Frank Gehry, Pioneering Architect of the Guggenheim Bilbao, Dies at 96

Frank Gehry, one of the most influential and distinctive talents in American architecture, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles following a brief respiratory illness, his chief of staff confirmed too the New York Times.

Gehry, aged 96, the most recognisable American architect as Frank Lloyd Wright, was one of the first to embrace the potential of computer design, and pioneered a distinctively exuberant style of bravura power, whimsical and arresting collisions of form.

His most famous work remains the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, a fantastical, titanium-clad composition on the Nervión River wich received international acclaim upon its opening in 1997, heralding a new era of emotive architecture.

The project lent its name to a phenomenon – the Bilbao effect – in which decaying old cities tried to spur revival with breathtaking architecture, and became, as Guardian critic Rowan Moore put it in 2019, “the icon of what would be called iconic architecture”.

Other famous works included the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, completed in 2003; Miami’s New World Center, a concert hall finished in 2011; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, an ethereal museum in Paris completed in 2014.

Born Frank Owen Goldberg on 28 February 1929, to a working-class Jewish family in Toronto, Gehry was a relatively late bloomer as an architect.

He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s, where he attended the University of Southern California, studying ceramics, after a brief stint in the US army. He switched to architecture after a teacher introduced him to the work of Raphael Soriano, a pre-eminent designer of postwar Modernism in southern California. As a young graduate, he changed his surname to Gehry, a decision he later attributed to a desire to avoid anti-Semitism.

Gehry spent several years working as a mid-level designer at a firm specialising in shopping malls before opening his own firm, in 1962, while designing houses and offices for friends on the side.