Frank Gehry, who died in December 2025 at the age of 96, was one of the most influential and recognizable architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His work reshaped skylines and civic identities around the world, making him a cultural figure whose name was known well beyond the field of architecture.
Born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, Gehry moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager, a city that became both his laboratory and his home. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California and later pursued city planning at Harvard, grounding his radical visual language in a conventional professional education. After early work in established firms and a formative year in Paris, he opened his own practice in Los Angeles in the early 1960s.
Gehry first drew wide attention in the 1970s and 1980s through modest projects that used everyday materials like corrugated metal, chain-link fencing, plywood, in ways that were simultaneously rough and refined. His unconventional remodelling of his own Santa Monica house, wrapping it in these industrial elements, became a manifesto for a new kind of architecture that blurred boundaries between art and building. These experiments aligned him loosely with deconstructivism and postmodernism, even as he resisted easy categorization.
International fame followed with large cultural commissions whose curving, often metallic forms seemed to defy gravity. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, completed in the 1990s, became a global symbol of how a single building could catalyze urban and economic renewal, giving rise to the term “Bilbao effect.” Later works such as Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris confirmed his mastery of complex geometry and his pioneering use of digital tools in design and fabrication.
Gehry received architecture’s highest honors, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize, and was often described as the most important or most celebrated architect of his era. Beyond awards, his legacy lies in demonstrating that major public buildings could be bold, sculptural and accessible, inviting ordinary visitors into spaces that felt both surprising and welcoming.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
