News of Frank Gehry's passing today was another 2025 kick to the gut. What an imaginative, original thinker was he.
As of this post, The New York Times obit team is still tweaking their tribute under the working headline Frank O. Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Dies at 96 with sidebars of sweeping images for Top 12 Works and an extensive appraisal.
My earliest Gehry encounter was in the mid-1990s, spotting the gleaming, then recently opened Weisman Art Museum, aka WAM, on the Mississippi River hillside of the University of Minnesota campus.
Sunlight glistened from the building's stainless-steel coating, with different effects from midday to sunset, much like the 2009 photo (right).
Exploring its galleries, finally visited years later (in 2004 or 2005) proved reminiscent of trips to another architect Frank -- specifically, Lloyd Wright's -- Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan with its nontraditional spaces and oblong or curvy rooms.
Speaking of Guggenheims, I distinctly recall clipping photos of Gehry's
Bilbao masterpiece during the early days of my first PR job at Matlock (fall 1997) when my morning routine included mandatory reading of The Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for client or related industry news.
On one of the morning reads around the October museum opening, photos from Spain's Guggenheim jumped off the page, and a visit to experience that building instantly entered my international travel wish list at a time when my first passport had not yet been stamped.
Unknowingly, in November that year, on a first overseas visit to Barcelona, another of Gehry's icons appeared while touring the coastal 1992 Olympic Village, where his
Peix (fish) structure is proudly perched (no pun intended) adjacent to the two towers built to house athletes. Even at night it twinkled, but I did not recognize it as Gehry.
It took 21 years, but a visit to Guggenheim Bilbao was a "must" in a summer 2018 Spain-France-Andorra-Spain road trip with Valentina -- it took most of the day to explore every corner and curve, still marveling from all angles on an evening riverside walk and from atop the city's funicular-access cliffs (photo below left was museum view from hotel).
Over the years, experiencing Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles -- a likely Cultural Olympiad venue for LA28 -- as well as The Stata Center in Boston, Chicago's Pritzker Pavillion and neighboring Pedestrian Bridge (featured in Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid), Manhattan's IAC Building and skyscraper on Spruce Street, each came into view.
The 2017 IOC Commission Visit for the Paris 2024 Olympic bid also was punctuated by the committee's daytime visit (see photo right) to what became my second-favorite Gehry, the astounding Foundation Louis Vuitton, which last year hosted the Torch Relay and one of the biggest pre-Games galas.
Valentina and I enjoyed an after-hours visit to the museum's showstopping exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat in Oct. 2018 (yes, we could not get enough of France that year) -- in many ways, Gehry's design was the best possible venue to experience the young painter's work.
At the end of the aforementioned Spain road trip, we swam in the shadow of Gehry's Olympic fish while guests of the Barcelona '92 athlete housing-turned-hotel (we also could not get enough of Spain).
Reflecting on Gehry's passing, this afternoon brought realization that around each of his creations, I was never the only passerby who stopped in their tracks, awestruck by the designs, or who lingered as participants on
Slow Art Day, studying each line and curve.
Even this past May, in Prague for the 2025 World Olympic Collectors Fair, spotting Gehry's "Dancing House" (right) co-designed with a Czech architect was a showstopping part of the weekend.
It's unclear to me why Gehry did not contribute more to Olympic venue design, but then, sports arenas are not part of his extensive CV. The
website of his firm is sparse on such information.
Though his Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opening date is yet unknown, I'll rest tonight dreaming of a future visit to this and other Gehry destination designs.
Image credits: Top photo Getty via BBC; WAM photo via Wiki; headshot via this biography page; Peix with pool via this Port Olympic Barcelona page; exterior of Eight Spruce Street from The New York Times by Piotr Redlinski via this archive link; Foundation Louis Vuitton photo and Dancing House photo by Nicholas Wolaver. Guggenheim Bilbao photo with red bridge and photo below by Nicholas Wolaver.
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