Gehry's Glibness

Frank Gehry is the biggest "starchitect" in the world, but "the biggest threat to Gehry's legacy may be the Gehry brand itself," according to The Washington Post. A pair of new Gehry buildings—a library at Princeton and an expansion at an art museum in Toronto—underscore "a growing sense that his most acclaimed work, buildings made in the style of Bilbao, have turned out to be dead ends. Rather than open up new possibilities for the architect, they seem to have left him in a rut. And as his most recent projects suggest, Gehry's best work today may be his least 'Gehryesque.'" Per author Philip Kennicott: "[W]hat he definitely needs less of is the old Gehry glibness, which dominated his work for two decades, often diminishing it to triviality. The Gehryesque can be left to other architects, who may make more sense of it. What Frank Gehry needs now is a new chapter, a last act, a purifying of his life's work into something final and thoughtful. A summation."