American architect Frank Gehry
The renowned architect Frank Gehry, known for the designs of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles, has died, his office confirmed to the Associated Press and AFP. He was 96 years old.
The American architect died this Friday at home in Santa Monica, California. Frank Gehryafter a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloydchief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.
Ephraim Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto on February 28, 1929 and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947, eventually becoming a North American citizen. As an adult, changed the name at the suggestion of the first wife, who told him that the antisemitism could be holding back your career.
Throughout his career, he received all the major architectural awards, including the highest distinction in the field, the Pritzker Architecture Prizeattributed to a work described as “refreshingly original and utterly American”, recalls .
The fascination of the consecrated modern pop art led to the creation of some of the most imaginative buildings ever builtand earned him a degree of worldwide acclaim rarely granted to an architect.
In addition to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Gehry’s many masterpieces include the DZ Bank buildingin Berlin, and the expansion of Facebook headquarters in Northern California, made at the request of the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
He also signed the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and the BP Pedestrian Bridge, which connects Millennium Park to Maggie Daley Park.
Among the other distinctions he received are the gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award and the highest honor of his country of origin, that of Companion of the Order of Canada.
Years after having stopped designing conventional-looking buildingsnews emerged in 2006 that the banal Santa Monica shopping center that had been the origin of his professional epiphany could be about to be demolished.
Gehry’s admirers were outraged, but he himself found it amusing. “They are going to tear it down now and build the kind of original idea I had“, he said, laughing. The center ended up being remodeled, gaining a more contemporary, open and open-air feel. Still, it’s not a Gehry masterpiece.
However, the architect continued to work well into his 80screating acclaimed buildings that have redesigned urban skylines around the world.
A InterActiveCorp headquartersknown as the IAC Building, took the form of a shimmering beehive when it was completed in 2007 in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
The 76-story skyscraper New York by Gehry, then one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, it was a stunning addition to the Lower Manhattan skyline when it opened in 2011.
That same year, Gehry joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as architecture teacher. He also taught at Yale and Columbia University.
Not everyone was a fan of Gehry’s work. Some critics dismissed it as little more than giant, scruffy reincarnations of small towns made of scrap wood that, as he said, he spent hours building as a child in the mining town of Timmins, Ontario.
Princeton art critic Hal Foster classified many of his later works as “oppressive”arguing that they were designed mainly to be tourist attractions. Some detractors said Disney Hall looked like a set of cardboard boxes left in the rain.
Critics also included the family of Dwight D. Eisenhowerwho challenged Gehry’s bold proposal for a memorial in honor of the 34th president of the United States.
Although the family said that I wanted a simple memorial and not what Gehry proposed, with several statues and undulating metallic tapestries portraying the life of Eisenhower, the architect refused to significantly change the project.
If the critics’ words bothered you, rarely let it show. Sometimes it even came to join in the fun. He appeared as himself in a 2005 episode of “The Simpsons”in which he agrees to design a concert hall that is later transformed into a prison.
The idea for the project, which looked a lot like Disney Hall, came after wrinkle the letter that Marge Simpson had sent him and throwing it on the ground. As he looked at the crumpled paper, he exclaimed: “Frank Gehry, you did it again!”
Frank Gehry leaves his wifeBerta; daughter, Brina; the two sons Alejandro and Samuel; and the buildings he created. Another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died of cancer in 2008.
