Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry, 96, died on Dec. 5. Just a few days ago, I was struggling with the works of Robert A.M. Stern, and here I am, taking on Gehry. He is described in his obits as a “post-modernist deconstructivist,” but I find many of his buildings to be just plain agreeably silly. I cannot stand the big box school of architecture, which has destroyed the skylines of so many cities. Gehry’s buildings ranged from the aggressively hideous (the Chiat/Day Building in Venice, California; an insulting public housing building in Frankfurt-Schwanheim; the scary, box-like Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland) to the adorably hilarious (the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas looks like Buster Keaton’s One Week house; the Fondation Louis Vuitton building looks like it was dropped before being unwrapped; and the Dancing House in Prague, the Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, and the Hotel Marqués de Riscal in Spain are all fall-down laughing funny, whether or not that’s what Gehry intended). Gehry said that “I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao… Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.”
