California. After becoming an architect, his time in Paris – where he won a scholarship – and his desire to become a modern architect marked his career more than his graduate studies at Harvard, which he did not complete.
Thus, Gehry began as a modernist, that is, a cubist, and a professional with a sensitivity to ornament. He ended up denouncing himself as a deconstructionist, without having time to comment on how Philip Johnson, head of MoMa’s architecture department, described what he perhaps did not fully understand.
It was his first wife, Anita Snyder, whom he married when he was 23, who suggested that Jerry change his name. It was the second, Panamanian Berta Aguilera, who would – almost unwittingly – give him the wings to transform into the architect he decided to be. It happened in 1975, when they got married. They bought a house in Santa Monica that needed repairs. Jerry was responsible for their fabrication – not design – using chicken wire for the stairs, corrugated steel sheets for the fascia and… cardboard for the furniture. This furniture would change his life. The house will also become his business card.
The Easy Edges armchair collection will reach even the most expensive hotels. It will sell for thousands of euros and will enter the MoMa collection. Using the cheapest materials available at the hardware store would make him one of the most famous architects in the world.
After that dare, when he was commissioned to build the Los Angeles Air Museum, he smashed a small plane onto the facade to serve as a decoy. At that time, Rolf Fehlbaum, owner of the German furniture production company Vitra, brought him to Europe to sign his first building on the continent: the Vitra Design Museum. It was in 1989 when he finished the film. It is worth a visit in Weil am Rhein. It’s like the naked Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
By then, Gehry and his studio were signing agreements to create universities and housing for the rich. An expert gambler, Jerry increased the stakes with each new bet. He was under modern containment for years, and in Prague, he built two buildings that he called “The Dance.” ginger and unique. How does architecture begin to dance? Breaking symmetries, relying on organic structures more than geometric structures and… with great engineers calculating structures. Gehry was also a pioneer in this: in bringing the computer design that engineering uses to architecture. It wasn’t the design, it was the calculation. He shaped what he wanted to see made out of plasticine, like his great friend, the sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Others were calculating how to raise it. That’s how he arrived in Bilbao.
He entered Spain via Barcelona: along with the magnificent fish shadow that accompanies the Hotel Arts – designed by Chicago firm SOM. It was thought up by promoter Ware Travelstead. They told him in Barcelona: “It will be the most expensive umbrella in the world.” “It will be cheap in the future.” He was right. Gehry’s next step was to create a monument representing the before and after of his work. And in the history of architecture.
Today, the economically transformative result that architectural work can have on a city is known as the “Bilbao Effect.” There are many people who have tried it. Only in Spain, Santiago, with Peter Eisenman in his book Cidade da Cultura, is an example of this. It is not necessary to remember that not all cities suffered the same luck. Success has no mathematical formula. Of course, it usually leads to a decrease in heights. This also happened to Gehry when he devoted himself to signing works by his eminent cousins at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
These were not bad buildings, but rather a unique monument. Thus, the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles was followed by the Marques de Riscal Hotel in Elsiego (La Rioja) and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Jerry has become the best advertising investment. He even signed on to the airport expansion project – an airport with it Guggenian– From a gun no less. Not Built: Serenissima has its times.
From the height of recognition that earned him all sorts of accolades – from the Japanese Empire to the Pritzker to the then Prince of Asturias, there is still the memory of Gehry making a fig – the comb – for someone who was critically asked whether he considered himself a star architect. It was the opposite of the “Bilbao effect”. Amid the detritus of a surplus of architectural stars – many of which have collapsed – and at a time when the economic crisis led to questions about how many contemporary monuments a city could hold, Gehry showed why he was great: he was able to reinvent himself.
On Spruce Street, in the financial district of lower Manhattan, he built a skyscraper, thin, round, friendly, ironic, and somewhat vertiginous, reminiscent of New York and Gehry. That was in 2011. The 2001 attacks spelled the end of the model that the United States had built during its invasion of the Middle East. Gehry had a final word: it was necessary to change the international style of most skyscrapers to get a dose of identity. It is the lack of identity that results in bland cities. And the skyscrapers built by Frank Gehry will not contribute to this. Thus, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and 8 Spruce Street today are great achievements of an architect who leaves a great legacy: he knew how to play with spaces and, consequently, with light and context to evoke sensations and contribute to the construction of places of pilgrimage.