Frank Gehry: Serralves Museum presents 19 projects by the architect who wanted to make buildings sculptures

Frank Gehry: Serralves Museum presents 19 projects by the architect who sought to turn buildings into sculptures. On view until the end of December.

Frank Gehry at Serralves Museum

“Each of my projects reflects personal impressions of the site and, for that reason, could not be built anywhere else in the world.” This statement by Frank Gehry (1929–2025), displayed on one of the walls at Serralves Museum in Porto, offers an essential key to the work explored in The Gehry Century exhibition.

“Responding to the spirit of the place” is one of the exhibition’s eight thematic sections, which bring together 19 projects by the Toronto-born architect. Most have been completed, while others remain under construction and some were never realised. One such unbuilt proposal was intended to redesign Lisbon’s Parque Mayer in 2003/2004.

Gehry’s connection with Álvaro Siza, with whom he worked on the masterplan for the Art Center College of Design in California, is evident not only in the use of the Portuguese architect’s Wing to house the exhibition, but also in their shared notion of incorporating the features of the setting in which a building is created.

Buildings between sculpture and architecture

Described as a “celebration of freedom and imagination”, the exhibition includes sketches, models, photographs and videos. These place the works in context through interviews with Gehry and contributions from figures ranging from Álvaro Siza to Bob Geldof.

They reveal the defining themes of Frank Gehry’s work: “the dissolution of the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, gravity and fluidity, memory and the future”. They also highlight his particular obsessions, including the architect’s fascination with fish forms. He reportedly said: “The fish is architecture, the cow is not.”

Frank Gehry’s landmark projects

Above all, the display unveils the fantastical shapes of remarkable buildings such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and Bilbao’s celebrated Guggenheim Museum. In one of the videos, the latter is said to have contributed to “the community’s self-esteem”.

The exhibition also features images of the architect’s California home, designed in 1977.