Frank Gehry, the architect who turned metal into waves, one of the most popular in the world, died this Friday at his home in Santa Monica, on the coast of Los Angeles, California. He was 96 years old. The news of the death of the creator of the Guggenheim Bilbao museum has been confirmed by his chief of staff at his studio, Gehry Partners, to media outlets such as the local o The New York Times. He was having a short but intense respiratory illness. He was 96 years old.
Gehry, who was actually called Ephraim —Frank— Owen Goldberg was a late but brilliant star in the world of architecture and even popular culture, where he made good friends, great contacts and great friends. He was enormously productive in the last stage of his life, and one of the pioneers in using technology in combination with metal, especially titanium. Considered as one, for him, the architectural work had to be conceived as an integral work of art whose result could resemble that offered by a sculpture.
In 1989 he won the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious in the world of architecture. But the opening, , turned him into an absolute star at the age of 68, and the building into an advance of what was to come in the 21st century. The museum and its content, but also the spectacular nature of the continent, with its immense titanium structure in the heart of the city, completely changed the face of the Nervión estuary and all of Bilbao, converting it from an industrial bastion to a cultural, tourist and gastronomic attraction pole. Its impact was such that it was called .
Hence, just a couple of years Gehry decided to create his twinthe headquarters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, located in the city’s financial center (its downtown). The so-called Walt Disney Concert Hall, which began construction in 1999 and was inaugurated in October 2003, was not only acclaimed for its design and acoustics, but it aesthetically and culturally revitalized the district. “The musicians constantly tell me that they feel the audience, and the audience tells me that they feel very connected to the musicians. That makes a big difference,” he told the Philharmonic magazine a couple of years ago. A renowned builder of musical auditoriums, he also owns the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago.
In , in Washington State. Funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, with $250 million, its impact and repercussion, as well as its finish, were less powerful. In 2014, with the help of Bernard Arnault and the then French president François Hollande, it inaugurated another of its star buildings, 11,000 square meters of art and glass. The Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi will now remain as a posthumous work, which is scheduled to open next year 2026, after more than 20 years since it was commissioned and
Despite being Canadian, born in Toronto in February 1929, Gehry made the United States his homeland, and especially California. In his adolescence he moved with his family to Los Angeles (his father had suffered a heart attack and they had recommended a milder climate than Toronto), where he became a naturalized American. Hence, he developed the bulk of his professional career in his host State. He first studied at LA City College, a kind of municipal university, and then went on to the prestigious USC (the University of Southern California). He then served in the military in Atlanta, Georgia, and later continued his studies, this time at Harvard.
The architect came from a working and migrant family. His father, a New Yorker, with whom he was not very close, tried to become a boxer and eventually became a salesman and truck driver. It was his mother, Thelma, born in Poland and migrant to Canada, and his maternal grandparents who instilled in young Frank his passion for art, music and literature. It was his own mother, as well as his first wife, Anita Snyder (to whom he was married between 1952 and 1966) who encouraged him to change his last name from Goldberg to Gehry, so that his origin would not be so identified as Jewish. He himself explained on one occasion that at the beginning of his career he suffered anti-Semitic behavior and there were other architects who did not want to work with him because of his ancestry.
After his marriage and subsequent divorce from Anita, with whom he had two daughters, Brina and Leslie (who died of uterine cancer in 2008), he remarried, to Berta Aguilera, in 1975. Together they had two children, Sam, also an architect, and Alejandro, an artist.
After Harvard, and after saving for a time to be able to live for a year in his beloved Paris, Gehry returned to Los Angeles, which he always loved and where he remained his entire life. In a 2009 biography he stated that he fell in love with the chaos, the constant mix of people, the world of cinema and the constantly developing frontier feel of the city. Hence he settled in the coastal Santa Monica, where he continued his career and settled until his death.
In his beloved Los Angeles he also leaves the Loyola Marymount University Law School building or the Science Museum, from 1984, as well as the Frances Howard Goldwyn Library, located in Hollywood, from 1985, or the Binoculars Building, a 1991 building shaped like binoculars. Several houses also remain: his own in Santa Monica, Gehry Residence, from 1978; the Spiller House, in Venice, 1980; or the Norton House, also in Venice, from 1984. In downtownin front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, also created a luxurious 45-story residential building with more than 400 homes, called The Grand LA, precisely where the Spanish chef José Andrés has his Los Angeles restaurant. In Southern California there is the Cabrillo Aquarium or the Disneyland workers’ offices in Anaheim.
After working in several firms and staying in France that year, at the age of 33 he opened his first own studio in Santa Monica (California) Frank O. Gehry & Associates, . He created his own style as a reaction to the coldness of the modernist buildings in vogue when he began to work, reflected in the renovations he made to his own house or in two collections of cardboard furniture, Easy Edges (1969) y Experimental Edges (1979). In 1965, his first major work, which he created for a graphic artist, Lou Danzinger, caught the attention of the public and from there the commissions multiplied.
After winning the Pritzker in 1989, his projects . After the Bilbao museum, in Spain he made the sculpture of the Golden Fish, 56 meters long and 35 meters high in the gardens of the Hotel Arts, on the Paseo Marítimo, or in Elciego (Álava). “I wanted to design something exciting, festive, because wine is pleasure,” he said, when they were inaugurated, to later become, like so many of his buildings, the epicenter of tourist attraction for the entire region.
In addition to the famous architectural award, in 2008, the Venice Biennale awarded him the Golden Lion in recognition of his entire career. In the United States, he received the gold medal for architecture from the American Institute of Architects in 1999 and the prestigious United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the country’s highest civilian honor, presented to him by President Barack Obama. Then, the president applauded him as “a true inspiration”: “Frank’s work teaches us that, although buildings are solid and fixed to the ground, like all great works of art, they can lift our spirit. They can elevate us and broaden our horizons.”
