Canadian-American architect Frank O. Gehry died today in his home in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 96. News of his passing was confirmed by Meaghan Lloyd, his chief of staff, to The New York Times. Gehry died from a respiratory illness, just days after the death of Robert A. M. Stern, a longtime friend. Vanity Fair in 2010 called Gehry “the most important architect of our age.”
Gehry Partners—the late architect’s eponymous firm—designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Art Gallery of Ontario, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Chicago’s Millennium Park, MIT’s Stata Center, Dancing House in Prague, and 8 Spruce in Manhattan, among many other notable projects.
Gehry earned numerous accolades: In 1989, the Pritzker Architecture Prize; 1992, the Wolf Prize in Arts; 1998, the National Medal of Arts and, that same year, the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and Art; 1999, the AIA Gold Medal; 2000, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal; 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Architecture; 2004, the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service; and in 2016, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed by Barack Obama.
In an essay for the 1989 Pritzker Prize architecture critic and writer Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, “The spin is that Gehry’s work goes to the heart of the art of our time, carrying the conceptual and technological achievements of modernism (as real and instructive as its much better-publicized failures) to the spectacularly enriched vision that characterizes the 1990s.”
Gehry’s work, which drew from sculpture, also revolutionized architectural technology. Famously, his paper models were translated into 3D models using a laser stylus into CATIA, a software originally used for airplane design. Gehry founded Gehry Technologies in 2002 as a consulting business to better integrate software into architecture businesses. The company was sold to Trimble in 2014.
From Humble Origins
Frank Owen Goldberg was born in 1929 in Toronto to Russian-Jewish parents from New York City and Łódź, Poland. His grandfather owned a hardware store in Toronto, and Goldberg was known for building model cities there with the scrap he’d find on the ground. He also famously took up hockey, a hobby he kept up his entire life. (He completed a hockey arena in Anaheim, California, in 1995 and in 2004, he designed a trophy for the World Cup of Hockey.)
In 1947, he and his family moved to California, where he worked as a truck driver and enrolled at Los Angeles City College. He transferred to the University of Southern California’s architecture school where he graduated in 1954, the same year he changed his name to Gehry, stemming from concerns related to antisemitism. Gehry had a brief stint in the U.S. Army after graduation. In 1956, he enrolled in the urban planning program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but he didn’t graduate, having dropped out.
After Harvard, Gehry moved back to Los Angeles where he worked for Victor Gruen, another Jewish emigre. Gruen and Gehry worked on a handful of projects, mostly shopping malls. In 1961, Gehry moved to Paris and briefly worked for André Remondet. Gehry moved back to the U.S. in 1962 and founded his own firm, which was officially named Frank Gehry and Associates in 1967. A number of residential commissions followed. The Gehry Residence was completed in 1978 out of an existing Santa Monica house, putting Gehry on the map.
In 1972, Gehry completed the Ronald Davis Studio and House in Los Angeles, although that project was destroyed in the 2018 Woosley fire. Gehry finished the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California, in 1981. The California Aerospace Museum opened in 1984 and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany in 1989, the year he earned his Pritzker.
In 1990, Gehry designed a small bagel store for New York Bagel Co. in Los Angeles with a giant Chrysler Building replica running through it; the store was recently scrapped. Gehry’s Binoculars Building (the original Chiat/Day offices), named for an inhabitable sculpture on its frontage designed by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen debuted in 1991, a property now up for sale. Gehry’s most famous projects—Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Fondation Louis Vuitton—came next; Walt Disney Concert Hall was the subject of a recent exhibition by the Getty Research Institute.
Media Matters
In 2005, Gehry appeared as himself on The Simpsons: In the episode, Marge Simpson personally writes to Gehry asking him to design a new concert hall in Springfield, an invitation Gehry accepts. (The show’s co-curator Sam Simon was an architecture buff: Other episodes included bits about Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, and Frank Lloyd Wright, although Gehry was the only architect to play himself.) Gehry later said he regretted appearing in The Simpsons, because of how it lampooned his process.
In 2010, the Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Street opened across from the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. The Beekman Tower was built one foot taller than the nearby Trump World Tower, then the tallest residential tower in New York. Trump took offense to this: He and Gehry spatted the next few years. Gehry said in 2010 Trump always had a grudge against him for turning down a chance to work together. “I don’t like his hairdo,” Gehry said.
Gehry never had a problem running up against U.S. presidents: His design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. wasn’t very well received by the Eisenhower family. And Gehry clashed with the Eisenhowers in public, too.
A postmodern rabble-rouser, in 2014 Gehry flipped off a journalist for asking pointed questions about his building’s forms. He responded, “In the world we live in, 98 percent of what gets built and designed today is pure shit.”
Continued Success
Paul Goldberger published a biography of Gehry in 2015, the same year that a sailboat designed by Gehry was completed. (Its name, Foggy, was a play on Gehry’s initials.) Historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who died suddenly in 2023, published a Gehry monograph in 2021, with Rizzoli. Frank Gehry: The Masterpieces by Cohen focused on 38 projects Gehry worked on between 1961 and 2021. Cohen had also worked with Gehry to orchestrate an eight-volume catalog raisonné; the first one was published in 2020.
In 2018, after Robert Venturi’s passing, Gehry told AN “Bob Venturi is one of my heroes in life, as is Denise.” That year, Gehry donated $1 million to Los Angeles River schools for arts education. His building for Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was also completed in 2018.
In 2021, Gehry completed the Luma Arles residential tower in France, and also an adaptive reuse project closer to home at the Yola Center in Los Angeles, reviewed for AN by Ian Volner. More recently, Mimi Zeiger reviewed a building that Gehry Partners designed pro bono for a children’s nonprofit in Watts.
Gehry never retired. In Toronto, Gehry’s hometown, a new residential skyscraper, Forma, is underway. And just this month, one of his residences graces a cover in Architectural Digest with a story written by Goldberger. After a series of delays, the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is slated to open soon.
In the coming days, AN will share tributes from architects and admirers.