From June 12 to December 20, 2026, the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, will be hosting a retrospective exhibition dedicated to the career of Frank Gehry (1929-2025). Titled The Century of Gehry, the exhibition presents to the public original large-scale models, sculptures, drawings, furniture, and other works documenting the architect's notable, and at times controversial, postmodern architecture. The exhibit covers from early experiments to iconic buildings such as the architect's house in Santa Mónica, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The Serralves Museum occupies a building designed by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira in 1991. The exhibition is housed in the new wing that bears his name.
The exhibition was curated by António Choupina, Director of Architecture at the Serralves Foundation, together with Gehry Partners, and in collaboration with the Getty. It is organized across eight thematic chapters bringing architecture to life through sketches and models, to present it as a dynamic and human process, practical and imaginative, "shaped by creativity, emotion, and poetic expression." The exhibition also covers Gehry's dialogue with other architects and artists, especially Álvaro Siza, with whom he worked on the master plan for the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. The selected works aim to show how the architect "dissolved the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, gravity and fluidity, memory and future." The original drawings and sketches, models, photographs, and documents have been collected from the archives at Gehry Partners and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, along with an original Gehry Residence model on loan from the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
There's a before and after Frank Gehry in contemporary architecture. His was a tectonic shift in the way the architectural profession is and will be understood and practiced evermore, simultaneously propelling it into the future and reconnecting it with the past, before he was born in 1929, when art and architecture were one. He was fueled by a community of artists and friends from Los Angeles all the way to Porto, where he connected with Álvaro Siza, a poetic brother whose namesake wing is now able to celebrate Frank Gehry's life and work. — Curator António Choupina
From June through December, the Museum will present 19 of the architect's projects across Bilbao, Toronto, Paris, Los Angeles, and other locations, to explore his radical approach to form, material, and structure. Featured projects include the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica; Cardboard Furniture Series; Loyola Law School in Los Angeles; Chiat/Day Building Venice in Los Angeles; Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein; Lewis Residence in Lyndhurst; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena; the Parque Mayer in Lisbon; the Ferreira de Sá Rug; the Neuer Zollhof in Düsseldorf; the DZ Bank in Berlin; the Marqués de Riscal in Elciego; Dr Chau Chak Building (UTS) in Sydney; the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; LUMA in Arles; the Beekman Tower / 8 Spruce in New York; and Forma at King Street in Toronto.
The Museum building was commissioned to Álvaro Siza in 1991, to be built on the grounds of the Serralves Estate. The Museum was inaugurated on June 6, 1999, with the exhibition Circa 1968, about a decade of art-making that corresponded with a period of profound social and political change in Portugal and around the world. In 2024, the Museum inaugurated a 45,000-square-foot Álvaro Siza Wing, attached to the main building both by an elevated gallery and a first-floor passage. The new wing features two floors dedicated to contemporary art and architecture exhibitions, and one floor that houses the Serralves archives, doubling the museum's exhibition space. Programming within the wing alternates between presentations from the museum's permanent collection and temporary exhibitions focused on architecture.
Joyfully, Frank Gehry started building something new, something that goes hand in hand with the ancient, ever evolving, combining traits of what is unique, natural and necessary. That joy he had slowly transformed the history of architecture. I hoped to see him again at Serralves but, despite his absence, I know that all the rooms in the museum and all the streets in the city will be filled because of him. — Architect and 1992 Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Siza
Other recent announcements about architectural events around the world include the opening on June 10 of 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, with a city-wide program of exhibitions, installations, talks, and showroom presentations organized around the theme "Make This Moment Matter." In Tirana, the second edition of The Bread & Heart Festival was held from June 3 to 5, 2026, gathering international figures from the architectural community to reflect on the country's rapid transformation. On June 3, the Serpentine Galleries unveiled the first images of the 25th edition of the Serpentine Pavilion, designed by LANZA Atelier and open to the public from June 6 through October 25, 2026, as part of Serpentine's annual programme of public events.
