Frank Gehry, who in the second half of the 20th century forged a new language in architecture, becoming one of the most famous architects of his time, has died at the age of 96, according to a spokesperson at Gehry Partners. He died at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness.
Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada. After studying architecture at the University of Southern California and urban planning at Harvard, he set up his practice in Los Angeles in 1962.
Redeveloping his own home using utilitarian materials — cinder blocks, plywood, corrugated metal and chain-link fencing — helped jump-start his career in 1978 in and around the state.
“We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand, I built a house around it,” he told TED founder Richard Saul Wurman in a 2008 discussion. “And a few people got excited about it.”
He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, which vaulted him and his work to international acclaim.
But Gehry was in his late 60s when he received the commission for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, perhaps the most critically-acclaimed and renowned building of his career.
In 1998, the late Philip Johnson, the godfather of American modern architecture, stood in the atrium and was moved to tears. According to Vanity Fair, he anointed Gehry “the greatest architect we have today.” It was a rare moment in architecture: critics, academics and the public collectively enraptured by a single building.
Gehry transformed our idea of what was architecturally possible, shaping and sculpting buildings with the same software used to design fighter jets. The titanium-clad Guggenheim swooped, curved and shimmered by a river, which Vanity Fair correspondent Matt Tyrnauer likened to “a gargantuan bouquet of writhing silver fish.”
Fish were a recurrent theme in Gehry’s work, but his designs were also sparked by ideas as diverse as the shape of Japanese Buddhist temples, ice hockey and Stratocaster guitars.
The Guggenheim led to a series of high-profile commissions: the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle (2000), Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris (2014) among them. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016. Gehry brought spectacle and showmanship to the field, undoubtedly, but did not see such qualities in himself.
“You are not going to call me a f***ing ‘starchitect’?” he told a Financial Times reporter in 2013. “I hate that.”
In person, Gehry was a plain-speaking, soft-spoken and good-humored, if occasionally cantankerous, communicator.
He had many close collaborators over the years, and those who knew him spoke to both his momentous impact and his character.
Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, who worked with Gehry across multiple projects including the Louis Vuitton Foundation, called the architect “a dear friend” in a statement posted to X.
“I owe to him one of the longest, most intense, and most ambitious creative partnerships I have ever had the privilege to experience,” he said. “He will remain a genius of lightness, transparency, and grace.”
US representative and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called him “a gentleman titan of architecture and a master communicator of the future,” in a statement posted to X, praising his contributions to global visual culture.
“Frank left an indelible mark on his beloved Los Angeles, in California, across America, and indeed around the world — not only through his designs, but also through his generosity,” she said.
Describing his aesthetic, Gehry once told Vanity Fair: “Overall, the kind of language I’ve developed, which culminated in Bilbao, comes from a reaction to Postmodernism. I was desperate not to go there.”
He simply had an aversion to historical pastiche.
“I said to myself, ‘If you have to go backward, why not go back 300 million years before man, to fish?,’” he continued. “And that’s when I started with this fish shtick, as I think of it, and started drawing the damn things, and I realized that they were architectural, conveying motion even when they were not moving.” (CNN)
English