Review: Frank Gehry

Abstract

Frank Gehry Centre Pompidou, Paris 8 October 2014–26 January 2015 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 13 September 2015–31 March 2016 Given that the Frank Gehry exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) made its way from the Centre Pompidou, where it opened in 2014, one might have been tempted to see this as a homecoming. Certainly the drive from the I-10 freeway through the neighborhood called Little Ethiopia seemed a fitting gateway. The incongruity of small houses, modest-size apartment buildings, and unpretentious shops occupying space between large fitness centers and strip malls prepared one for the marvelous cacophony of form we have come to expect from the office of Gehry Partners, an architecture firm based in Los Angeles for several decades. Indeed, this ability to create unexpected form inspired one of the clearest (yet least expected) messages expressed in the exhibition: that Gehry's architecture responds to local context. Another message of the show, perhaps even louder, seemed contradictory to the first, eschewing even the sentimentality of a homecoming. Gehry was represented not so much as a Los Angeles architect, but as a unique force. Inside the exhibition, for example, visitors found this quote by Gehry prominently displayed on a central partition: “My intention is to be part of each place…. I don't consciously take Los Angeles with me…. I take me with me, whatever that is.” Organized by curators Aurelien Lemonier and Frederic Migayrou of the Centre Pompidou but designed and installed by Gehry Partners in collaboration with LACMA's Stephanie Barron, the exhibition championed Frank Gehry as …