The complexity of the design—bowed walls and ceilings, curves everywhere—exceeded the ability of architects drawing on paper using Euclidean and Cartesian tools and math. He adopted advanced aerospace software CATIA (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application) to document and tame the fractious complexity.
Armed with CATIA, he went on to build the Bilbao Guggenheim, which resembles a swimming school of headless fish, flowing alongside the Nervión River. Computer science had enabled the study of nonlinear phenomena like clouds, and it made unruly nonlinear buildings like the Guggenheim, with its chaotic affinity to the clouds above and mountains beyond, both drawable and buildable. The measurable world of boxes ceded to an unruled and unruly reality.
When it opened, Bilbao roared. The stunning design, light glinting off the churning titanium surfaces, made him perhaps the most famous architect in the world, setting off the “Bilbao effect”: culturally ambitious cities soon wanted a Gehry of their own. Unlike most other public monuments, it was chaotic, nonrepetitive, unclassical, übermodernist, and apparently irrational. Its new, unexpected form of beauty took new eyes to see.
If his house in Santa Monica had become a target, the Guggenheim in Bilbao—christened by King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 1997—had an apparently pacifying effect on Bilbao, where, not long after its opening, as Gehry liked to point out, Basque separatists put down their arms. The building elevated the rust-belt city to international fame, earning it, and the Basque nation, respect.
One masterpiece followed another, most settling into variations on two themes. Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2014, commissioned by LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, drew on the Guggenheim and the earlier Disney Hall for its flowing and billowing forms—but seen through a Cubist lens. Even the glass office curtain walls of Barry Diller’s IAC headquarters on the banks of the Hudson, in Manhattan, in 2007, billowed. In an encore for the Guggenheim Museum, Gehry designed its huge outpost in Abu Dhabi as a collage of truncated cones, pyramids, and boxes in abrupt juxtaposition, following the architect’s earlier paradigm of colliding shapes. In 2021, he broke with even his own precedents with a towering iceberg of stainless-steel fractals, glinting both day and night, in the LUMA Arles art center in the south of France, commissioned by arts patron Maja Hoffmann.
