A man who made his mark on the world through his architectural designs has died.
Frank O. Gehry was 96 years old.
His chief of staff said he died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on Dec. 5 after a brief respiratory illness, The New York Times reported.
Gehry designed such landmarks as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
The Los Angeles Times said that he “brought an alluringly new kind of shape-making to his profession even as he fundamentally changed the reputation and civic landscape of his adopted hometown of Los Angeles."
He was well known in Los Angeles among designers since the 1970s, the Los Angeles Times explained, but became a global phenomenon late in his career, when his company, Gehry Partners, used technology to create geometrically complex buildings.
He was 68 when the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997.
Gehry was born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929.
His father was a salesman, a truck driver and a trained boxer. His mother was born in Poland and immigrated to Toronto when she was a child.
The Los Angeles Times said he was not close to his father, but his mother influenced his love of music and art.
He learned how things worked in the back room of his grandfather’s hardware store.
“There he tinkered with dismembered clocks and toasters, and the pathos of dismantled gears, springs and wires infected him with a tenderness for mechanisms that spill their guts for all the world to see," Leon Whiteson wrote in 1989.
He moved with his parents to Los Angeles in 1947 after graduating from high school.
“Los Angeles when I got here was brash, raucous, frontier,” he said in 2009. “Carney business. The movies. The development was vast and rampant. Whole neighborhoods seemed to spring up instantly in desert locations.”
He characterized the growth of the city as freedom and risk-taking and attended night school at L.A. City College, where he took art and architecture classes. He went to USC to study both architecture and ceramics.
Gehry changed his name in 1954 because of the racism he faced as being Jewish.
“I learned I was passed over for an architectural fraternity because I was a Jew,” he said. “I didn’t care, but it was evidence of anti-Semitism to me. Then a guy I knew came to me and said, ‘Change your name and we can start a partnership.’ That kind of stuff is what pushed my ex-wife to lobby for a name change, and why I finally gave in to it.”
He got a degree in architecture from USC and joined the Army, serving in Atlanta before returning to the City of Angels, working for the man who invented the shopping mall.
After studying urban planning and working for other firms, he returned to Los Angeles in 1962 and opened his own shop, the Los Angeles Times said.
His first design that took the spotlight was a loft and studio he created for Lou Danzinger.
Gehry said it wasn’t the fame that made him make the groundbreaking designs.
“You go into architecture to make the world a better place,” Gehry said in 2012, according to The New York Times. “A better place to live, to work, whatever. You don’t go into it as an ego trip.”
“That comes later, with the press and all that stuff. In the beginning, it’s pretty innocent,” he added.
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