Frank Gehry, architect, 1929-2025
The globetrotting ‘starchitect’ created some of the world’s best-known buildings, from the Bilbao Guggenheim to LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall
There’s always a temptation to delve into early formative experiences when trying to explain a creative genius. In the case of Frank Gehry, you might be tempted to reflect on a childhood spent around his grandfather’s Toronto hardware store, building dens and miniature cities from timber offcuts and scraps of construction materials. Looking at the home he remodelled for himself in Santa Monica, extending an unlikely Dutch colonial-style house using corrugated steel, chain-link fencing, raw plywood and standard windows squeezed into wonky, ad hoc planes, it might seem obvious.
But then again, you might suggest that the same architecture came from Gehry’s involvement with the 1960s art scene, where his friends, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Richard Serra, were all experimenting with junk, collage or huge pieces of scrap metal. Wherever it started, that impulse ended up refined into the billowing metal sheets of the Bilbao Guggenheim, perhaps the last building to have changed everything in architecture.
Gehry, who has died at the age of 96, was an American original, the first architect since Frank Lloyd Wright to have made such an individual impact on the international scene. His fame even propelled him to an appearance in The Simpsons.
He was also a paradox. Gehry was arguably the man most responsible for remaking modern architecture as a spectacle, yet he hated the idea of the spectacular. He blazed a trail bringing advanced digital technology into architecture (adapting Dassault’s aeronautical engineering software for use in construction and founding the pioneering Gehry Technologies in 2002), yet he could barely use a keyboard or a mouse, always hand sketching squiggly scribbles or making scrappy cardboard models. He adopted an ordinary-Joe schtick, refusing to theorise or provide an intellectual underpinning for his architecture, yet he was one of the smartest, most cultured and most historically aware of modern architects.
With the Guggenheim he was responsible for what has become known as “The Bilbao Effect”, in which blockbuster architecture is credited with catalysing radical urban regeneration, yet he always denied such a thing existed; and, finally, he was arguably the first “starchitect” of the modern age — yet if anyone used that word to refer to him he might express his disdain in the language of his beloved ice hockey players.
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, his New York-born father hailed from a Russian Jewish family and his mother had been a Polish Jewish immigrant from Łódź. In 1947, the family moved to Los Angeles and Gehry worked in a series of dead-end jobs, including truck driver and carpenter (he once made a breakfast nook for Western star Roy Rogers) while halfheartedly attending community college. Eventually, thinking back to his childhood (and being inspired as a teenager by a lecture by visiting Finnish architect Alvar Aalto), he alighted on architecture, going to study at the University of Southern California and then the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.
He married Anita Snyder in 1952 and changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry, apparently because it would keep his signature similar, with a peak in the middle and a downward flourish at the end. The couple had two daughters.
After serving in the US Army, he found a job back in Los Angeles working for Victor Gruen, the Austrian émigré architect who had effectively invented the shopping mall. In 1961, he moved briefly to Paris, establishing his own practice on his return the following year. In 1975, he married Berta Isabel Aguilera, with whom he had two sons, a partnership that remained solid until the end of his life.
Gehry’s early work was characterised by an industrial, ad hoc roughness that concealed extremely smart design and a genuine love of joinery and construction. He built in a kind of Los Angeles vernacular, the language of back alleys, lock-ups and industrial strips, the kinds of buildings his artist friends were living and working in.
It was his own Santa Monica house (1978) that propelled him to wider renown. It seemed to leapfrog the postmodern era straight into what would become known as deconstructivism, a movement that upturned received wisdom using expressionist angles, jagged and fragmented forms and disorienting spatial experiences. The modest home has become perhaps the most emblematic architect’s house of the modern era, colliding forms and materials, wonky walls and tortured junctions. Gehry continued to develop his junk aesthetic with a series of brilliantly inventive chairs made from corrugated brown card that were lightweight, comfortable, cheap and striking — they proved so popular that Gehry withdrew them, fearing they would distract from his work as an architect.
He made some waves with quirky buildings, such as the Los Angeles Venice HQ for advertising firm Chiat/Day, a collaboration with his friend Claes Oldenburg, which combined a building that looked like a blown-up, discarded cardboard model with a giant pair of binoculars, and a theatrical corner building in Prague that became known as “Fred and Ginger” for its seemingly dancing, interlocking volumes. But it was with the sensuous curves of the Bilbao Guggenheim in 1997 that he became arguably the world’s most famous architect.
The titanium-sheathed building picked up on the Basque city’s history of iron and steel to make a metallic symphony, a swaying, baroque spectacular that gave the fading post-industrial city a logo and revived its confidence. Soon every city wanted a cultural blockbuster and Gehry professed to being worn down by being constantly asked to “do a Bilbao for us”.
A great lover of classical music and jazz, he completed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003, a building designed before Bilbao and with a similar spirit but which took much longer to realise.
Despite his avuncular, “aw shucks” public persona, Gehry could be thin-skinned. He was particularly upset when he was accused of cost overruns, claiming that his buildings were not extravagant. He was fiercely proud of being a practical architect and not a fey dreamer. His later designs included New York’s shimmering stainless-steel-clad 8 Spruce Street (2011), the wobbly walled Dr Chau Chak Wing at the University of Technology Sydney (2015) and the wavy glass Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014). In London, Gehry designed a wall of residential blocks at Battersea Power Station (2022), and in the Gulf, the colossal, forever imminent Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. His sinuous curves were much influenced by the folds of robes in medieval and baroque sculptures; he was always looking outside architecture for inspiration.
Gehry came to regret his 2005 cameo in The Simpsons, in which his cartoon alter ego crumples up a sheet of paper and throws it away only to realise that it is exactly the design he was looking for. It made the creative process, over which he struggled with endless iterations of form, seem too easy. But walking around his studio and seeing the ranks of rough cardboard models with their scrappy immediacy, the animators might have hit on something essential. Gehry embodied the paradox of an architect who sees himself as an artist but is offended by the implication that art comes with impracticality. He wanted it both ways and most of the time, he got it.