Gehry Across America: Chasing the Greatest Living Architect

Frank Gehry, possibly the most famous living architect, has a major retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA). It’s a fitting locale: The 87-year-old Canada-born architect has lived and worked in Los Angeles for six decades, and, although celebrated for international works like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the new Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Gehry has devoted much of his life to work right here in America. Here are six essential pit stops to see the works of Gehry between the U.S. coasts and ending in Los Angeles, where an exhibit about his work runs until March 20, 2016.
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    Richard B. Fisher Building, Hudson, New York

    Gehry's designs often live in urban cityscapes of concrete and brick. This performing-arts center is an exception. Nestled against the bucolic greenery of the Hudson Valley, Gehry's theater for dance, concerts, and opera is part of Bard College. Local preservationists fought against it at first, fearing Gehry’s big-scale urbanism would scandalize the historic, pastoral landscape. Bard's president Leon Botstein won out, and Gehry incorporated geothermal heat pumps to keep the building from using any fossil fuels for climate control. The shiny, stainless-steel vision opened in 2003.

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    Peter B. Lewis Building, Cleveland, Ohio

    Peter B. Lewis, the Cleveland philanthropist and onetime CEO of Progressive Insurance, commissioned Gehry to design a new home for the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. He wanted a building symbolic of 21st-century entrepreneurialism, not one that looked like traditional business schools. He got it: Since the swooping steel canopies and brick foundation were erected, the business school has incorporated design into its management curriculum and garnered a reputation for creative thinking.

  • Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois

    The Jay Pritzker Pavilion sits on the edge of Lake Michigan and is the focal point of Chicago’s Millennium Park (also home to Anish Kapoor’s selfie-inspiring Cloud Gate—also known as the "bean" sculpture). The steel pipes that radiate outward from the stage over the grass create a trellis that's rigged with a sound system, ensuring that none of the 11,000 seats are bad ones. The stage features one of Gehry’s trademark curvy, geometric steel compositions.

  • Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota

    For the University of Minnesota's art museum, Gehry created a sort of Cubist castle, in which the entire building is composed of angular curves and conical turrets. The entire exterior is clad with Gehry's beloved stainless steel, a material that stands out on a college campus dominated by brick. However unorthodox, the reflective metal helps the Weisman Art Museum become part of its habitat, not clash against it, by mirroring the collegiate brick structures on one side, and the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River on the other side.

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  • EMP Building, Seattle, Washington

    The Experience Music Project Museum sits at the base of Seattle's iconic Space Needle. Word has it that Gehry initially took inspiration for the design from a smashed guitar as a nod to Jimi Hendrix, a Seattle native. It has tablecloth-like waves of steel that flutter around the entrance to the museum, in imaginary response to the breeze from the nearby monorail.

  • California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles, California

    The California Aerospace Museum in Exposition Park is early Gehry: Built in 1984, it's the oldest design on the entire road trip. The building has more of a Brutalist edge than is typical of Gehry's work. Instead of housing symphonies and fine art, like most of the architect's museum work, this structure is home to works of aeronautical achievement. The museum was also one of the works cited by the jury when they announced Gehry as the 1989 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner.

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  • Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California

    Gehry's work tends to attract controversy, but in 2003, his design for Disney Hall quickly became an architectural darling of Los Angeles. Suggestive of a ship, and inspired by Gehry's own affection for sailing, the stainless-steel-clad concert hall has interiors equally as structural as its exteriors. Thanks to skylights, the California sunshine bounces off the angular staircases and scalloped balconies inside, giving off the impression of a building in motion—fitting for the home of the L.A. Philharmonic.