Frank Gehry’s ‘legacy’ buildings in doubt

The recession has not being kind to Frank Gehry, the US-based architect best known for the Guggenheim art gallery in Bilbao, northern Spain. He has revealed that two of his most ambitious projects – buildings planned for Los Angeles and New York which many felt would secure his legacy as one of the leading lights of the modernist school - have been placed on hold.

And it gets worse. The downturn has also resulted in him having to halve the number of staff working at his offices in Paris, Hong Kong, New York and Los Angeles, and, on a more personal level, postpone his long-standing plans to build a new home for himself in Venice, California.

"I've had a disappointing year, with Grand Avenue and Brooklyn," Gehry (pictured) told the Los Angeles Times. "All my life I've wanted to do projects like that, and they never came to me. And then all of a sudden I had two of them. I invested the last five years in them, and they're both stopped. So it leaves a very hollow feeling in your bones."

The buildings Gehry refers to are the Grand Avenue project - part of a $3bn plan to turn part of downtown LA into the Champs Elysees of the western States - and the Atlantic Yard development in Brooklyn.

However, it’s not all bad news for the Canadian-born Gehry, who turned 80 last week. His Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a $200m, 30,000-square-metre contemporary art museum, is still going ahead.