Architect Frank O. Gehry poses in front the Guggenheim museum in 1997. (Photo: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Born Ephraim Owen Goldberg to a Jewish family in Toronto in 1929, Gehry changed his surname in 1954 at the urging of his first wife, who was “worried about antisemitism and thought it sounded less Jewish.”
He told the Jewish Journal in 2018: “There’s a curiosity built into the [Jewish] culture. I grew up under that. My grandfather read Talmud to me. That’s one of the Jewish things I hang on to probably — that philosophy from that religion. Which is separate from God. It’s more ephemeral. I was brought up with that curiosity. I call it a healthy curiosity. Maybe it is something that the religion has produced. I don’t know. It’s certainly a positive thing.”
Gehry moved to Los Angeles in 1947 to study architecture at the University of Southern California, later earning degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956 and 1957.
He spent several years designing public housing projects and shopping centres without taking any design risks. But when he remodeled his own modest home in Santa Monica with chain-link fencing, exposed wood and corrugated metal, creating a building that doubled as a work of art, he was encouraged to follow his own artistic vision.
In 1962 Gehry started his own firm, Gehry Partners LLP, through which he designed more experimental buildings that used unconventional geometric shapes, asymmetry and unfinished materials in a style now known as deconstructivism. His buildings, often sheathed in glinting stainless steel that created undulating silhouettes, were described by the Pritzker jury in 1989 as possessing a "highly refined, sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic".
"His designs, if compared to American music, could best be likened to Jazz, replete with improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit," the panel for the Pritzker Architecture Prize said at the time.
View of the new Guggenheim museum by the river Bilbao, 15 October 1997 in Bilbao. (Photo: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Gehry’s creation of the Guggenheim in Bilbao not only elevated him to international fame but also catalysed the "Bilbao effect”, a term describing the impact of his architecture – and of innovative architecture at large – as a driver of economic and cultural revival.
Tributes to Gehry have emphasised the lasting impact of his creative vision. Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of LVMH, said he owes to Gehry “one of the longest, most intense, and most ambitious creative partnerships I have ever had the privilege to experience” in the form of his Louis Vuitton Foundation building.
“Frank Gehry—who possessed an unparalleled gift for shaping forms, pleating glass like canvas, making it dance like a silhouette—will long endure as a living source of inspiration for Louis Vuitton as well as for all the Maisons of the LVMH group,” Arnault wrote in a statement.
View of the Louis Vuitton Foundation designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in 2014. The building, which takes the form of a sailboat amongst the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, consists of twelve huge sails glass, and is part of the long tradition of architectural glass such as the Grand Palace. (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Paul Goldberger, author of Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, said he was “one of the very few architects of our time to engage people emotionally.”
“He was all about pushing the envelope... wanting to use the most advanced technology to do the most adventurous things,” Goldberger told BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight.
Gehry's death was confirmed by his chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Leslie and Brina, as well as his wife, Berta Isabel Aguilera, and their two sons, Alejandro and Samuel.
