He changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry in his twenties. While this oiled his passage into the job market, in later years the move instilled in him a sense of guilt that led him to accentuate his Jewish background.
In 1947 he studied architecture at the University of Southern California, and became drawn to Japanese architecture under the influence of a teacher who had been in Japan during the war. After military service he studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956 but abandoned the course, disillusioned by overwhelming planning rules. He then joined the shopping mall inventor Victor Gruen and William Pereira; the combination of the former’s pragmatic modernism with the latter’s commercial realism led to Gehry’s view of the southern Californian marketplace as the prevailing “cheapskate aesthetic” or “dirty realism”. He designed moderate commercial projects, while in his spare time toying with more ambitious ideas.
In 1961 Gehry joined André Rémondet’s Paris atelier. In 1962 he launched Gehry & Associates in Los Angeles, working on house conversions, barns and artist studios, but his deeper quest was for acceptance in the art world. He built houses for the graphic artist Lou Danziger and Ron Davis, and designed radical studios for his arty friends.
This picture taken on December 6, 2025 shows a view of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry in the Spanish Basque city of Bilbao. Famed US-Canadian architect Frank Gehry died December 5, 2025, aged 96 at his home in California, his office told AFP. (Photo by ANDER GILLENEA / AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Drawn increasingly into the world of conceptual and abstract artists, he began to study displacement and reduction, using materials with subtle repetition. He soon began to challenge conventional perceptions of symmetry by embodying geometric shapes and raw materials. His designs, sheathed in curvy stainless steel, began to resemble sculpture rather than architecture. It was poetry in solid form.
He once described his methods as “like jumping off a cliff”. He saw the link between the static essentials of architecture and musical improvisation. For him it was all to play for. It was the same with materials – anything and everything could be used. The furniture he designed out of corrugated cardboard in the 1960s and early 1970s would now sell for thousands.
A somewhat eccentric figure in the architectural world, he employed the type of 3D modelling normally used by aerospace engineers to shape windy buildings. It rarely found favour with his contemporaries because of the complexity and the expense involved. Beyond massive civic constructions, Gehry also built a tranquil cottage refuge for cancer patients, Maggie’s Centre in Dundee in 2003.
According to the Pritzker jury, who awarded him the industry’s top accolade, the Pritzker Architecture Prize for life long achievement, his work possessed a “highly refined sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic”. In fact, the adjudicating panel went further, comparing it to American jazz – “replete with improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit”. He received numerous other awards and accolades, such as the J Paul Getty Medal in 1994 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.
Gehry’s design for the Bilbao Guggenheim is said to have transformed the city itself, its tourism and local economy. It was claimed to have added $400 million to the city’s fortunes. Hailed by the American architect Philip Johnson “as the greatest building of all time”, the celebrated structure became known as the Bilbao effect, with several other cities attempting copies.
This aerial view shows the BioMuseo museum, dedicated to the biodiversity and natural history of Panama, in Panama City on September 30, 2025. The BioMuseo is located on the Amador Causeway, south of the entrance to the Panama Canal. Inaugurated in 1999, it was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. (Photo by Martin BERNETTI / AFP) (Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
By the 2000’s Gehry was a household name. The cartoon show The Simpsons parodied Gehry’s success by inviting him to design a concert hall for the fictional town of Springfield. None too proud to share the joke, the eminent man agreed to voice himself in the parody, showing the concert hall design in the form of a scrunched-up letter. Unfortunately, the joke rebounded on him. In 2011 Gehry told The Observer that people really believed his work was inspired not by complex computations but by nothing more than a screwed-up piece of paper!
After Bilbao, he went on to create more highly individualist designs in cities all over the world. Among them are the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, Germany’s eponymous Gehry Tower, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, home of its art collection in 2014. Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company and owner of Louis Vuitton, said: “He bestowed upon Paris and upon France his greatest masterpiece.”
Effusive praise may have followed him throughout his career, but it is the individuality of each building that bears the mark of his genius.
His stunning Dancing House on the Vltava River in Prague, commissioned by Vaclav Havel – who told him: “Give me something of today but I want it to fit” – was completed in 1996. It assumes all the colours of the light as it dances into and embraces itself and by contrast, his Sydney business school looks straight out of Harry Potter. Gehry’s Hotel Marques in Spain, build in 2006, resembles a compressed coil of gold and purple corrugated steel winding in on itself.
Once having taken hold, Gehry’s poetic imagination would never decline into the predictable or the everyday. The metal sails of his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles offer all the fantasy of Disneyworld. But not everyone was happy. Its opening in 2003 draw fire from critics who called it “a pile of broken crockery”, a “fortune gone berserk” and an “emptied waste paper basket”.
Undeterred, the architect responded: “At least they’re looking!” Others took a more proactive stance. In 1979, married to his second wife, Berta Aguilera, he built a small house for his family in Santa Monica.
Adored by his aficionados, it was denigrated as the most notorious dwelling in the US, particularly loathed by his neighbours who brought their dogs to foul his garden.
Gerhy’s own personality was informal and gregarious.
With his wild grey hair, rumpled clothes and dreamy eyes he urged his clients to call him Frank, and sustained long friendships with them.
He had a sharper, cantankerous side to his character, too, and did not flinch from dismissing most modern architecture as “pure sh*t”. He would give any journalist who asked a question he disliked the middle finger.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered condolences to Gehry’s family on his passing, paying full tribute to “his unmistakeable vision” which, he added, “lives on in iconic buildings around the world”.
In a video tribute, Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum posted on Instagram: “His spirit and legacy will always remain connected to Bilbao.”
Frank Gehry is survived by his second wife, the anthropologist, Berta Aguilera, their two sons and his surviving daughter from his first marriage.
GLORIA TESSLER
Frank Gehry: born February 28, 1929. Died December 5, 2025
This picture taken on December 8, 2025 shows a general view of the Marques de Riscal winery and luxury hotel complex designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry in the Spanish Basque village of Elciego. Famed US-Canadian architect Frank Gehry died December 5, 2025, aged 96 at his home in California, his office told AFP. (Photo by ANDER GILLENEA / AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images