Frank Gehry: The radical master who created instant icons like the Bilbao Guggenheim | Frank Gehry

FMark Gehry once had a cameo role on The Simpsons where he designed buildings by crushing pieces of paper. There was little more than that, but from Prague to Panama City, its wrinkled features were instantly recognizable, expressed in a great procession of buildings that shook and toppled as if struck by a wrecking ball, or crashed and whirled like a dervish, defying the laws of gravity and structural logic. Although Jerry, who has died aged 96, came of age in the modern era, he seemed physically incapable of drawing a straight line.

In his heyday, Gehry’s architecture was a rejection of modernist autocrats like Mies van der Rohe and his brave-faced commandment, “less is more.” American postmodern theorist and architect Robert Venturi turned it on its head, quipping: “Less is boring.” Jerry summed up the extremist perfectly.

As the millennium approached, he changed the game with his 1997 design for a site for Guggenheim’s modern art empire in the unfashionable northern Spanish city of Bilbao. Struggling with post-industrial decline, its unexpected revival has been catalyzed by a delightfully complex construction encased in a layer of 33,000 thin strips of titanium that sparkle like rippling fish scales. With gallery spaces as expressive as the works they were designed to house, this was not a neutral backdrop for art.

Located on a prominent waterfront site on the Nervion River, the Guggenheim became an instant icon, catapulting Gehry, then in his late 60s, into the heavens of “star architect,” an adjective he loathed. As its proponents had hoped, it also transformed Bilbao’s wider civic fortunes, attracting 1.3 million visitors in its first year and giving rise to the “Bilbao Effect”, which became shorthand for uplift through cultural tourism built on “iconic” architecture.

Bilbao was followed by 2003’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Gehry’s hometown of Los Angeles, which was conceived as a collection of stainless-steel-clad volumes resembling billowing sails or giant metal shavings. He urged his client to use stone, but they wanted Bilbao. The wood-lined hall was warm and intimate, as if it were inside a musical instrument. Even the organ bore Jerry’s approval, sporting a set of pipes like a can of exploding French fries. For Jerry, whose family moved to Los Angeles from his hometown of Toronto when he was 17, it marked the culmination of a long and formative relationship with the city.

The dynamic forms of his buildings were achieved through a deft but laborious working method involving, primarily, hand-crafted models. They were then digitized using computer software capable of modeling complex curves, originally designed for use in the aviation industry. In fact, sculpture has become an architecture that always seeks to impress. Everything was possible.

As computers liberated the process of model-making, architecture became increasingly – often unreasonably – unconstrained. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, architects and their patrons sought to outdo each other, with Gehry leading the charge, with projects like the Dancing House in Prague, nicknamed “Fred and Ginger,” where two pairs of disparate towers come together in a rotating ballet embrace, and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by a halo of stainless steel bands.

But over time, in an attempt to emulate Bilbao’s success, Gehry became interested in pursuing ill-conceived museum projects around the world. To expand its work to include the Middle East, the Guggenheim Foundation commissioned him in 2006 to produce a satellite in Abu Dhabi, which has suffered delays and is scheduled to open only next year, two decades after it was designed. “It has been said that huge budgets have outgrown a clear idea of ​​what the building would mean culturally or even what kind of artwork it would contain,” Christopher Hawthorne wrote in the Los Angeles Times.

Seattle’s Music Experience project (known since 2016 as the Museum of Pop Culture) proved a major disappointment, while the 2014 Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, designed to house the collection of French tycoon and art collector Bernard Arnault, suffered a bloated car accident, with some appallingly shoddy workmanship. By then, Gehry was also designing suitcases, yachts and cognac bottles, a side hustle that began more complexly with furniture made from layers of corrugated cardboard.

Such late-career arrogance was a far cry from the project in which he first made his name, his own house in Santa Monica, California, a two-story pink stucco dwelling he bought in 1977 and then proceeded to eviscerate and augment by assembling bits of corrugated metal and a chain-link fence. “I was trying to use the normal stupid stuff in the neighborhood,” he said at the time. Imbued with bold and daring populism, his early works drew parallels with the artistic practice of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Los Angeles provided scope and momentum for experimentation as Jerry gradually found his rhythm in a border city of sprawl and custom. A delight in exaggerated geometry and juxtapositions, the 1980 house by director Jane Spiller featured a plywood interior covered by a shield of corrugated metal. American architecture critic Nikolai Ourosov wrote that when the wood intermittently penetrates the exterior walls “the house looks like the architectural equivalent of a couple fighting in the kitchen.”

Although Gehry built extensively in Europe, especially in Germany, where residential tower blocks in Düsseldorf slouched like dissipated drunks, and the design museum Vitra Furniture Campus, which marked his transition from industrial construction to a more balanced sculptural scene, the UK proved more resistant to his charms.

In 2003 he designed the Maggie’s Center for Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, part of a network of cancer reception centres. It is surprisingly sober and simple, designed in the style of a traditional Scottish ‘but and ben’ dwelling, with a white cottage topped with a folded metal roof, like a piece of origami.

More recently, he has been involved in rehabilitating the areas around Battersea Power Station, designing silos of luxury housing that, though clever, look distinctly modular. He was also invited to design the Serpentine Pavilion, London’s annual architectural pavilion birthday party, Reimagined as a whirlwind in the lumber yard.

In a career spanning 60 years, Gehry became a great man of architecture, able, at times, to shout at the clouds, while the world changed around him. At a press conference held in Spain in 2014, on the occasion of receiving another award, when he was accused of designing “architecture,” he silently moved his finger in front of his audience. He later apologized. He also declared that: “In the world we live in, 98% of what is built and designed today is pure bullshit. There is no sense of design, no respect for humanity, just damned buildings.”