In Porto, airbrushing the Gehry legend

Christopher Hawthorne | Punch List | 26th June 2026

A mere six months after his death Gehry is being honoured in a retrospective. The show seems to reveal a tussle over how his legacy will be defined. He hoped to be remembered as much as an intuitive sculptor as an architect. Is that how he was?  In fact, he used design software extensively and his best designs were “attuned to both human scale and the civic fabric”. His reputation emerged from relatively modest projects, while [later] controversial projects “periodically exposed the limits of Gehry’s huge talent”.