When I heard about Frank Gehry's death last week, it felt like a personal loss to me, as we had worked together for many years.
My wife, with whom I had the privilege of visiting and photographing his last home in April 2019, after he had been living there for almost a year, encouraged me to share my encounters with Frank Gehry as a person. He and his wife welcomed us warmly into their home, and when they went to a concert in the evening, they simply left us alone in the house with everything open. He amusedly told my wife about our collaboration on this house, our discussions, our differences of opinion in implementing his goal of building a house that met his aesthetic requirements with a minimal ecological footprint in operation. He had large trees planted in the garden at the time because he knew he would not see them grow for many years.
We worked together on this house for at least seven years, and when it was finished, complete with a geothermal heat pump, photovoltaics and solar panels, natural ventilation and gravity walls for cooling, the phone rang more than once at 3 p.m. at our home in Stuttgart, which was 6 a.m. in Santa Monica. Frank then reported on constantly opening skylights or flow noises in the gravity walls that had robbed him of his sleep. Fortunately, we were able to access the control system from Stuttgart and after some time, optimize its operation accordingly. We had to plan the lap pool for a water temperature of 92°F for his morning swim training, which was an energy challenge, but he finally agreed to a cover.
This house was his statement that sustainable construction can indeed be realized with his high architectural standards.
We have also learned to get closer to this goal in the many joint projects we carried out in more than 20 years of collaboration and were able to implement many—but not all—of our ideas. Frank was particularly proud of the gray, transparent PV cells on the roof of his administration building on the Novartis campus in Basel, which were manufactured according to his specifications. A misunderstanding had led us there, because the black front of the photovoltaic sample sent by mail was unthinkable for him, whereas the silver back was more acceptable. At first I was shocked, but then I took it as a challenge and developed the solution together with Sunways from Konstanz.
I didn't understand Frank Gehry's motto “Buildings are sculptures of the city” at first, but I immediately grasped it on my first visit to Bilbao. If we can now ensure that these urban sculptures also contribute to the urban climate, we will certainly be acting in the spirit of Frank Gehry.
Matthias Schuler,
December 16, 2025 Stuttgart