Beyond the Skin: What Frank Gehry Taught Me About Space

Frank Gehry has passed away at 96, and I’ve been thinking about the rare privilege of working with him on the Vitra Design Museum and the Vitra Office Headquarters.

So much has been written about the bravura of his forms: the way a building can twist, lift, and catch the sky like something alive. But what impressed me most was not the spectacle. It was the quiet rigor underneath it.

Frank began with the program the way a sculptor begins with a block of stone: by searching for the true mass inside it. He didn’t treat rooms as drawings that could be “extruded” into space. He treated each requirement as an ideal volume in three dimensions: held, turned, tested from every angle. You could feel him weighing proportions in the air, listening to the way a space wanted to stand.

Only after those primary volumes were understood did the skin arrive, like a garment tailored to a body already resolved, not a costume invented first and justified later. The architecture everyone sees was never the starting point. It was the consequence.

MODEL PHOTO

And in the museum, light was never an afterthought. Skylights were placed to gather the most beautiful north-facing illumination: soft, steady, and faithful so the art could breathe without glare, and the room could feel both precise and calm.

Working with Frank reminded me of something easy to forget in our profession: that the most daring silhouettes can come from an almost tender discipline, an insistence on getting the space right, in full dimensional truth, before it ever becomes an image.

Rest in peace, Frank. Thank you for the lessons that won’t show up in photographs but shape how I see, and how I design, forever.