Canadian-American architect Frank O. Gehry died as we speak in his dwelling in Santa Monica, California, on the age of 96. Information of his passing was confirmed by Meaghan Lloyd, his chief of employees, to The New York Instances. Gehry died from a respiratory sickness, simply days after the loss of life of Robert A. M. Stern, a longtime pal. Self-importance Honest in 2010 referred to as Gehry “crucial architect of our age.”
Gehry Companions—the late architect’s eponymous agency—designed the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Walt Disney Live performance Corridor in Los Angeles, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the Weisman Artwork Museum in Minneapolis, Artwork Gallery of Ontario, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion at Chicago’s Millennium Park, MIT’s Stata Middle, Dancing Home in Prague, and eight Spruce in Manhattan, amongst many different notable initiatives.
Gehry earned quite a few accolades: In 1989, the Pritzker Structure Prize; 1992, the Wolf Prize in Arts; 1998, the Nationwide Medal of Arts and, that very same 12 months, the Kiesler Prize for Structure and Artwork; 1999, the AIA Gold Medal; 2000, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal; 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Structure; 2004, the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service; and in 2016, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, bestowed by Barack Obama.
In an essay for the 1989 Pritzker Prize structure critic and author Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, “The spin is that Gehry’s work goes to the guts of the artwork of our time, carrying the conceptual and technological achievements of modernism (as actual and instructive as its a lot better-publicized failures) to the spectacularly enriched imaginative and prescient that characterizes the Nineties.”
Gehry’s work, which drew from sculpture, additionally revolutionized architectural expertise. Famously, his paper fashions had been translated into 3D fashions utilizing a laser stylus into CATIA, a software program initially used for airplane design. Gehry based Gehry Applied sciences in 2002 as a consulting enterprise to raised combine software program into structure companies. The corporate was bought to Trimble in 2014.
From Humble Origins
Frank Owen Goldberg was born in 1929 in Toronto to Russian-Jewish dad and mom from New York Metropolis and Łódź, Poland. His grandfather owned a ironmongery store in Toronto, and Goldberg was identified for constructing mannequin cities there with the scrap he’d discover on the bottom. He additionally famously took up hockey, a interest he saved up his complete life. (He accomplished a hockey enviornment in Anaheim, California, in 1995 and in 2004, he designed a trophy for the World Cup of Hockey.)
In 1947, he and his household moved to California, the place he labored as a truck driver and enrolled at Los Angeles Metropolis Faculty. He transferred to the College of Southern California’s structure faculty the place he graduated in 1954, the identical 12 months he modified his title to Gehry, stemming from considerations associated to antisemitism. Gehry had a short stint within the U.S. Military after commencement. In 1956, he enrolled within the city planning program on the Harvard Graduate College of Design, however he didn’t graduate, having dropped out.
After Harvard, Gehry moved again to Los Angeles the place he labored for Victor Gruen, one other Jewish emigre. Gruen and Gehry labored on a handful of initiatives, principally purchasing malls. In 1961, Gehry moved to Paris and briefly labored for André Remondet. Gehry moved again to the U.S. in 1962 and based his personal agency, which was formally named Frank Gehry and Associates in 1967. Numerous residential commissions adopted. The Gehry Residence was accomplished in 1978 out of an present Santa Monica home, placing Gehry on the map.
In 1972, Gehry accomplished the Ronald Davis Studio and Home in Los Angeles, though that venture was destroyed within the 2018 Woosley fireplace. Gehry completed the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California, in 1981. The California Aerospace Museum opened in 1984 and the Vitra Design Museum in Germany in 1989, the 12 months he earned his Pritzker.
In 1990, Gehry designed a small bagel retailer for New York Bagel Co. in Los Angeles with a large Chrysler Constructing duplicate operating by means of it; the shop was not too long ago scrapped. Gehry’s Binoculars Constructing (the unique Chiat/Day places of work), named for an inhabitable sculpture on its frontage designed by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen debuted in 1991, a property now up on the market. Gehry’s most well-known initiatives—Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Walt Disney Live performance Corridor, Fondation Louis Vuitton—got here subsequent; Walt Disney Live performance Corridor was the topic of a latest exhibition by the Getty Analysis Institute.
Media Issues
In 2005, Gehry appeared as himself on The Simpsons: Within the episode, Marge Simpson personally writes to Gehry asking him to design a brand new live performance corridor in Springfield, an invite Gehry accepts. (The present’s co-curator Sam Simon was an structure buff: Different episodes included bits about Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, and Frank Lloyd Wright, though Gehry was the one architect to play himself.) Gehry later stated he regretted showing in The Simpsons, due to the way it lampooned his course of.
In 2010, the Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Road opened throughout from the Woolworth Constructing in Manhattan. The Beekman Tower was constructed one foot taller than the close by Trump World Tower, then the tallest residential tower in New York. Trump took offense to this: He and Gehry spatted the following few years. Gehry stated in 2010 Trump all the time had a grudge towards him for turning down an opportunity to work collectively. “I don’t like his hairdo,” Gehry stated.
Gehry by no means had an issue operating up towards U.S. presidents: His design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. wasn’t very effectively obtained by the Eisenhower household. And Gehry clashed with the Eisenhowers in public, too.
A postmodern rabble-rouser, in 2014 Gehry flipped off a journalist for asking pointed questions on his constructing’s kinds. He responded, “On the planet we dwell in, 98 p.c of what will get constructed and designed as we speak is pure shit.”
Continued Success
Paul Goldberger revealed a biography of Gehry in 2015, the identical 12 months {that a} sailboat designed by Gehry was accomplished. (Its title, Foggy, was a play on Gehry’s initials.) Historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who died instantly in 2023, revealed a Gehry monograph in 2021, with Rizzoli. Frank Gehry: The Masterpieces by Cohen centered on 38 initiatives Gehry labored on between 1961 and 2021. Cohen had additionally labored with Gehry to orchestrate an eight-volume catalog raisonné; the primary one was revealed in 2020.
In 2018, after Robert Venturi’s passing, Gehry informed AN “Bob Venturi is one in every of my heroes in life, as is Denise.” That 12 months, Gehry donated $1 million to Los Angeles River faculties for arts training. His constructing for Fb in Menlo Park, California, was additionally accomplished in 2018.
In 2021, Gehry accomplished the Luma Arles residential tower in France, and in addition an adaptive reuse venture nearer to dwelling on the Yola Middle in Los Angeles, reviewed for AN by Ian Volner. Extra not too long ago, Mimi Zeiger reviewed a constructing that Gehry Companions designed professional bono for a kids’s nonprofit in Watts.
Gehry by no means retired. In Toronto, Gehry’s hometown, a brand new residential skyscraper, Forma, is underway. And simply this month, one in every of his residences graces a canopy in Architectural Digest with a narrative written by Goldberger. After a collection of delays, the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is slated to open quickly.
Within the coming days, AN will share tributes from architects and admirers.
