Frank Gehry, who has died aged 96 after a respiratory illness, influenced the course of world architecture at least twice. First, in the 1970s, with his informal ad hoc aesthetic, he showed how such material as chain-link fencing could be turned into an expressive art form. Secondly, in the 1990s, he showed how the computer could be used to help realise extraordinarily complex forms, unleashing the thrashing metallic fish of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and a fleet of similarly crumpled creations.
When it opened in 1997, the titanium-covered Guggenheim captured the imagination of the architectural profession and the world’s media. It was hailed as the leading example of the new paradigm of computer-led design, and a convincing piece of urban sculpture, writhing along the riverbank, part palazzo, part ship. The impact on museums and the world of art was profound, as what became known as the “Bilbao effect” transformed the rust-belt city in northern Spain into a tourist destination. In two years, helped by the media feeding frenzy that accompanied its opening, Gehry’s museum was said to have added $400m to the city’s fortunes.
For some, the spectacle of the container was deemed to detract from the art inside. In the view of the critic Hal Foster, Gehry “has given his clients too much of what they want, a sublime space that overwhelms the viewer, a spectacular image that can circulate through the media and around the world as brand”.
More than any other architect of his generation, Gehry amplified the role of architecture as a brand. His marketing power would turn out to be his key strength, as well as his biggest weakness, with some of his later projects descending into self-referential cliche.
A rumpled everyman who always dressed in T-shirts and baggy trousers, Gehry displayed a relaxed, informal character that was the key to his architecture – it was always fresh, inclusive and willing to take risks. Gregarious, ready to break into a grin, he was “Frank” to his clients, with whom he often had long friendships. But he also could be impatient and cantankerous, too, particularly later in life. At a 2014 press conference in Spain, for instance, he dismissed most modern architecture as “pure shit” and, in response to a question he did not like, gave a journalist the middle finger.
Born and brought up in Toronto, Canada, Frank was the son of Jewish immigrants, Thelma (nee Kaplanski) and Irving Goldberg. Having experienced antisemitism when young, in his 20s he changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry, something that did smooth the way to acceptance, and jobs, but also brought him remorse. Later on, and paradoxically, this early denial made him accentuate his Jewish background, and his role as outsider.
He moved to California in 1947 and, after a stint as a lorry driver, gained an architecture degree at the University of Southern California (1954). After military service, in 1956 he started studying city planning at Harvard – but left before completing the course, disillusioned. He then worked with the pragmatic modernist Victor Gruen, inventor of the shopping mall, and William Pereira, a slick and commercial realist. The result of this experience in the marketplace of America would be what Gehry called the “cheapskate aesthetic”, a tough or “dirty realism” that was later to inspire a generation of architects, including Rem Koolhaas. In 1961 he spent time in André Rémondet’s atelier in Paris.
Before Gehry arrived at his distinctive synthesis, he struggled with minor house conversions, minimalist barns, and a few artist studios, having set up his own firm, Gehry & Associates, in Los Angeles in 1962. Noteworthy was his Danziger Studio of 1964, three stuccoed boxes with a no-nonsense interior of exposed beams and metal shelving, all of which focused on a central pool table, for the graphic artist Lou Danziger.
Unappreciated, as he saw it, by local Los Angeles architects, Gehry looked to artists for acceptance and ideas. This led to a series of friendships, in the late 1960s and early 70s, with Danziger and Ron Davis, for both of whom he built houses, and with Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg. From them he learned the lessons of canny transformation, the “funk art” aesthetic, how to expand a pair of binoculars to the scale of a whole building (which he did with Oldenburg, for the Chiat/Day “Binoculars” Building built in Venice, Los Angeles, in 1991).
From the more conceptual and abstract artists, such as Larry Bell, Carl Andre and Richard Serra, he learned the lessons of displacement and reduction; how to use materials in a repetitive but sublime way. Gehry thus fashioned his cheapskate aesthetic, which fitted very well into the southern California culture of the time. By 1972, with his studio/residence for Davis, Gehry was on to something interesting, a position outside normal architecture that was almost art, almost sculpture – and almost the wry assemblage of a hardware store. The skewed spaces and hard-edged ambiguities of this building mirrored Davis’s geometrical paintings.
In 1978, married by now to Berta Aguilera, his second wife, he completed a house for his own family, a small abode in Santa Monica which became for a while the most notorious house in America. It was loved by the avant-garde, but was hated by the neighbours and burghers of LA (who brought their dogs to foul its garden). Time magazine, and Philip Johnson, legitimised it as the freshest creation in architecture.
Still, it did not lead to big commissions, nor acceptance in downtown Los Angeles, and so Gehry continued to develop through cheapskate jobs, chain-link surrounded architecture for the Cabrillo Marine Museum (1981), for many small houses, and for the Loyola Law School (1980). This last, low-cost scheme showed his pragmatism could produce a convincing informal urbanism. A village of simple volumetric shapes and unusual materials – brown Finnish plywood – gave fresh meaning to the then fashionable notion of contextualism by elevating the banal and industrial.
Located in a dangerous, rundown part of central LA, it was also his answer to the classicists. Whereas they proffered Corinthian columns for ornament, Gehry answered: “Three hundred million years before man was fish ... if you gotta go back ... Why are you stopping at the Greeks?”. Soon natural metaphors populated his work.
Artists helped Gehry steer around professional orthodoxy and produce work that, by conventional standards, was zany but cleverly apt. A series of postmodern metaphors dominated his work of the middle 1980s: the California Aerospace Museum (1984) announced its use with a Lockheed F104 Starfighter hovering over a giant door; a restaurant, Rebecca’s, in Venice, California (1986), dramatised a night out with giant trees, an octopus, alligator and several fish hanging about its interior. Significantly, the overlarge animals and fish were explored again and again, in different media, influencing his work for the coming decades.
In the meantime, Gehry started to pick up one award after another and became a favourite of the architectural profession. In 1989 he received the Pritzker prize, the so-called Nobel of architecture, and in 1992 the Japanese Imperiale award in architecture. He held academic appointments at Harvard, and received the Harvard arts medal in 2016. In 2000 he received the RIBA gold medal, and in 2016, from the US president, Barack Obama, the presidential medal of freedom. The success was partly a matter of Gehry’s relaxed charm, his humour and the way his unassuming figure – “like a little dumpling”, Bob Geldof said – captured the popular imagination.
In 1986, Gehry had his first museum retrospective, organised by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The show travelled to the Whitney Museum in New York, where the director of the Guggenheim, Thomas Krens, understood its importance. Krens commissioned Gehry for a large art project, which came to nothing, and during the late 1980s he started developing his fish-grammar into something else.
The first indication of a breakthrough was the small furniture museum for Vitra, in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in 1989, then a series of projects, notably a fish sculpture in Barcelona (1992) and a sprawling mansion for the insurance magnate Peter Lewis, near Cleveland, Ohio. The $82m Lewis House was never built, but it allowed Gehry to experiment wildly with his new vocabulary – wiggly glass, roofs that ruckled like fabric, horse-headed rooms and the abstract trout or salmon.
Many critics thought he had gone mad; psychologists delighted at the Jewish, Freudian and Christian symbolism of the fish; Gehry talked about “the proper fish-scale”. The 11-year project, which generated $6m in fees before it was cancelled, funded his studio’s development of Catia software (computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application), originally intended for designing aircraft, which enabled his complex forms to be linked up directly with the manufacturing process. It was a breakthrough in the building industry at the time, and spawned a separate branch of the office, Gehry Technologies, later sold to tech giant Trimble.
The first result of this digital experimentation was the design for the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1991, which Gehry won in a limited competition against Arata Isozaki and Coop Himmelblau. Here all those abstracted fish curves, and the riotous forms of the Lewis House, were brought into a related grammar and built from a common material, titanium, which would become his hallmark.
The Bilbao effect also reverberated in Gehry’s adopted home town, Los Angeles, and forced the city that had lost its nerve to resume work on his Walt Disney Concert Hall. Launched in 1987 and finally completed in 2003, the project was subject to more than 10,000 requests for information from contractor to architect, resulting in a legal dispute that ended in a costly settlement. The problems did not stop there. When it was finished, neighbours discovered that the building’s concave polished steel surfaces had the effect of focusing the sun’s rays into their apartments, leading to skyrocketing air-conditioning bills and the danger of blinding passing drivers. Returning to manual methods, Gehry’s team had to sand down the offending panels to eliminate the glare.
Such practical issues and budget over-runs did not deter the flood of future clients. Large commissions poured in; major iconic shapes would come to exist all round the world. There is the 76-storey skyscraper in Manhattan – simply branded New York by Gehry – that hangs like a sheer silk scarf, rippling in the wind. There are tumbling university buildings in Massachusetts and Cincinnati and a museum shaped like a giant smashed guitar in Seattle.
A building for Sydney’s University of Technology in 2014 saw Gehry apply his crumpling technique to brick walls, conjuring a jaunty complex that was compared to a pile of brown paper bags. A vast gallery for the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, also completed in 2014, saw him push the possibilities of double-curved glass at eye-watering expense, while a recent apartment complex next to Battersea Power Station in London showed how his signature style could be deployed as little more than a branding exercise to clothe the latest luxury investment opportunity.
Meanwhile, Gehry’s celebrity status only continued to grow. Becoming a household name by the 2000s, he even appeared on an episode of the Simpsons, designing Springfield opera house in the shape of a scrunched-up envelope. He made a hat for Lady Gaga, collaborated with Brad Pitt on an affordable housing initiative, and was hired by Mark Zuckerberg to design Facebook’s gargantuan office in Menlo Park, California.
His Dwight D Eisenhower Memorial in Washington (2021) brought out differing views as to how a hero should be commemorated in the modern world. More crumpling came with a twisted structure incorporating 11,000 stainless steel panels at the Luma Arles creative campus (also 2021) in southern France. Gehry’s projects continued in California, and yet to be completed is the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, again putting the architect’s stamp on the visual experience before the visitor gets anywhere near the art on display inside.
However, Gehry also kept time for modest and personal commissions, such as a Maggie’s cancer care centre in Dundee (2003). It was designed as an act of friendship for Charles Jencks’ wife Maggie, who had died in 1995.
Essential to the whole story was the support of his family, particularly Berta. She was constantly at Gehry’s side, or in the background handling the finances, and making a large organisation feel like an informal family.
She and their two sons, Sam and Alejandro, survive him, as does his daughter, Brina, from his first marriage, in 1952, to Anita Snyder, which ended in divorce. Another daughter, Leslie, from his first marriage, died in 2008.
• Frank Owen Gehry, architect, born 28 February 1929; died 5 December 2025
• Charles Jencks died in 2019
