Frank Gehry, late renowned architect, helped design The Woodlands Town Center | Houston Public Media

The Woodlands was never supposed to be a bedroom community. Instead, Jim Carman, president of the Texas Region of Howard Hughes Communities, the master planned developer behind The Woodlands, said it was designed to be an ecosystem in and of itself.

“It’s all-encompassing,” he said. “You’ll see other communities around town that just don’t have the scale or the opportunity to do what we’re doing at the scale that a community like The Woodlands … has.”

In order to accomplish that goal, oil tycoon George Mitchell, who founded The Woodlands in 1974, knew he wanted to invest in a thriving town center, with shopping, dining, entertainment, and employment.

In order to do that, Mitchell turned to a number of architects and planners for their design suggestions. One of them was Frank Gehry, who died last week on Dec. 5 at 96. He died at his Santa Monica home after a brief respiratory illness.

“Frank and his team in 1977 created a master plan of The Woodlands Town Center, these 1,200 acres for George Mitchell and his team,” Carman said. “We have the copies today. It’s an amazing artifact, you know, something that we pride very much.”

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Gehry’s plan for the town center included a significantly walkable downtown area, with a 1.6 million square foot shopping mall at the end of the canal. Surrounding the town center are several parks and green spaces, with space for businesses and residents to live and work.

Gehry went on to design some of the most iconic buildings around the globe, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. His work in The Woodlands, though, was many years before his heyday.

“He was not the Frank Gehry that we’ve all come to know and love,” Carman said. “Frank Gehry was known in California at that time, but certainly was not near as famous as he became. But George and his team identified Frank as a really experimental thinker — just absolutely ties right into George Mitchell and his overall vision. He did not want to repeat what cities around the country and around the world were doing at that time in The Woodlands.”

Gehry’s exact designs weren’t completely implemented in The Woodlands Town Center, though aspects of his design are present in The Woodlands today. Carman noted Gehry’s push for connectivity and walkability in the downtown area, particularly in a time when cities were not emphasizing walkability.

Howard Hughes Communities

Two years ago, Carman and his associates took Gehry’s plan back to Gehry himself. At one point, Carman said he saw Gehry’s phone background was a character from The Simpsons. Carman was curious about which character it was and asked Gehry about it. Gehry informed him it was a picture of himself from when he guest-starred in the 2005 episode of The Simpsons, “The Seven-Beer Snitch,” in which Marge Simpson hires Gehry to build a concert hall in Springfield.

More than a trip down memory lane, the meeting with Gehry was also to gauge whether or not Gehry, in his 90s, was interested in working in The Woodlands again.

“His energy and his vision was — I wasn’t able to work with him in ‘77 or any year before — as vibrant and clear as any designer that we work with every day here at Howard Hughes,” Carman said. “And so, we were hopeful and would have been over the moon to be able to put something together.”

Despite his death, Gehry’s work will continue to live on as a copy of his original town center was placed in a time capsule in October 2024, honoring the fiftieth anniversary of The Woodlands’ founding. The capsule is set to be opened in 2074.