Archive for March, 2019

Frank Gehry, ‘Starchitect’ of the modern era

Monday, March 25th, 2019

The man who gave Spain – and the world – the Guggenheim Museum is a master moulder of shapes, using new materials and technologies to usher in a fluid 21st century definition of architecture.

Gehry international masterpiece – the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Think Gehry and you picture the iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but of course this celebrated ‘starchitect’ who helped to define the shape of the modern era has many more famous edifices and projects to his name. They include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Louis Vuitton art museum and cultural centre in Paris, the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, to name a few. Named “the most important architect of our age” by Vanity Fair in 2010, many of Gehry’s most famous designs involve museums and other large public projects, yet he also managed to raise eyebrows and shift boundaries when creating the now-iconic academic complex – known as Building 32 – for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Not surprisingly, given his stature around the world and particularly in North America, Frank Gehry was also chosen to give shape to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC. (more…)