Book Review: “Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas” (2025) Published by Artvoices Books

Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas (2025). Published by Artvoices Books.

By LIAM OTERO March 21, 2026

The world of architecture is such an interesting arena because, unlike the world of art, it appears that few architects have the opportunity for their name to become so ubiquitous in the public consciousness. Frank Gehry (Canadian-American, 1929 - 2025) was and remains a star architect whose legacy is so freshly embedded in the collective psyche of millions of people all around the globe. But something many may or may not yet realize is that Gehry was also one half of a powerfully inspiring friendship with a creative equal, Robert Tannen (American, b. 1937), an artist, architect, urban planner, and community activist. Tannen is more regionally known in the Southeastern United States - especially in Gulf Coast states like Louisiana and Mississippi - yet is the type of artist who speaks the same imaginative language as Gehry and is deserving of a similar recognition.

Frank Gehry and Robert Tannen. Image courtesy of Artvoices Books

In 2024, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi curated an exhibition that revealed the five decades-worth of fruitful collaborations and personal affinities between Gehry and Tannen, Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas. Around the time of Gehry’s passing in late-2025, the New Orleans-based Artvoices Books published an exhibition catalogue in tribute to Gehry’s memory. For people like me who did not have the benefit of seeing the seminal exhibition, the catalogue (which directly takes its name from the show itself) is a fitting testimony to the greatness of Gehry’s stature as an architect concerned with using his designs to create a better world. Bearing in mind the title, the book is just as much a tribute to the still living Tannen whose philosophies on art, design, and community are perfectly aligned with that of Gehry’s but also stand for their own interpretations and meanings quite divorced from mainstream Art World trends.

Narratively, one has the option to read the book either from front-to-back or back-to-front, with the first half being on Gehry and the other half on Tannen. Regardless of how you choose to read it, this will ultimately lead to a crucial moment in the middle of the book at page 70: the crystallization of Gehry and Tannen’s friendship. The book provides a superbly thorough overview of how their friendship materialized in addition to transcribed interviews in which each of them describe how they collaborated over the years. These interviews, which are titled “My Friend, Frank” and “My Friend, Robert”, are beautifully touching testimonies of how both men view one another. 

Page spread from Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture & Ideas (2025). Published by Artvoices Books.

It comes as a pleasant surprise to discover that much of Gehry’s lasting architectural contributions possibly may not have happened without the humble support of Tannen, ranging from the Biomuseo in Panama to a series of community-based building projects in New Orleans (especially post-Hurricane Katrina). The reasons for the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art as the venue for the two artists’ retrospective exhibition is important to note as Tannen and his partner Jeanne Nathan were instrumental in securing Gehry to design the museum, his only one in the Southeast, which opened in 1999.

Page spread from Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture & Ideas (2025). Published by Artvoices Books.

Ample images blown-up to a visually legible scale and resolution populate most of the pages, and these are quite revelatory of the inherent synchronicity between Gehry and Tannen. Gehry’s signature messy schematics for planned buildings have a close resemblance to the scratchy and overly stylized handwriting of Tannen in his more conceptual projects and urban planning proposals. Gehry’s Deconstructivism is an innately sculptural style of architecture, but the book includes never-before-shown ceramic sculptures of his alongside his more design-oriented series of fish lamps and stacked rock vases.

Page spread from Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture & Ideas (2025). Published by Artvoices Books.

Akin to Gehry, Tannen’s practice has been one defined by a sculptural impetus, ranging from his Duchampian ceramic found object assemblages to his ecologically political Crucifish (1975). And just like his friend, Tannen’s work blurs the boundaries between fine arts and architecture as his famed Shotgun House sculptures, which are based off of the vernacular dwellings synonymous with the Deep South, have been a recurring subject on both a small, table-top scale all the way to practically the size of an actual house.

Page spread from Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture & Ideas (2025). Published by Artvoices Books.

The book’s design, which was conceived by Virginia Walcott, is a playfully engaging aesthetic that neither detracts from nor overwhelms the content of the catalogue, but only further enhances its potency as it relates to the creative genius of Gehry and Tannen. Aside from pages with full-scale images, there is a delightfully rhythmic flow of color to the pages of white, red, green, and blue that are either marked by white or black font text, thereby making everything pop off the pages.

Illustration of Robert Tannen and Frank Gehry as seen in the book.

When reviewing museum or gallery exhibition catalogues, I have an important criterion that solely applies to these types of books: does the book uphold the integrity of the exhibition by functioning in its textual format like a miniaturized version of the physical exhibition? Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas most certainly lives up to the hype of the original exhibition from two years ago with its enticingly informative text that is sumptuous but not dense, which is evened out by primary source material from Gehry and Tannen. The images, too, are plentiful and aid in better understanding the significance of each artists’ works in addition to their conceptual similarities - and some of my favorites of the photos in this book are Gehry’s architectural models and the sculpture garden on Tannen’s property.

Frank Gehry & Robert Tannen: Art, Architecture, & Ideas is a tremendously remarkable book that most definitely has cross-appeal to all enthusiasts of Art and Architecture because this catalogue demonstrates how Gehry and Tannen each embody the labels of artist-architect / architect-artist (or vice versa). WM