A Farewell to Frank O. Gehry:Reflections on Light, Curves, and a Moment in Düsseldorf.
- Grégory Herpe
- 11 hours ago
- 2 min read
Frank O. Gehry has left this world, but his buildings continue breathing — bending light, distorting gravity, and whispering stories to anyone willing to stand still long enough to listen.
When I heard of his passing, my mind didn’t travel to Bilbao or Los Angeles, nor to the endless pages written about his genius.
It returned to a quieter moment: a trip in Düsseldorf in 2020, with my son Arthur by my side, as we discovered the Neuer Zollhof.
Those three buildings in the MedienHafen were unlike anything I had ever photographed.
They didn’t sit on the ground; they seemed to sway, to lean, to hesitate — as if deciding whether to remain architecture or to become pure dream.
Their facades caught the sky with the tenderness of a hand catching water.
The brick, the white plaster, the shimmering stainless steel: three voices speaking the same language of movement, doubt, and wonder.
Arthur was still young then. I remember him looking up, eyes wide, trying to understand how a building could appear so alive.
Perhaps that is Gehry’s greatest gift: he reminded us that structures do not need to be rigid, that cities do not need to be predictable, that imagination can infiltrate even the coldest materials.
Standing there with my camera, watching the reflections slide across the steel tower, I felt as though Gehry had drawn those curves from inside a child’s dream — or perhaps from the part of us that never fully stops dreaming.
The Neuer Zollhof is often described as iconic, sculptural, deconstructivist.
But for me, it is something more intimate: it is the memory of my son discovering beauty without symmetry, order without straight lines. It is the realization that a building can change the light of a day, and even the texture of a moment shared.
Gehry built monuments to movement. He bent reality just enough to let poetry seep through the cracks. His passing is a loss, yes — but the ripples of his vision continue to expand across the world.
And in my photographs of Düsseldorf, I like to believe that a small piece of his spirit lives on: in the tilt of a wall, the gleam of a window, the feeling that something solid might suddenly take flight.
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