Frank Gehry, the most celebrated architect of his time, has died at the age of 96, after a brief respiratory illness, said Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP.
Gehry’s masterpieces include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in the United States and the DZ Bank Building in the German capital Berlin.
“You know, I went there just before the opening and looked at it and said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done to these people?'” Gehry told Vanity Fair magazine, speaking about his Guggenheim design. “It took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually.”
He has won every major prize that architecture has to offer.
Who was Frank Gehry?
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto on February 28, 1929, Gehry moved with his Jewish family to the United States in the late 1940s and changed his name to avoid anti-Semitism.
He studied architecture at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1954, then briefly joined the US Army and later pursued city planning at Harvard without completing the program.
Gehry began his career in Los Angeles with Victor Gruen, worked in Paris in 1961, and opened his own practice the following year.
By the 1970s and 80s, his bold, experimental designs, often featuring irregular metal facades resembling crumpled paper, made him a leading figure in deconstructivist architecture.
His 1978 reworking of his Santa Monica home, described as a “collision of parts,” became a hallmark of his style.
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