"There was a bit more to it than that, but from Prague to Panama City, his scrunched contours were instantly recognisable, expressed in an exuberant parade of buildings that cranked and slumped as if hit by a wrecking ball, or crashed and whirled like dervishes, defying laws of gravity and structural logic. Though Gehry, who has died aged 96, came of age in the era of modernism, it was as if he were physically incapable of drawing a straight line."
"As the millennium loomed, he changed the game with his 1997 design for an outpost of the Guggenheim modern art empire in the unfashionable northern Spanish city of Bilbao. Grappling with post-industrial decline, its unlikely recovery was catalysed by a building of exhilarating complexity sheathed in an epidermis of 33,000 wafer-thin sheets of titanium that shimmered like rippling fish scales. With gallery spaces as expressive as the works they were designed to house, this was no neutral backdrop for art."
Frank Gehry created exuberant, sculptural buildings characterised by swooping, cranked and slumped forms that rejected modernist simplicity. His designs often resembled scrunched paper and appeared to defy gravity and structural logic. He came to global prominence with the 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, clad in 33,000 wafer-thin titanium sheets that shimmered like fish scales and catalysed Bilbao's post-industrial revival by attracting 1.3 million visitors in its first year. Gehry embraced maximalist expression over 'less is more' modernist restraint and acquired the 'starchitect' status he preferred to disdain. He died aged 96.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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