Frank Gehry

The Millennium Court Arts Centre (MCAC) in Portadown has announced one of the most important architecture exhibitions created in Ireland in the past ten years. In March – May 2006, MCAC will present 'Frank Gehry, Architect: Designs for Museums'. Originally organised at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis the show then toured to The Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. With the help of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the National Lottery Fund, MCAC has now the opportunity to present it here — the first major exhibition of the architect's work in Ireland and the United Kingdom. This is the only European venue for this worldwide touring exhibition.

Frank O. Gehry's designs for museums have made him one of the preeminent architects of the twentieth century. His first museum, the Cabrillo Marine Museum in San Pedro, California, opened in 1979. The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, which opened in 1993, was the first art museum Gehry designed from the ground up. Before the Weisman he had designed an art gallery in Santa Monica that was part of a shopping center. He had also renovated some warehouses as the "Temporary Contemporary," for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. That space is now called the Geffen Contemporary. A Gehry-designed museum in Germany for the Vitra Furniture Company opened in 1989.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997, gained worldwide fame for Gehry and for the city of Bilbao. The museum transformed Bilbao from a little-known, declining industrial city to a thriving inter- national tourist destination. New museums and other cultural organizations in small and large cities, rural and urban, are being built in the hopes that they will emulate the so-called "Bilbao effect" — nothing less than the economic revitalization of a city.

Gehry's designs for museums reflect and facilitate the complicated roles that museums play in the world today. Museums are no longer simply places for the safekeeping of rare, historically important, or beautiful objects that they usually were a century ago. Today it is not enough for museums to simply provide a quiet place where well-educated, well-to-do visitors may come to contemplate beautiful or important objects. Museums are educational institutions, community centers, and tourist attractions. They operate businesses, such as stores and cafes, integrate new immigrants, and revitalize neighborhoods and cities.

Frank O. Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was a teenager. Gehry was educated at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and at Harvard University. He opened his own firm in Los Angeles in 1962. Gehry is well known as a sculptor and artist as well as an architect. He created the giant glass fish at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the sculptural Formica fish lamp on view in the Weisman's Dolly Fiterman Riverview Gallery. He won the architecture world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Pritzker Prize, in 1989 and the American Institute of Architect's Gold Medal in 1999.

This exhibition is one of the programs the Weisman is organizing to celebrate its tenth anniversary in its Gehry-designed facility. The exhibit presents four Gehry-designed museums and six museum projects that are in various stages of design or construction. The built projects include:

• Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened 1989
• Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, opened 1993
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, opened 1997
• Experience Music Project, Seattle, Washington, opened 2000

The projects in the exhibit that are not yet completed are:

• The Ohr-O'Keefe Museums, Biloxi, Mississippi; design began 1999, construction 2003, completion 2005
• Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; won design competition 1998
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lower Manhattan Project, New York City; design began 1998; project has been cancelled
• MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany; design began 1998, construction 2001, completion 2004
• Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance—Center for Human Dignity — A project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem; design began 2000; completion expected 2006-07
• Puente de Vida — Panama Museum of Biodiversity, Panama City, Panama; design began 1999; construction 2003; completion 2006

The show will not only feature photographs, models, installations, and 3D video of Gehry's architecture focusing on museum spaces but also examples of his sculpture and furniture. It emphasises both the function of Gehry's sculptural exteriors, which set the tone for the artistic and historical experience within along with his equally groundbreaking interiors, which can be regarded as works of art in themselves. There are four main sections in the exhibition—Contexts for Museums, Complex Exteriors, Galleries with Character, and Technology.

Other exhibition-related activities include panel discussions, public tours, a film series, classes for adults and children on architecture and gallery space, and disability workshops.