Frank O. Gehry (1929-2025)
In just the past few days, two figures synonymous with the
architectural culture of the past half-century died: Robert A.M. Stern
(1939-2025) and Frank Gehry (1929-2025). Their deaths, so close together,
invite reflection—not because they directly influenced my career, but because
they figured so prominently in the architectural landscape during my formative
years. Those years—roughly the decade between 1977 and 1987, encompassing my
university studies and early years in the profession—would see the work of both
men achieve prominence.
Gehry’s own home in Santa Monica provoked debate, dismantling domestic form and announcing a new architectural language. Around the same time, he completed the Information and Computer Science/Engineering Research Facility (ICS/ERF) at UC Irvine. I was working on another project for the university then, and I remember how cheap the building looked—which, in fact, it was, consistent with his raw, deliberately provisional aesthetic of that period. When the university demolished it in 2007, a mere twenty-one years after its completion, the decision confirmed my impression that the ICS/ERF functioned more as an experiment than an enduring contribution.
Gehry drew on an idiosyncratic vision shaped by the Los
Angeles art scene. He stood as a dominant personality on the avant-garde Los
Angeles scene, a figure whose originality commanded attention even as his
influence remained limited by how personal it was to him. That individuality
gave his buildings force, but it also made them difficult to emulate without
sliding into imitation.
Stern’s work in those years followed a different path. His
Shingle Style houses, such as the Wiseman House in Montauk, carried forward a
historical lineage with studied care. At the same time, his more mannered Post-Modern
efforts reflected Robert Venturi’s teachings during Stern’s time at Yale. Stern
also stepped into the “Whites vs. Grays” debate of the 1970s, giving voice to
the Grays—those who argued for historical reference and contextualism against
the abstract modernism of the New York Five. His writings and advocacy gave
coherence to that position, showing him not only as a designer but also as a
polemicist in one of the era’s defining conversations.
I met Stern during my graduate studies at UCLA. He visited
Los Angeles and joined a small group of us for an interactive session. He
carried himself with polish and approachability, more professor than
provocateur. Gehry, by contrast, earned a reputation for bluntness and ill
temper, qualities that matched the rough edges of his early work. Their
personalities mirrored their architectural philosophies: Stern as the
cultivated historian, Gehry as the restless experimenter.
Neither man directly shaped my development. Their
philosophies stood far apart, and I found my path elsewhere. Yet as a student I
fell under the thrall of the starchitect phenomenon. Architecture in those
years revolved around celebrity, around the idea that a single figure could
embody the discipline’s aspirations. Stern and Gehry ranked among the most
visible of those figures.
Duo Dickinson, in his essay The Twilight of the
Starchitect, argued that this era is ending. I share that view, though I
believe the decline began long ago. In 2016, when Zaha Hadid died, I wrote that
the starchitect phenomenon was already fading. The deaths of Stern and Gehry
feel less like continuation than conclusion. Who among their contemporaries
remains? Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Thom Mayne, perhaps a few others—but the celebrity
of these architects today has diminished. Bjarke Ingels has cultivated a kind
of stardom, but he belongs to a younger generation, and his fame seems the
exception rather than the rule.
Where once a plurality of schools of thought gave
architecture its coherence—Modernism, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, High-Tech—today
the profession confronts a tangle of competing urgencies: climate change,
equity, technology, housing, and economic precarity among them. During the
starchitect era, aesthetics carried weight because they were embedded in those
schools, which together defined the architectural zeitgeist. Today, no single
school commands that kind of influence. The starchitect era, with its focus on
personality and spectacle, has ended. Architecture now reflects a spectrum of
overlapping concerns rather than a single, unified cultural narrative.
I acknowledge Stern and Gehry as presences in my education,
unavoidable figures in the architectural conversation of their time. They were
not direct influences, yet they informed the atmosphere in which I learned to
think about architecture. Their passing closes a chapter and underscores the
unsettled terrain the profession now inhabits.
