Canada-born U.S. architect Frank Gehry, whose daring designs from the Guggenheim Bilbao to the Walt Disney Concert Hall reshaped contemporary architecture, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness. He was 96.
Often called a “starchitect,” a label he disliked, Gehry became a global figure through his complex, sculptural forms, including the glass “sails” of the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. He insisted he was simply “a maker of buildings,” even as he appeared on “The Simpsons” and inspired a generation of designers.
Born in Toronto in 1929 as Frank Owen Goldberg, he moved to the United States in the late 1940s and changed his name to avoid antisemitism. He studied at USC, served in the U.S. Army, and later attended Harvard before beginning his career in Los Angeles. After a period in Paris, he founded his own firm in 1962.
His breakthrough arrived in the ’70s and ’80s, when his deconstructionist, experimentally shaped buildings — often wrapped in irregular metal surfaces — began redefining the possibilities of form through early computer-aided design. His renovation of his own Santa Monica home in 1978 became a manifesto project.
Gehry won the Pritzker Prize in 1989, and in 1997 unveiled the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, hailed by Philip Johnson as “the greatest building of our time.” Its success helped revive the city and inspired the term “Bilbao effect.”
He later completed the Walt Disney Concert Hall, New York’s Beekman Tower, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. His work for Facebook expanded the company’s Menlo Park campus.
Gehry pushed digital modelling further than most, creating curved structures that once seemed impossible to build, including the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.
