Frank Gehry, the Canadian-American architect whose restless, curving buildings reshaped museum and concert-hall design at the turn of the century, has died at his home in Santa Monica, California, aged 96.
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto on 28 February 1929, he died on 5 December after a brief respiratory illness, according to his office.
Gehry was best known to the wider public for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, completed in 1997, a titanium-clad composition of swept and folded forms set beside the Nervión river. Opening when he was already 67, the museum was initially criticised by some as an empty showpiece, yet it rapidly became the main attraction of the Basque city and helped to popularise the notion of the “Bilbao effect”, in which a single cultural building is credited with driving urban and economic renewal.
The same sculptural language – asymmetrical, apparently improvised and clad in metal panels – defined later works including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. In both, overlapping shells and sail-like volumes were supported by complex steel structures made possible by advanced computer-aided design, an area in which Gehry was regarded as an early adopter. Before the gleaming museums and concert halls, he had experimented with cheaper, everyday materials such as corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing, particularly in Southern California during the 1970s and 1980s.
Gehry grew up in a Polish-Jewish family in Toronto, where he spent time in his grandfather’s hardware shop and began making small constructions from offcuts of wood. The family moved to Los Angeles in the late 1940s. He studied first at Los Angeles City College and then architecture at the University of Southern California, before undertaking graduate work in urban planning at Harvard University. During this period he changed his surname from Goldberg to Gehry, a decision later linked to a desire to avoid antisemitism.
After a brief spell working in Paris, Gehry opened his own practice in Los Angeles in 1962. Early projects ranged from commercial schemes such as the Santa Monica Place shopping centre to modest houses around Los Angeles. His remodelling of his own Santa Monica home in the late 1970s – wrapping a conventional bungalow in sheets of metal and exposed framing – attracted wide professional attention and established many of the themes that would recur in his later work.
International recognition followed with the award of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, then the profession’s most prominent honour. The jury described his designs as comparable to jazz, “replete with improvisation and a lively, unpredictable spirit”, and praised his buildings as “juxtaposed collages of spaces and materials” revealing both “the theatre and the back-stage”. He later received, among other distinctions, the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal and his native Canada’s highest civilian honour, the Companion of the Order of Canada.
From the 1990s onwards Gehry’s office produced a series of large cultural and institutional projects across Europe and North America. Besides Bilbao and Disney Hall, his work included the Dancing House in Prague, the DZ Bank building beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the New World Center in Miami Beach, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion and BP Bridge in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Luma Arles arts complex in France. In the corporate sector he designed, among other projects, expansions to Facebook’s headquarters in Northern California and the IAC Building in New York.
His buildings attracted both visitors and debate. Supporters pointed to their technical ambition and the way they turned museums and concert halls into destinations in their own right, while critics argued that some projects overwhelmed their surroundings or placed spectacle above everyday use. Reuters noted that he was frequently described as a “starchitect”, a label he is reported to have disliked. He acknowledged that the Guggenheim Bilbao prompted clients to request similar effects elsewhere, and his later work was sometimes assessed in that light.
Gehry also moved into other fields, producing furniture and objects, including the “Easy Edges” line of corrugated cardboard chairs and tables, and collaborating with fashion and jewellery firms. He appeared as himself in an episode of The Simpsons in 2005, in which a crumpled piece of paper supposedly inspired a concert hall design – a joke he later said had led some people to believe that was genuinely how his buildings began.
In later years he continued to work from his Los Angeles office on projects including the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington DC, a series of developments in downtown Los Angeles and the long-discussed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Well into his nineties, he remained involved in design reviews and client meetings, according to colleagues.
Frank Gehry was married twice. His first marriage, to Anita Snyder, ended in divorce. In 1975 he married Berta Isabel Aguilera. He is survived by Berta and by children from his two marriages; another daughter predeceased him.
