Frank Gehry, the architect who turned metal into waves, one of the most popular in the world, died this Friday at his home in Santa Monica, on the coast of Los Angeles, California. The news of the death of the creator of the Guggenheim Bilbao museum has been confirmed by the chief of staff of his studio, Gehry Partners, to media such as Los Angeles Times o The New York Times. He was having a short but intense respiratory illness. He was 96 years old.
Gehry, who was actually called Ephraim —Frank— Owen Goldberg was a late but brilliant star in the world of architecture and even popular culture, where he made good friends, great contacts and great friends. He was enormously productive in the last stage of his life, and one of the pioneers in using technology in combination with metal, especially titanium, to create structures of a geometry never seen before. Considered one of the most prominent representatives of deconstructivism, for him, the architectural work had to be conceived as an integral work of art whose result could be similar to that offered by a sculpture.
In 1989 he won the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious in the world of architecture. But the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997 made him an absolute star at the age of 68, and the building became a preview of what would come in the 21st century. The spectacular nature of the continent, with its immense titanium structure in the heart of the city, completely changed the face of the Nervión estuary and all of Bilbao, converting it from an industrial bastion to a pole of cultural, tourist and gastronomic attraction. Its impact was such that it was called Guggenheim effect. “We will always be deeply grateful to him for the magnificent and bold building that he devised for Bilbao. His spirit and his legacy will forever be linked to our city,” recalled the director of the museum, Miren Arzalluz, in a statement after learning of the architect’s death.
Hence, only a couple of years later, Gehry decided to create his twinthe headquarters of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, located in the city’s financial center (its downtown). The so-called Walt Disney Concert Hall, which began construction in 1999 and was inaugurated in October 2003, was not only acclaimed for its design and acoustics, but it aesthetically and culturally revitalized the district. “The musicians constantly tell me that they feel the audience, and the audience tells me that they feel very connected to the musicians. That makes a big difference,” he said in an interview with the Philharmonic magazine a couple of years ago. A renowned builder of musical auditoriums, he also owns the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago and the Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin, Germany.
In the year 2000 another one came out little brothernow the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, in the State of Washington. Funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, with $250 million, its impact and repercussion, as well as its finish, were less powerful. In 2014, with the help of Bernard Arnault and the then French president François Hollande, he inaugurated another of his star buildings, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, 11,000 square meters of art and glass. The Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi will now remain as a posthumous work, which is scheduled to open next year 2026, after more than 20 years since it was commissioned and with a long decade of delays, as well as, precisely, the Vuitton store in Beverly Hills, of almost 8,000 square meters.
Despite being Canadian, born in Toronto in February 1929, Gehry made the United States his homeland, and especially California. In his adolescence he moved with his family to Los Angeles (his father had suffered a heart attack and they had recommended a milder climate than Toronto), where he became a naturalized American. Hence, he developed the bulk of his professional career in his host State. He first studied at LA City College, a kind of municipal university, and then went on to the prestigious USC (the University of Southern California). He then served in the military in Atlanta, Georgia, and later continued his studies, this time at Harvard.
The architect came from a working and migrant family. His father, a New Yorker, with whom he was not very close, tried to become a boxer and eventually became a salesman and truck driver. It was his mother, Thelma, born in Poland and migrant to Canada, and his maternal grandparents, who instilled in young Frank his passion for art, music and literature. His own mother, as well as his first wife, Anita Snyder (to whom he was married between 1952 and 1966) encouraged him to change his last name from Goldberg to Gehry, so that his origin would not be so identified as Jewish. He himself explained on one occasion that at the beginning of his career he suffered anti-Semitic behavior and there were other architects who did not want to work with him because of his ancestry.
After his marriage and subsequent divorce from Anita, with whom he had two daughters, Brina and Leslie (who died of uterine cancer in 2008), he remarried, to Berta Aguilera, in 1975. Together they had two children, Sam, also an architect, and Alejandro, an artist.
After Harvard, and after saving for a time to be able to live for a year in his beloved Paris, Gehry returned to Los Angeles, which he always loved and where he remained his entire life. In a 2009 biography he stated that he fell in love with the chaos, the constant mix of people, the world of cinema and the constantly developing frontier feel of the city. Hence he settled in the coastal Santa Monica, where he continued his career and settled until his death.
In Los Angeles he also leaves the Loyola Marymount University Law School building or the Science Museum, from 1984, as well as the Frances Howard Goldwyn Library, in Hollywood, from 1985, or the Binoculars Building, a 1991 building shaped like binoculars. Several houses also remain: his in Santa Monica, Gehry Residence, from 1978; the Spiller House, in Venice, 1980; or the Norton House, also in Venice, from 1984. In downtownin front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, created a luxurious 45-story residential building with more than 400 homes, called The Grand LA, precisely where the Spanish chef José Andrés has his Los Angeles restaurant. In Southern California there is the Cabrillo Aquarium or the Disneyland workers’ offices in Anaheim.
Your own studio
After working in several firms, at the age of 33 he opened his studio in Santa Monica (California) Frank O. Gehry & Associates, his first architecture office. He created his own style as a reaction to the coldness of the modernist buildings in vogue in the renovations he made to his own house or in two collections of cardboard furniture, Easy Edges (1969) y Experimental Edges (1979). In 1965, a minimalist studio at 7001 Melrose Avenue, his first major work, which he created for a graphic artist, Lou Danzinger, caught the public’s attention and from there the commissions multiplied.
Upon winning the Pritzker in 1989, his projects multiplied throughout the world. After the Bilbao museum, in Spain he made the sculpture of the Golden Fish, 56 meters long and 35 meters high in the gardens of the Hotel Arts, on the Paseo Marítimo in Barcelona, or the wineries of the Marqués de Riscal in Elciego (Álava). “I wanted to design something exciting, festive, because wine is pleasure,” he told this newspaper in 2006, when they were inaugurated, to later become, like so many of his buildings, the epicenter of tourist attraction for the entire region.
In addition to the famous architectural award, in 2008, the Venice Biennale awarded him the Golden Lion in recognition of his entire career. In the United States, he received the gold medal for architecture from the American Institute of Architects in 1999 and the prestigious United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the country’s highest civilian honor, presented to him by President Barack Obama. Then, the president applauded him as “a true inspiration”: “Frank’s work teaches us that, although buildings are solid and fixed to the ground, like all great works of art, they can elevate our spirit. They can elevate us and broaden our horizons.”