Frank Gehry, 1929–2025

The titanium has stopped moving. Frank Gehry died Friday at his Santa Monica home, following a respiratory illness. He was 96. His legacy is truly massive.

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Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto, raised in a mining town by a grandmother who let him build cities from hardware store scraps and kept carp swimming in the bathtub on Friday nights, Gehry spent seven decades turning architecture inside out.

His 1978 Santa Monica house renovation announced the terms. He wrapped his pink stucco bungalow in chain-link and corrugated metal, left the skeleton exposed, shoved asymmetrical glass and steel through the walls.

Neighbors hated it. Critics called it revolutionary. Gehry called it “a dumb little house with charm.”

Bilbao Changed Everything

In 1997, at 68, Gehry opened the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time.” The New Yorker called it a masterpiece. A dying industrial city on Spain’s northern coast suddenly had a reason to exist again.

The titanium-clad museum looked like something that had exploded out of the ground, frozen mid-burst. Glittering, silvery, joyful. It didn’t follow rules, it truly created them.

The “Bilbao Effect” entered the vocabulary: one building transforms an entire city’s fortune.

Making Architecture Fun Again

Gehry’s approach felt closer to Rauschenberg than Mies van der Rohe. He often used cheap materials, like corrugated cardboard for furniture, chain-link for canopies, plywood left unpainted.

He made architecture that looked unfinished, crude even, but was meticulously calculated.

His work resisted categorization.
Deconstructivist, they called it.
Postmodern.
California funk.
Gehry shrugged off all of it.

As his work matured, the materials were made more substantial and upscale, but the ethos never changed.

Indeed, we personally were mixed on Gehry’s approach to building design

“I’m trying to make buildings that are fun,” he said, “sculpturally exciting, good experiences.”

The Landmark Projects

Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), Los Angeles
A cascade of stainless steel ribbons, curved and billowing. The Los Angeles Times called it “the most effective answer to doubters an American architect has ever built.” Inside: warm Douglas fir, floral cushions, acoustics that changed how concert halls could sound.

Louis Vuitton Foundation (2014), Paris
Twelve glass sails in the Bois de Boulogne. Extravagant, some said bloated. But unmistakably Gehry.

Art Gallery of Ontario renovation (2008), Toronto
A glass and wood facade wrapping his hometown’s museum. Gehry did it practically for free, calling it a gift to the city that raised him.

The Contradictions

Late-career Gehry became a brand, a global practice with hundreds of employees. Critics wondered how much of him remained in the work.

His Seattle Experience Music Project was called “something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over and died.”

But Frank Gehry never stopped.

At 95, he was still sketching on napkins, still designing towers and concert halls, still pushing titanium and other materials into impossible shapes.

Gehry won the Pritzker Prize in 1989, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, and dozens of other honors. But his real legacy isn’t awards. It’s the permission for architecture to be weird, bold, playful.

To make buildings that don’t apologize for existing.

He is survived by his wife Berta Isabel Aguilera; sons Sam and Alejandro; daughter Brina; and countless buildings that refuse to sit still.

Working up until the very end, Gehry’s work continues to be built, with a number of projects currently under construction.

His hometown of Toronto is currently building Forma, a pair of super-tall skyscrapers that will complete in 2028.

Thanks for all you contributed, Frank. Architecture just got quieter.