Seattle doesn't have just One Frank Gehry Building, But Three
Seattle is graced with three buildings designed by the late superstar architect, Frank Gehry. The most famous is the Museum of Popular Culture (MoPOP) (2000), the extravagantly sculptural celebration in architecture of rock ‘n roll imagery, a spectacular but controversial building designed by Gehry at the height of his fame with ample funding from Paul Allen.
The most recent is the Meta office building in South Lake Union (2016), a far less flashy, but nevertheless creative design, featuring large, adaptable workspaces with many quirky and colorful Gehry touches and a grand rooftop park where employees can stroll among 400 trees.
But the first project Gehry took on in Seattle is rarely identified as his. It is the modest and mostly conventional retirement community building of Loyal Heights Manor (1980), which continues to serve its original function 45 years after its opening. This building dates from a period when Gehry was moving from designing what he called “straight stuff” to the incorporation of curious shapes and odd materials. A catalogue of Gehry’s works shows Loyal Heights Manor as a drawing, but notes that the finished building was not constructed as designed. The absence of a photograph of the final product in the catalogue implies that the architect had basically disowned it.
When comparing the drawing to the built structure, one sees that the former has sheets of corrugated metal hanging on the exterior of the building whereas the built structure has none. Since these proposed panels played no structural role, we would classify them as ornamentation. But how strange is that? Corrugated metal for decorative effect? One can understand why a developer might decide to just leave them off. Yet it is likely that in the architect’s mind the panels were what made the building a Gehry building.
https://www.postalley.org/2025/12/14/seattle-doesnt-have-just-one-frank-gehry-building-but-three/
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