The man who taught buildings how to dance has taken his final bow. Frank Gehry, the revolutionary architect whose work—like the shimmering, ship-like Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao—sculpted cities and redefined modern design, died Friday at his Los Angeles home. He was 96.
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved to Los Angeles as a young man. He would later unleash a radical vision that broke architecture free from the straight line. His style, known as deconstructivism, embraced crumpled titanium, cascading curves, and raw materials, turning buildings into breathtaking public sculptures.
The “Bilbao Effect” & Beyond
While his portfolio is vast, his legacy is often tied to a single, transformative project: the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997). Its soaring, metallic forms didn’t just house art—they became the art, single-handedly revitalizing the Spanish city and coining the term “the Bilbao Effect” for architecture’s power to regenerate.
His other landmarks read like a global tour of architectural wonder:
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles
Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris
New World Center, Miami
Opus Hong Kong
A late bloomer by fame’s clock, Gehry won the prestigious Pritzker Prize at age 60 in 1989. The jury hailed his work as “the architectural equivalent of jazz”—improvisational, bold, and utterly alive.
