Frank Gehry once had a cameo in The Simpsons in which he designed buildings by scrunching up pieces of paper. There was a bit more to it than that, but from Prague to Panama City, his scrunched contours were instantly recognisable, expressed in an exuberant parade of buildings that cranked and slumped as if hit by a wrecking ball, or crashed and whirled like dervishes, defying laws of gravity and structural logic. Though Gehry, who has died aged 96, came of age in the era of modernism, it was as if he were physically incapable of drawing a straight line.
In his prime, Gehry’s architecture was a rebuff to modernist imperators such as Mies van der Rohe and his po-faced injunction, “less is more”. The American postmodern theorist and architect Robert Venturi turned it on its head, quipping “less is a bore”. It summed up the maximalist Gehry perfectly.
