Among his most recent works are the headquarters of DZ Bank, in Berlin, Germany, the expansion of the Facebook headquarters building, in California, the headquarters of InterActiveCorp, in New York, and a 76-story housing project, in the Chelsea neighborhood, in Manhattan, opened in 2011.
In 2003, the then president of Lisbon City Council, Pedro Santana Lopes, invited Frank Gehry to develop a project for Parque Mayer, in the Portuguese capital, which was not implemented.
The initial version of this project included a casino, four theater rooms, a jazz club, a fashion museum, a media library, two residential buildings, a hotel and commercial areas.
Speaking to Portuguese journalists in 2003, Frank Gehry explained that he did not want to carry out “a historical reconstruction”, but rather to transform Parque Mayer into a “modern space of the 21st century” so that it looked like “it was always there”.
The proposal envisaged a main building, in the heart of Parque Mayer, with two performance halls – the largest, with a capacity of 800 to a thousand people, included an indoor hall and an outdoor amphitheater, on the border with the Botanical Gardens.
Frank Gehry returned to Portugal, in 2014, to present another project in Guarda for a five-star hotel and a museum, in the context of a tourist complex, planned for the border area between the municipalities of Guarda and Belmonte.
In 2007, the architect designed the set for Mariza’s concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which three years later accompanied the fado singer on the tour to present her album “Fado Tradicional”.
Gehry then designed a tavern, as he conceived it, in an alley in Lisbon, with the aim of highlighting and supporting Mariza in her work in Los Angeles, as the architect then declared to the Associated Press.
“It won’t be a Frank Gehry decoration. They won’t recognize it,” he told the North American news agency at the time, highlighting the intimate nature of the setting.
In 2011, Gehry returned as a professor to the University of Southern California, where he had graduated, after having taught at Yale and Columbia universities.
Although he enjoyed drawing and building miniature cities when he was a child, as the Los Angeles Daily News recalls today, Gehry said that it was only when he was 20 that he considered the possibility of pursuing a career in architecture, after a ceramics teacher recognized his talent: “It was like it was the first thing in my life that I did well at.”
Frank Gehry has been honored with more than a hundred awards, including the Pritzker (1989), the Praemium Imperiale of Japan (1992), the Frederick Kiesler, of Austria (1998) and the Prince of Asturias Award for Arts, of Spain (2014), in addition to the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (1999).
Today, The New York Times defines him as “the titan of architecture”. The Los Angeles Times considers him the most famous and well-known North American architect, after Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the creator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.