Frank Gehry, the architect whose undulating titanium-clad museum transformed little-known Bilbao, Spain, into an international tourist destination and ushered in an era of spectacular architectural forms, has died at age 96.
He died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, California, the New York Times reported, citing Meaghan Lloyd, his chief of staff. He lived in Santa Monica with his wife, Berta, in a house that was one of his great design experiments.
Gehry’s curved, glittering, twisted, and flourishing creations—particularly the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—delighted audiences and demonstrated the potential of contemporary architecture to transform cities. He was a pioneer in the use of computer software to transform fanciful drawings into accurate construction plans.
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Gehry projects in the United States
He spent 15 years shepherding the 2,265-seat Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles to completion, whose construction was delayed by changing demands and lack of financing. The building, his most iconic project in the U.S., opened in 2003 to rave reviews for its elegant, acoustic interior—Gehry called it “a living room for the city”—and a lush, curvaceous stainless steel exterior that evokes a ship with sails in the wind.
A companion project, also designed by Gehry and long delayed, across the street from the concert hall was finally completed in 2022. The 45-story luxury building at the center of the project, the Grand LA, is called The Grand by Gehry.
In 1989, Canadian Gehry became the sixth American to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious honor in the field. “His projects, compared to American music, would resemble jazz, full of improvisation and a lively, unpredictable spirit,” said the Pritzker jury.
Unique creations
Inspired by fellow artists such as Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Richard Serra, Gehry resisted attempts to categorize the style of his distorted, asymmetrical, sculpture-like buildings.
“Gehry’s buildings appear to some like alien intruders on the landscape, and to others like local hybrids sprouting from the very soil of our culture,” architecture professors Francesco Dal Co and Kurt W. Foster wrote in a 2003 book about Gehry’s designs.
Either way, they wrote, Gehry’s work “transforms the familiar.”
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‘Raw industrial beauty’
Gehry was 52 years old when, in 1991, he beat two competitors to design the planned New York Guggenheim branch in Bilbao.
Gehry said he and Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, imagined what a 21st-century museum should look like and agreed to challenge the idea “that everything has to be white and perfect.” Gehry’s goal was to design a museum that reflected the “raw industrial beauty” of the Basque city.
In a former abandoned shipyard on the banks of the Nervión River, Gehry juxtaposed orthogonal blocks of limestone with curved surfaces of titanium to create a shimmering, undulating building that looked like a jumble of buildings on the city side and a boat on the river side.
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Renowned architect Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time.” For architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, from the New York Times, the voluptuousness of the building made it “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe”.
The museum opened on October 19, 1997, attracted more than 1.3 million visitors in its first year, and maintained an average of 1 million annual visitors for the next decade.
Its success spawned what became known as “the Bilbao effect” — cities around the world hiring famous architects to design public buildings capable of boosting tourism and economic development.
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Gehry’s varied interests included playing hockey and riding motorcycles. His love for art was reflected in his work. He said that drawing — the first step in his creative process — was a way of “thinking out loud.”
Painter’s look
“There’s an immediacy to painting — you feel as if the brushstrokes have just been made,” Gehry said in a 1984 interview. “I think about paintings all the time, so one part of architecture I always felt interested in exploring was how to bring those ideas into buildings.”
Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto, where his Polish-Jewish grandparents had settled. He suffered anti-Semitism in his youth and abandoned religion after his bar mitzvah. At age 25, he convinced his family to adopt Gehry as their surname.
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His mother, Thelma, studied music and participated in Yiddish theater. His father, Irving, was a boxer and a salesman of arcade machines and slot machines. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, and Gehry became an American citizen three years later.
He studied architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1954. Recruited into the Army, he designed common rooms for soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia.
He went on to study urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but dropped out after a year and returned to Los Angeles. In 1967 he opened the firm Frank O. Gehry and Associates.
His design for the Merriweather Post Pavilion, an open-air music theater in Columbia, Maryland, won him an award in 1967 from the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He gained more attention in 1972 with a line of furniture, “Easy Edges,” made from corrugated cardboard.
Starting in 1977, Gehry expanded and renovated his Santa Monica home, a pink Dutch Colonial-style bungalow, transforming it into an indoor-outdoor composition of wood and glass, chain-link fences, and corrugated metal, defying the traditional notion of the house as castle by cutting irregular holes in it.
Old and new
“With very little money, I decided to build a new house around the old one and try to maintain a tension between the two, making one define the other, and giving the feeling that the old house remained intact within the new one,” wrote Gehry.
Neighbors were not pleased, and Gehry said his experiment drove away potential customers. He spent the next five years rebuilding his career.
Loyola Law School in Los Angeles hired him in 1978 to build its new campus. Gehry’s design, which grouped a series of contemporary buildings around a traditional square, proved that he was as much an urban planner as he was an architect. Gehry said he found the school in “a deplorable environment” and sought to create a campus “that gives a sense of dignity and is inspiring.”
Gehry became fascinated with fish as a child, when he played with the live carp his grandmother put in the bathtub until he transformed them into gefilte fish. The shape of fish appeared in several of his designs.
His 1986 design for the Fish Dance restaurant in Kobe, Japan, included a giant copper-scaled fish sculpture, one of his first computer-aided designs.
The ribbon-like curves that would become Gehry’s trademark first appeared in a transformative project in Europe. The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1990, features a serpent-like spiral staircase that coils around structural blocks.
His building for the Nationale-Nederlanden, in a public square in Prague, became known as the Dancing House, or Fred and Ginger building, because one tower seems to embrace the other, in full motion, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Manhattan skyline
Gehry’s first building in New York, 10 stories of white glass for IAC Corp. by Barry Diller, opened in the Chelsea neighborhood in 2007. His first foray into skyscrapers, the 76-story residential building at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan opened in 2011 as the tallest residential building in the city.
Although Gehry was personally averse to computers, his company became innovative in using computer-aided design to ensure that complex projects were viable and on time and on budget.
“We really try to become part of the construction industry, work with it, develop a partnership, because that’s the only way we can make things happen,” Gehry said in 2007, upon receiving a construction technology award from the National Building Museum.
Not everyone thought Gehry’s designs worked perfectly.
Responding to complaints about excessive glare, he agreed to sandblast parts of the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s shiny surface. In 2008, he was sued by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which claimed that planning and construction flaws resulted in leaks and cracks at the Stata Center, a Gehry-designed science building that cost $300 million. Gehry said these problems were minor and unavoidable in such complex structures, and the case was “amicably resolved” in 2010, according to a joint statement from the university, Gehry and construction company Skanska USA Building Inc.
Gehry married Anita Snyder, a legal secretary, in 1952, and they had two daughters. The marriage ended in divorce. He had two children with Berta Aguilera, whom he married in 1975. Gehry’s sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, founded the Center for City Building Education, which trains teachers in urban design.
