Renovation in progress

In a celebrity-obsessed age, Frank Gehry has attained a stature that would make Andy Warhol quiver with jealousy.

Since the runaway success of his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed five years ago, Gehry has become one of the world’s most recognizable cultural figures. His buildings -- raucous explosions of shimmering metal -- have become the dominant image of contemporary architecture, more familiar, perhaps, than the earlier landmarks of Frank Lloyd Wright.

That familiarity has landed Gehry a wealth of commissions. His Weatherhead School of Management building at Case Western Reserve University was dedicated Wednesday in Cleveland. A 430,000-square-foot Computer Science complex for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is under construction in Cambridge, as is his much-anticipated Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. And he is working on a hotel and conference center in Venice, Italy; a major addition to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; and the Museum of Biodiversity in Panama City, Panama.

With so much public adulation focused on him, one might expect Gehry to retreat into self-absorption, or to simply churn out formulaic buildings in an effort to appease the demands of a ravenous market. If not all of these works measure up to the standards set by Bilbao, who can blame him? The market is unlikely to notice.

But there is increasing evidence that, at 73, Gehry has not yet reached the point of creative exhaustion. In September, he purchased a Venice lot where he plans to build a new home for himself and his family. The move would mean abandoning the Santa Monica house that has stood at the center of his architectural identity for decades.

At the same time, many of his recent projects suggest a desire to stretch the boundaries of his aesthetic vision. In the Panama design, for example, Gehry’s typically exuberant forms have been replaced by a more delicate aesthetic of folding planes.

Such changes may reflect a desire to wiggle free of unwanted expectations. But they are also more personal. They are rooted in a need to break away from creative constraints -- something that has always lain at the core of Gehry’s art. And they point toward a new chapter in Gehry’s life, the third and final act in a long and prolific career.

“I sometimes think of Matisse,” he said recently. “When I was younger, I loved his line drawings. And when I saw the cutouts he was making at the end of his life, it made me sad. I thought, here’s this arthritic man reduced to making paper-doll cutouts. Now I realize that he used his problems, the physical deficiencies he was facing, and blasted forward.”

A subtle shift in values

Most architects spend their lives honing a single vision. Mies van der Rohe -- a giant of the Modernist tradition -- revolutionized the profession by refining a relatively limited palette of glass and steel.

Gehry can claim two major breakthroughs in his career. The first came at age 49, when, after years of frustration designing relatively conventional buildings for local developers, he bought and began remodeling his Santa Monica house. At the time, many architects were trying to break from established Modernist dogmas. Gehry’s answer was to tear apart a banal suburban bungalow, wrapping it in a collage of chain link, corrugated metal and exposed studs. The result was a powerful expression of social fragmentation.

For nearly a decade, Gehry expanded on that theme with a series of works whose raw, geometric forms were composed with the intensity of a child playing with building blocks. In the 1984 Benson House in Calabasas, for example, two banal, box-like structures were joined by a series of bridges and decks made out of raw plywood and 2-by-4s. In the Winton Guest House, built in Wayzata, Minn., in 1987, simple, platonic forms -- one shaped like a chimney stack, another a simple box -- were huddled together in an open field.

Such projects represented more than aesthetic games. They were colored by memories of childhood -- the working-class suburb of Toronto where he grew up; his father’s crippling stroke in 1947; and the family’s descent into poverty after it moved to L.A. Their composition seemed to reveal the tensions hidden beneath the numbing uniformity of suburban society.

But by the end of the 1980s, Gehry seemed to be reaching the limits of that vocabulary. He was now grappling with bigger commissions, and the mostly wood-frame structures he had produced until then could not be easily adapted to the scale of major public works.

Using computer software originally created to design fighter jets, Gehry began molding industrial materials into more sculptural forms. The first of these, the 1992 Vila Olimpica in Barcelona, Spain, included a gigantic steel mesh fish sculpture that hovered above an outdoor court. In the design for Disney Hall, the forms became more integrated, with a series of petal-like layers wrapping around a central core.

Such works suggested a subtle shift in Gehry’s core values as an architect. If once he sought to locate aesthetic meaning in everyday life, these later projects were more overtly sensual. Their beauty flowed out of the muscular forms of a postindustrial landscape.

Gehry has yet to abandon that language entirely. The Weatherhead School of Management, for example, retains some of the imagery of Bilbao. The building’s steel roofscape spills over the main facade like wet drapery, recalling the museum’s titanium-clad skin.

In Le Clos Jordan Winery near Toronto, the forms become more amorphous. The design’s undulating steel exterior seems to hover over the acres of grapevines like a cloud. A series of passageways will carve through the building, allowing light to spill into the interiors.

But Gehry speaks of this work as an end, not a beginning. Beneath his sometimes gruff manor and rumpled appearance, he is mellowing. And increasingly, he seems to be driven by a renewed sense of introspection. He is more apt to reflect on his early experiences as an architect, as if he is trying to correct misconceptions about the meaning of his work -- or searching for a deeper level of truth within it.

To some degree, this is taking him back to an earlier language. In his design for the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Gehry is creating a collection of small, simple buildings, scattered amid a field of trees in the heart of Biloxi, Miss.

The buildings were inspired by local shotgun shacks built by former slaves. They will be topped by folding, faceted roofs. Gently propped up on wood columns, the roofs will play off the surrounding tree canopies.

The project’s humble appearance gives it a calm, empathic quality that is far from the aggressive sensuality of Gehry’s other recent work.

But the project that most suggests a shift in Gehry’s creative sensibility is the Museum of Biodiversity in Panama. In the design, still in its early stages, galleries are sheltered beneath a dense network of overlapping roof canopies, their colorful, folded planes evoking a cloud of butterflies that have come to rest on a tree branch. Underneath, bridges crisscross the space to connect the various galleries.

In part, the uniqueness of the Panama design results from a reorganization in the structure of Gehry’s 130-person office. For about a decade, Gehry has worked almost exclusively with two principal project designers, Craig Webb and Edwin Chan. The collaborations with Chan, which include Bilbao, tend toward the flamboyant; those with Webb, who is working on the Ohr Museum, seem a bit more restrained. Recently, however, Gehry has begun to work with a broader range of in-house talents. Panama is the first major project led by Anand Devarajan, who came to the firm a little more than a year ago.

In many of these commissions, Gehry is also touching on more personal territory. Gehry’s wife, Berta, was born in Panama, and Gehry sometimes speaks of the museum as a gift to her native country. Gehry’s Le Clos Jordan Winery is his first major commission near Toronto, the city where he grew up and to which he traces his working-class identity. He recently accepted a commission to design an addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which he remembers visiting with his mother when he was a child.

Gehry is conscious of these connections. Sitting in his office recently, he playfully showed off a Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal he was awarded by the Canadian government, before mentioning that it was also sent to 46,000 other Canadians.

“These projects are emotional things,” Gehry said as he placed the medal back on a desk cluttered with other memorabilia, including architectural drawings by his two sons. (He also has two daughters from a previous marriage.) “And that makes them a challenge for me.”

This seems less a nostalgic trip than a reflection of a desire to tap into primal imaginative sources, and inevitably, it is opening new creative veins.

Reconnecting to earlier ideals

It is in that context that Gehry’s decision to abandon his Santa Monica house is so revealing. Gehry built the house as a sort of architectural manifesto. It existed as the physical expression of his creative mission, defining his position within the profession and his relationship to mainstream culture.

Since then, the neighborhood has become more affluent, and the house has been celebrated as a landmark of 20th century design. Gehry, too, has changed. He keeps a 40-foot yacht in Marina del Rey; he drives a shiny new BMW 745i.

The move to Venice can be read as an effort to reconnect to earlier ideals. Flat and barren, the lot is marked by two skinny palms and a pine tree. A row of shabby bungalows stands to the south. Driveways are littered with old trucks and the occasional boat trailer.

“It’s a simple neighborhood,” Gehry says. “So I could easily go back to the old language of exposed studs and the Winton House. And I don’t want to do that. I’m struggling with that.”

So far, Gehry envisions a walled compound of small structures, some rising two floors so he can catch distant views of the ocean. He also says that he hopes to design the project with his 22-year-old son, Sam, who recently began working for the firm. But whatever he builds here, Gehry cannot escape the fact that it will mark a significant chapter in the long arc of his career.

The pressures of such a task are daunting. Aldous Huxley once described Francisco Goya’s life as a “growth away from restraint and into freedom, away from timidity and into expressive boldness.” Gehry’s odyssey has followed a similar course. What he may be seeking now is a new set of constraints -- the kind of inner tension that could once again spark his imagination.

It is too soon to know whether that struggle will pay off. But the process of reinvention, in itself, is an act of daring. It requires a willingness to venture onto unstable ground, both creative and psychological. And ultimately, that may be more important than whether or not he fails.

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A career in three acts

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Act 1: Fractured forms

Gehry first came to prominence in 1978, with the design of his Santa Monica house, and the next few years were some of the most fertile of his career. Projects such as the Winton Guest House in Wayzata, Minn., and the Norton House in Venice, Calif., were crude, box-like structures that often seemed torn apart by internal forces. Stud walls were left exposed; simple forms crashed together at odd angles.

Act 2: Metallurgist

In the 1990s, Gehry began experimenting with more fluid, sensuous forms, mostly in metal. The most famous of these is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, whose curvaceous exterior, clad in shimmering titanium panels, caused an international sensation. In Los Angeles, Disney Hall’s layered metal skin has been likened to a rose in bloom. Other works, such as the DZ Bank Building in Berlin, internalized this energy, embedding similarly curvaceous forms in a more stoic exterior.

Act 3: Homeward

In the past few years, Gehry has been striving to create new aesthetic challenges for himself. His Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, in Biloxi, Miss., still in design stages, marks a partial return to a language he mostly abandoned a decade ago. A current design for the Museum of Biodiversity in Panama creates a new formal imagery of folding, overlapping planes.