Frank Gehry, the most famous architect of his time, has died at the age of 96 after a brief respiratory illness, said Meghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.
Gehry’s masterpieces include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in the United States and the DZ Bank Building in the German capital Berlin.
“You know, I went there right before the inauguration and looked at it and said, ‘Oh my God, what have I done to these people?'” Gehry said. Vanity Fair Magazine, speaking about his Guggenheim design. “It took me a few years to actually like it.”
He has won every major award related to architecture.
Who was Frank Gehry?
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto on February 28, 1929, Gehry moved to the United States with his Jewish family in the late 1940s and changed his name to avoid anti-Semitism.
He studied architecture at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1954, then briefly joined the US Army and later pursued city planning at Harvard without completing the program.
Gehry began his career in Los Angeles with Victor Gruen, worked in Paris in 1961, and opened his own practice the following year.
By the 1970s and 80s, his bold, experimental designs, often featuring irregular metal facades resembling folded paper, made him a leading figure in deconstructivist architecture.
The reconstruction of his Santa Monica home in 1978, described as a “clash of parts”, became a hallmark of his style.
By the mid-1980s, his stainless steel and aluminum designs, which appeared to twist and move, attracted international attention.
After receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1989, Gehry achieved global fame with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which was completed in 1997 using advanced software to create his striking, unconventional forms.
He continued to do good work even till the age of 80.
Gehry became a professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, and also taught at Yale and Columbia.
Gehry was married twice and had four children.
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