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 of togetherness, where even in-between spaces can be read as one single vocabulary of movement and feeling, responds to the spirit of each place and to skyline of each city, while simultaneously inventing some of the most profound paradigm shifts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Across eight thematic chapters, nineteen projects follow the combination 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 reveals Gehry’s longstanding dialogue with artists and other architects, especially Álvaro Siza, with whom he worked with 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 feature someone who dissolved the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, gravity and fluidity, memory and future. This is not a retrospective, it’s a celebration of freedom, imagination, and the courage to keep seeing the world anew for nearly one hundred years.

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