Exhibitions
Gehry's Century
From June 13 to December 30, 2026, the Serralves Foundation presents The Century of Gehry , a major exhibition dedicated to Frank Gehry (1929–2025), a pivotal figure in contemporary architecture. Universally recognized as one of the great masters of the 20th and 21st centuries, Gehry transformed architecture into a language of movement, emotion, and formal freedom, capable of turning the most ordinary circumstances into extraordinary spatial experiences.
The exhibition offers a journey through eight thematic chapters and brings together nineteen projects that reveal the combination of intuition and intelligence present in the architect's creative process. From the intimate rebellion of his house in Santa Monica to the urban choreography of Loyola Law School, passing through the fragmented monumentality of the Chiat/Day offices, the titanium undulations of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the theatricality of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the exhibition allows visitors to follow the evolution of a body of work that redefined the relationship between architecture, city, and experience.
Through sketches, models, and materials from built, unbuilt, or still-developing projects, Gehry's architecture emerges as a living organism: pragmatic and visionary at once, profoundly human, imbued with invention and poetry. More than a conventional retrospective, The Century of Gehry is conceived as a celebration of a way of seeing the world that, for nearly a hundred years, never ceased to reinvent itself.
The exhibition also highlights Gehry's ongoing dialogue with artists and architects of his time, and especially with Álvaro Siza. The friendship and collaboration between the two—particularly in the context of the master plan for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena—led to a fruitful exchange between the United States and Portugal, and constitutes one of the most unique aspects of the exhibition.
From Los Angeles to Berlin, from Paris to New York, from Sydney to Toronto, the selected works trace a map of an architecture that dissolves boundaries: between sculpture and building, between gravity and fluidity, between memory and future. In this hybrid territory, Gehry emerges not only as an architect of iconic forms, but as a creator capable of altering the perception of space and imagining new ways of inhabiting the world.
The exhibition's content and project documentation were developed in close collaboration with the archives department of Gehry Partners and the Frank Gehry Papers (2017.M.66), housed at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. "Gehry's Century" is organized by the Serralves Foundation and curated by its Director of Architecture, António Choupina, in conjunction with Gehry Partners.
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