Architecture

Frank Gehry’s Lasting Spirit Drives a Major Retrospective in Portugal

In a fitting nod to their friendship and mutual admiration, “The Century of Gehry” is on view inside an Alvaro Siza-designed building at the Serralves Museum

By Caroline Roux

June 12, 2026

Architectural model of a modern building with curved metal sections and wooden supports against a black background. — Model of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Photo: Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners.

“What I’m doing is very personal, exploring a material, seeing where it goes and where it takes me,” Frank Gehry once said. At the time, the late architect was talking about the radical—and now iconic—cardboard furniture he created throughout the 1970s, but it could have been about so many of his projects. As a new exhibition at the Serralves Museum just outside the northern city of Porto will show, Gehry never stopped applying his overarching imagination to the business of design.

This is the first exhibition dedicated to his work since his death, at age 96, in December last year. “He was very excited about the show, and made the preliminary selections,” notes Antonio Choupina, director of architecture at the Serralves, “so his spirit is very much here, and his son Samuel has carried on along with the team at the Getty, which holds a lot of the Gehry archive.”

Aerial view of Walt Disney Concert Hall's modern architecture with downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers in the background. — Walt Disney Concert Hall. Photo: © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

There is a joyous quote from Gehry for each of the 19 buildings on show here—as models, drawings, and photographs. “It’s a continuation of ideas I’ve been busy with for years,” he says of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, completed in 2003 in Los Angeles. “It has to do with my struggle to make the individual parts of a composition clear, then combine them in a dynamic relationship. Take the analogy of a cocktail party, where everything—short and tall, male and female, the striking and the conventional—collectively creates a fascinating interaction. I do the same thing in a building.”

Three architects discussing a scale model with contour lines, focusing on layout and design elements in a meeting room. — Alvaro Siza and Frank Gehry. Photo: © 2001 Dana Hutt

If Portugal seems an unlikely location, the building hosting the exhibition is by the esteemed Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, now 94, who Gehry routinely referred to as “my brother Siza.” Gehry won the Pritzker Prize in 1989; Siza just a few years later in 1992. In 2001, the pair collaborated on a project for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, which is shown as a model in the exhibition. “Gehry was doing the Library Building and Siza the Skills Lab,” says Choupina. “You can see them play off against each other, with Gehry becoming more geometric and Siza [a cool, poetic modernist] becoming much wavier. It marked a turning point for the Portuguese.”

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao exterior with large floral sculpture in foreground, sunny day with trees and hills in background — Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Photo: Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners, LLP.

The scale of certain models is immense and fits the scale of Siza’s lofty new building. The one representing Gehry’s most famous work—the Guggenheim in Bilbao, which opened in 1997—is nearly ten feet long and made of wood; you can see how the silvery metallic sheet, which represents its titanium cladding, is taped on by hand. By now, Gehry had started to use design software—adapted from aerospace technology—to create his buildings, but he continued to balance it with a love and understanding of traditional craft, hewing away at blocks of wood to devise the initial forms that, in accumulation, would make a whole. This model seems to subtly represent this new hybrid way of working.

Abstract blue watercolor art with intricate black line patterns resembling branches and bubbles on a white background. — Ferreira de Sá rug design. Photo: Courtesy Frank O. Gehry and Gehry Design

Classic white VW Beetle balanced on wooden chairs in a parking lot against a brick wall. — Cardboard Furniture Series. Photo: Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Design, LLC

The Guggenheim, which sits on the river Nervion like a scintillating silver galleon, also marked a significant turning point in architecture itself, when the building became the brand and a destination in its own right. The museum transformed the northern Spanish city’s reputation, reputedly increasing its income by $400 million a year by attracting tourists, both local and international. “It brought architecture to the attention of people who’d simply not been interested in it before,” he says. “It’s an architecture for everybody, for the masses, for the good of the city.”

Modern architectural interior with unique metal and glass design, featuring curved surfaces and geometric patterns. — DZ Bank in Berlin. Photo: Courtesy of Frank O. Gehry & Gehry Partners, LLP.

Gehry’s next Guggenheim, in Abu Dhabi, is still under construction and should open later this year. It is not in the exhibition, but there’s still plenty to enjoy in this chronological exploration, from the huge black binoculars by Claes Oldenburg that Gehry managed to insert into his Los Angeles headquarters for the advertising agency Chiat/Day to the dramatic crystalline sails of his foundation for Louis Vuitton that sits on the outskirts of Paris. He never shied from the big gesture.

Architect standing in front of a modern house with corrugated metal exterior and large geometric windows. — Gehry Residence in Santa Monica in California. Photo: © Frank O. Gehry. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

“Siza says that Gehry is the best architect of the 20th century—and the 21st century,” says Choupina. True or not, he certainly refused to disassociate architecture from art, creating works of extreme sculptural conviction. Buildings might need function, but in Gehry’s world, they needed emotion just as much.