The Century of Gehry at Serralves

The Century of Gehry was a major retrospective at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal — specifically in its Álvaro Siza Wing. It serves as the first posthumous exhibition dedicated to Frank Gehry (1929–2025), who passed away in December 2025 at age 96. Originally conceived as a collaboration with Gehry himself, the show evolved into an exploration of his legacy, organized by curator António Choupina, Director of Architecture at the Serralves Foundation, in partnership with Gehry Partners and the Getty Research Institute. The exhibition brings together nineteen landmark projects — spanning Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Bilbao, Toronto, and beyond — through large-scale architectural models, sketches, drawings, photographs, films, and even pieces of Gehry's groundbreaking corrugated cardboard furniture. Organized into eight thematic chapters, including "Making Something Out of the Ordinary" and "Reflecting on the Skyline," it traces how Gehry's fluid silhouettes and fractured volumes blurred the boundary between sculpture and building, ultimately reshaping city skylines and the course of contemporary architecture. A particularly resonant thread throughout is Gehry's longstanding friendship with Álvaro Siza, whose wing houses the very exhibition — a poetic dialogue between two architects whose ideas have left an indelible mark on the built world.