Overview

Frank Gehry: The Century of Gehry is a major exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, held in the Ala Álvaro Siza gallery. The exhibition presents a curated overview of Frank Gehry’s architectural career, focusing on key projects that shaped contemporary architecture across North America, Europe, and Asia. It combines models, drawings, sketches, and documentation of both built and unbuilt works.

From an architecture perspective, the exhibition frames Gehry’s work as a long-term shift in how form, structure, and spatial expression are understood in late twentieth and early twenty-first century design culture.

Focus

The exhibition focuses on Gehry’s experimental approach to form-making, where fragmentation, movement, and material tension become central design tools. It traces how his projects evolved from early residential work to large cultural landmarks such as museums, concert halls, and institutional buildings.

The narrative highlights architecture as a process shaped by intuition and iteration, which connects to broader ideas in design where representation and construction operate as overlapping systems rather than separate stages.

The exhibition presents architecture as an evolving system of ideas rather than a fixed sequence of completed objects.

Program

The exhibition is structured across eight thematic chapters that organize nineteen selected projects. These include the Gehry Residence, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and several urban and institutional works across different countries.

Materials such as sketches, physical models, and archival documents are used to reconstruct the design process behind each project. This method of presentation relates conceptually to urban planning, particularly in how large-scale projects are understood through layered development rather than single design moments.

Audience

The exhibition is intended for architects, students, researchers, and the general public interested in contemporary architectural history and design processes.

Event Details

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

The exhibition positions Frank Gehry’s work within a retrospective framework that emphasizes process over final form. While the presentation highlights the diversity of his projects, it also compresses complex architectural conditions into a curated sequence of representative objects and models. This creates a controlled reading of his practice, where architectural experimentation is translated into museum narratives rather than urban realities. From an analytical standpoint, the exhibition reinforces the idea of architecture as a cultural production system shaped by documentation, interpretation, and institutional framing, rather than solely by built space. However, this framing can distance the work from the social and spatial complexities of the cities where these projects originally operate.

Closing Note

The exhibition provides a structured overview of Gehry’s architectural evolution, presenting his work as a continuous exploration of form, material, and spatial logic within contemporary architectural discourse.