Architect Frank Gehry, whose audacious designs—from the Guggenheim Bilbao to the Walt Disney Concert Hall—reshaped contemporary architecture, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness. He was 96.
Often described as a “starchitect,” a term he famously rejected, Gehry became a global figure through his fluid, sculptural forms, including the glass “sails” of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Despite his celebrity status—he even appeared on The Simpsons—he preferred to think of himself simply as “a maker of buildings.”
Born in Toronto in 1929 as Frank Owen Goldberg, he moved to the United States in the late 1940s and changed his name to avoid antisemitism. After studying at USC, serving in the U.S. Army, and attending Harvard, he began his career in Los Angeles. A formative stint in Paris preceded the founding of his own firm in 1962.
Gehry’s breakthrough came in the 1970s and ’80s, when his deconstructivist, experimentally shaped buildings—often clad in irregular metal skins—challenged architectural conventions. His 1978 transformation of his own Santa Monica home became a defining statement of his approach.
He received the Pritzker Prize in 1989, and in 1997 unveiled the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, hailed by Philip Johnson as “the greatest building of our time.” The building not only revitalized the city but also sparked what became known as the “Bilbao effect.”
Gehry went on to complete the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Beekman Tower, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. He also expanded Facebook’s Menlo Park campus.
Pushing digital modeling further than most of his peers, Gehry realized sweeping, curved forms that once seemed impossible to build—including the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.
