Frank Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Has Died

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and distinctive talents in American architecture, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles following a brief respiratory illness, his chief of staff confirmed. He was 96.

Gehry, the most recognisable American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, was one of the first to embrace the potential of computer design, and pioneered a distinctively exuberant style of bravura power, whimsical and arresting collisions of form. His most famous work remains the Guggenheim Museumin Bilbao, a fantastical, titanium-clad composition on the Nervión River which received international acclaim upon its opening in 1997, heralding a new era of emotive architecture.

The project lent its name to a phenomenon — the Bilbao effect — in which decaying old cities tried to spur revival with spectacular architecture, and became, as Guardian critic Rowan Moore put it in 2019, “the icon of what would be called iconic architecture.”

Other famous works included the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, completed in 2003; Miami’s New World Center, a concert hall finished in 2011; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, an ethereal museum in Paris completed in 2014.

Born Frank Owen Goldberg on Feb. 28, 1929, to a working-class Jewish family in Toronto, Canada, Gehry was a relatively late bloomer as an architect. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, where he attended the University of Southern California, studying ceramics, after a brief stint in the US army. He switched to architecture after a teacher introduced him to the work of Raphael Soriano, a pre-eminent designer of postwar modernism in southern California. As a young graduate, he changed his surname to Gehry, a decision he later attributed to a desire to avoid antisemitism.

Gehry spent several years working as a mid-level designer at a firm specialising in shopping malls before opening his own firm, in 1962, while designing houses and offices for friends on the side.

The remodelling of his own house in Santa Monica — an eye-catching clash of crude and conventional designs made of unglamorous materials, suggesting turmoil within — frustrated neighbours but drew critical attention, and inspired a mid-life crisis. “Is this what you like?” a developer client asked him in 1980, after the completion of another shopping center. When Gehry said it was, he told the Guardian in 2019, the client responded, “Well, if you like this you can’t possibly like that,” pointing in the direction of the shopping centre, “so why are you doing it?” At 50, Gehry stopped working on his commercial projects and refashioned his career as an auteur designer, working his way up from small-to-medium civic projects like the 1983 design for the Temporary Contemporary (now the Geffen Contemporary) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, to, in his 60s, the reputation-making museum in Bilbao.

A sociable person, Gehry maintained the kind of starry circles befitting a celebrity of American architecture — his office included photos of himself with such figures as Herbie Hancock, Shimon Peres, Princess Diana, Jasper Johns, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Quincy Jones and numerous former world leaders. He remained based in Los Angeles, and continued working into his final years, on projects such as a distinctive 76-story residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan that appears to be rippling with glass and steel, which was completed in 2011.

“I love working,” he told The Guardian shortly after his 90th birthday. “I love working things out. I love the client interaction — I think it’s a 50-50 game. I love that we do what we do, and bring it in under budget, which no one believes, but it’s true.”

Gehry is survived by his second wife Berta Aguilera, as well as their two sons Sam, also an architectural designer, and Alejandro, an artist. His daughter Leslie Gehry Brenner, from his first marriage to Anita Snyder, died in 2008.

By Adrian Horton