The Century of Gehry

Frank Gehry (1929–2025) is universally recognized as one of the great masters of contemporary architecture. His ability to transform ordinary circumstances into opportunities for togetherness—where even transitional spaces can be interpreted as a single language of movement and emotion—responds to the spirit of each place and the skyline of each city, while simultaneously bringing about some of the most profound paradigm shifts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Across eight thematic chapters, nineteen projects trace the interplay of instinct and intellect in Gehry’s creative process: from the rebellious intimacy of his Santa Monica house to the urban choreography of Loyola Law School, from the fragmented monumentality of the Chiat/Day Offices to the titanium tides of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the musical sails of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Through sketches and models of ongoing or unbuilt dreams, architecture emerges as a living organism—as pragmatic and chimerical as any human being, full of invention and expressive poetry.

The exhibition also highlights Gehry’s longstanding dialogue with artists and fellow architects, particularly Álvaro Siza, with whom he collaborated on the master plan for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, and whose friendship led to numerous exchanges between the United States and Portugal. From Los Angeles to Berlin, Paris to New York, Sydney to Toronto, the selected works showcase an artist who has blurred the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, gravity and fluidity, memory and the future. This is not a retrospective; it is a celebration of freedom, imagination, and the courage to keep seeing the world anew for nearly a century.

The "Century of Gehry" exhibition is organized by the Serralves Foundation and curated by its Director of Architecture, António Choupina, in partnership with Gehry Partners and in collaboration with the Getty.

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