Frank Gehry, the celebrated architect known for his whimsical buildings, has died at 96, his chief of staff, Meaghan Lloyd, confirmed. His death followed a brief respiratory illness.
While commonly known as one of the leading postmodern architects, he rejected that distinction. Like all of Gehry’s works, he preferred to be unclassifiable.
Ironically, his last major project was for Warner Bros.’ Second Century, a building that housed the corporate headquarters of Warner Bros. Discovery, located down the street from the historic studio lot.
Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, before moving to California in 1947. He first studied architecture while attending Los Angeles City College, later graduating from University of Southern California’s School of Architecture in 1954. He studied city planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design but dropped out of the graduate program to start a manufacturing company.
He returned to Los Angeles, working with Victor Gruen Associates. He built his first residence in 1957 in Idyllwild, California. By the late 1960s he was working on bigger projects, like the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, later immortalized by the Animal Collective album of the same name.
He continued through the decades, oscillating between private residences and commercial spaces, all the while refining his style and trademarks, including his use of more everyday materials like corrugated steel and unpainted plywood. He was known for buildings that swooped and flowed, resembling a leaning deck of cards or a giant fruit bowl.
By the late 1980s he had become so well known that he was tasked by Disney CEO Michael Eisner with a number of projects. It was part of an initiative dubbed “Disney Deco” by the New York Times – basically Eisner’s bid to hire the world’s best architects to design Disney buildings all around the world. At the time Eisner called them “the Steven Spielbergs, George Lucases and Woody Allens of architecture.”
Gehry designed the Disney Village, an outdoor thoroughfare of shopping, dining, and entertainment just outside the gates of Euro Disney (later Disneyland Paris). When Disney acquired a hockey team in Anaheim, the stadium was already built, so Eisner had Gehry design the training facility. He also designed a long slab-like building for Disney’s Anaheim offices, the ones buttressing the freeway.
In 1997, the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum would open in Bilbao, Spain. In 2010, a Vanity Fair poll of architects designated it “the most important piece of architecture built since 1980.” The building is quintessentially Gehry – separate structures cascading into one another, others reaching skyward at impossible angles – it’s hard to imagine what other building could have been chosen. In 2003, the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in Los Angeles, a stark contrast to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, yet again featuring those flourishes only Gehry could conceive. In many ways, it was a spiritual successor to his Guggenheim and just as unforgettable.
Over the past few years he kept up with everything from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. to a one-of-a-kind cabin for Eisner in Basalt, Colorado.
He was the rare architect who was the subject of a Sydney Pollack-directed documentary (2006’s “Sketches of Frank Gehry”) and was lampooned on “The Simpsons” (he also appeared as himself), designing a concert hall for Springfield.
His legacy will live on in the many buildings he designed and constructed, in the playfulness he brought to each project and in the way he transformed every town he worked in into an architectural destination.
