Frank Gehry, who designed some of the most imaginative buildings ever built and achieved a level of global acclaim rarely achieved by any architect, has died. He was 96 years old.
Gehry died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, California, after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.
Gehry’sA fascination with modern pop art led to the creation of some of the most striking buildings ever built and earned him worldwide recognition rarely granted to any architect.
Among its many masterpieces are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and the DZ Bank building in Berlin, Germany.
He also designed an expansion of Facebook’s headquarters in Northern California at the insistence of the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Gehry received every major award architecture has to offer, including the highest honor in his field, thePritzker Prize,for what has been described as a “refreshingly original and totally American” work.
Other honors include the gold medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, the lifetime achievement award from Americans for the Arts, and his native country’s highest honour, the Companion of the Order of Canada.
Years after he stopped designing ordinary-looking buildings, news broke in 2006 that the Santa Monica pedestrian mall project that had led to his career epiphany might be headed for the wrecking ball. Gehry’s admirers were horrified, but the man himself was amused.
“Now they’re going to tear it down and build the kind of original idea I had,” he said, laughing.
Finally, the shopping center was remodeled, giving it an airy and more contemporary exterior appearance. Still, it’s not a Gehry masterpiece.
Meanwhile, Gehry continued to work well into his 80s, producing heralded buildings that remade skylines around the world.
InterActiveCorp’s headquarters, known as the IAC Building, took the shape of a gleaming beehive when it was completed in the Chelsea district of New York City in 2007. The 76-story New York By Gehry Building (now known as 8 Spruce), once one of the tallest residential structures in the world, was an impressive addition to the skyline of lower Manhattan when it opened in 2011.
That same year, Gehry joined the faculty at his alma mater, the University of Southern California, as a professor of architecture. He also taught at Yale and Columbia universities.
Not everyone was a fan of Gehry’s work. Some detractors dismissed him as little more than gargantuan, twisted reincarnations of the small wooden towns he said he spent hours building while growing up in the mining town of Timmins, Ont.
Princeton art critic Hal Foster dismissed many of his later efforts as “oppressive,” arguing that they were designed primarily to be tourist attractions. Some reported that Disney Hall looked like a collection of cardboard boxes abandoned in the rain.
Other critics included the family of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who objected to Gehry’s bold proposal to build a monument honoring the nation’s 34th president. Although the family said they wanted a simple monument and not the one Gehry had proposed, with its multiple statues and billowing metal tapestries depicting Eisenhower’s life, the architect declined to change his design significantly.
If his critics’ words irritated Gehry, he rarely let on. In fact, sometimes he even played along. He appeared as himself in a 2005 episode of The Simpsons cartoon show, in which he agreed to design a concert hall that later became a prison.
He came up with the idea for the design, which looked a lot like Disney’s Hall, after crumpling up the letter Marge Simpson had sent him and throwing it on the floor. After taking one look at it, he declared, “Frank Gehry, you’ve done it again!”
“Some people think I actually do that,” he later told The Associated Press.
Ephraim Owen Goldberg was born in Toronto on February 28, 1929 and moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1947, eventually becoming a US citizen. As an adult, he changed his name at the suggestion of his first wife, who told him that anti-Semitism could be holding back his career.
Although he enjoyed drawing and building model cities as a child, Gehry said it wasn’t until he was in his 20s that he considered pursuing a career in architecture, after a college ceramics professor recognized his talent.
“It was like the first thing in my life I did well at,” he said.
He then earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954. After serving in the military, he studied urban planning at Harvard University.
His survivors include his wife, Berta; daughter, Brina; sons Alexander and Samuel; and the buildings he created.
Another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died of cancer in 2008.
—By John Rogers, Associated Press
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