In Philadelphia, Frank Gehry’s legacy lives on at the Art Museum

Famed architect Frank Gehry died Friday in his home in Santa Monica at 96 after a brief respiratory illness. And while he is gone, cities all over the world will continue to hold a piece of him — including Philadelphia.

Though he is known for the striking, rambunctious architecture of buildings like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, around here, Gehry will perhaps be best remembered as the man behind the Philadelphia Art Museum as we know it today. Gehry in 2006 was selected from a slate of more than 20 renowned architects to oversee what would become a $233 million renovation of the Art Museum.

Known as the Core Project, the effort — completed in 2021 — was designed to open up the museum’s floor plans, reclaim a ground level that had been closed to the public for decades, and add some 20,000 square feet of new gallery space. Completed in phases over more than a decade, Gehry’s planned renovations were designed to make the building more accessible, revitalize its aging infrastructure, and give the space more flow — all while not disrupting the museum’s iconic look.

“Frank always felt in the design of the core project that he was collaborating with the original architects,” said retired Philadelphia Art Museum chief operating officer Gail Harrity Friday. “He often said he was following the bread crumbs left by the original architects to revitalize a building that needed a flow, needed the restoration of the east-west access, the north-south access.”

Gehry’s work on the Art Museum created “views toward a work of art that pull you like a magnet into the galleries,” Harrity said. And in a 2021 review of the revamp, Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron found that the redesign gave “museum officials precisely what they wanted: clarity, light, and space.”

But when he was selected to lead the effort, Gehry was something of a controversial choice. At the time, Gehry was known for flamboyant architecture dotted with playful, tumbling forms — much different from the Greek Revival and Neoclassical design that made the Art Museum an icon on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Some museum lovers worried he would desecrate Philly’s art museum, while others pondered why museum officials would pick such a high-profile architect to design features that largely would not be seen from the outside.

“Nothing [Gehry] has done gives me a good feeling,” one reader wrote to The Inquirer in 2006. “Pleas rethink using this man to destroy the Philadelphia Museum of Art.”

Gehry himself did little to quell his detractor’s worries. As he put it to the Inquirer at one point: “We will set off a bomb. But I can’t tell what kind till the fat lady sings. I think we’ll make it memorable.”

Ultimately, Gehry’s design would be understated and in line with the museum’s existing structure. In fact, it was Gehry’s work on the 60s-era Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena — which he transformed into a series of serene, classically arranged galleries in the 1990s — that convinced Art Museum officials to go with him for their redesign, so there was perhaps little to be concerned about all along.

Museumgoers got their first taste of the revamp in the fall of 2012, when work on an art-handling facility was completed. That project moved a loading dock and backstage area from the building’s northeast side near Kelly Drive to the Schuylkill River side, and would allow for Gehry’s redesign project to progress.

And, at least to Gehry, big plans were afoot.

“I wonder if people in Philadelphia know what a big deal this is,” he told The Inquirer in 2014. “Bilbao was a sleepy little town before the Guggenheim came along. This is going to change Philadelphia.”

By 2017, the Art Museum officially broke ground on the Core Project phase of its redesign. Two years later, in 2019, it reopened a long-shut entryway on the building’s north side, leading to a vaulted walkway more than 600 feet long, running the width of the museum. An auditorium was demolished, being replaced by the area today known as the Williams Forum.

Its removal opened up the interior of the museum, allowing visitors to see through the entire building, bringing in light and street vistas through windows, and “possibly ending that feeling of being lost amid proliferating galleries of art,” The Inquirer reported at the time.

In 2021, the Art Museum officially unveiled Gehry’s work, showing off the result of 15 years of planning, design, and reconstruction. The Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries and Robert L. McNeil Jr. Galleries made their debut, housing contemporary and American art, respectively.

“Gehry has provided the canvas,” Saffron wrote of the redesign. “Now it’s up to the museum to make the most of it.”

But the design wasn’t exactly completely finished. Gehry also created the Philadelphia’s museum’s master plan that includes a proposed next phase: building more gallery space beneath the museum’s east steps. The project has been on hold for a number of years, and its status remains undetermined, a museum spokesperson said Friday.

The museum had also had informal discussions recently with Gehry about designing a learning and engagement center, but that project‘s status is also undetermined, the spokesperson said.

“The building is a landmark that is iconic in Philadelphia, that’s difficult to change the exterior of, and in many respects is on a site that is hard to expand,” said Harrity. “So in looking at previous ideas and designs I think Frank’s solution for further increasing gallery space while responding to the architectural integrity of a landmark that is beloved in Philadelphia is brilliant.”

Staff writer Peter Dobrin contributed to this article, which also includes information from the Associated Press.