Frank Gehry: Legendary US architect dies aged 96

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the last century, has died aged 96.

Gehry was acclaimed for his avant garde, experimental style of architecture. His titanium-covered design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, catapulted him to fame in 1997.

His breakthrough in the architectural world came years earlier when he redesigned his own home in Santa Monica, California, using materials like chain-link fencing, plywood, and corrugated steel.

His 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.

Born in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager to study architecture at the University of Southern California, before completing further study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1956 and 1957.

After starting his own firm, he broke from traditional architectural principles of symmetry, using unconventional geometric shapes and unfinished materials in a style now known as deconstructivism.

Through blending unexpected materials and sheathing buildings in stainless steel to create curvy exteriors, Gehry created buildings that took on arresting sculptural shapes.

Later in his career, Gehry used 3D modelling similar to that used by aerospace engineers to shape windy buildings, a practice largely avoided by other architects because of the complexity and costliness of construction.

In 1989, at the age of 60, Gehry was awarded the industry’s top accolade, the Pritzker Architecture prize, for lifetime achievement.

The Pritzker jury said his work possessed 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 said at the time.

Gehry’s international breakthrough with the Guggenheim transformed the city of Bilbao, boosting tourism to the city and the local economy. Crafted out of titanium sheets, limestone, and glass, the museum was instantly celebrated as a modern marvel.

Architect Philip Johnson, Gehry’s American contemporary, described the structure as “the greatest building of our time”.

Other cities tried to replicate its success, branded the “Bilbao effect”, where investment in daring art could revitalise ailing economies.

The cultural phenomenon was parodied in a 2005 episode of The Simpsons, in which the fictional town of Springfield invites Gehry, who voiced himself in the cartoon TV show, to design a new concert hall.

In the episode, the shape of the concert hall is jokingly inspired by a letter Gehry had scrunched up.

The guest appearance later “haunted” Gehry, who told the Observer in 2011 that people sincerely believed his real-life designs were inspired by crumpled paper instead of complex computations.

His work in Bilbao put him in high demand, and he went on to design iconic structures in cities all over the world: the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, the Gehry Tower in Germany, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

“He bestowed upon Paris and upon France his greatest masterpiece,” said Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, the worlds largest luxury goods company which owns Louis Vuitton.

With a largely unpredictable style, no two of his works look the same. Prague’s Dancing House, finished in 1996, looks like a glass building folding in on itself; his Hotel Marques in Spain, built in 2006, features thin sheets of wavy, multicoloured metal; his design for a business school in Sydney looks like a brown paper bag.

Gehry also designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, layered in metal resembling sails billowing in the wind. After it opened in 2003, critics described it as a “pile of broken crockery”, a “fortune cookie gone berserk” and an “emptied waste basket”.

In a 2007 interview with the New Yorker, Gehry shrugged off the concert hall’s critics: “At least they’re looking!” he quipped.

Tributes are celebrating his eagerness to discard convention – and forge his own creative legacy.

Paul Goldberger, author of Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, came to know Gehry closely, and said he wanted to work “until the day he died”.

“He was one of the very few architects of our time to engage people emotionally,” Goldberger told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight.

“He was all about pushing the envelope… wanting to use the most advanced technology to do the most adventurous things.”

In a statement, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney extended his “deepest condolences” to Gehry’s family and the “many admirers of his work”.

He added: “His unmistakable vision lives on in iconic buildings around the world.”

Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum posted a video tribute to Gehry.

“We will be forever grateful,” the museum wrote on Instagram, “his spirit and legacy will always remain connected to Bilbao”.