American titan of architecture dies aged 96

“I was rebelling against everything,” Gehry said. New York Times It explains his antipathy towards the dominant architectural movements of the time, as exemplified by 2012’s Farnsworth House in the Illinois prairies, Mies van der Rohe’s stark, flat, steel-and-glass modernist pavilion.

“I can’t live in a house like this,” he said. “I had to come home, clean my clothes, hang them properly. I thought it was arrogant and influential. I felt like I didn’t quite fit into life.”

For some, their work was more sculptural than architectural. Others saw it as emblematic of global culture, reducing architecture to a form of branding. Gehry, whose name is known around the world, was sometimes derided as a “starchitect”.

But the emotional ferocity of his work could feel empowering, as if architecture had rediscovered a part of itself that had been lost after decades of dreary functionalism and postmodernist clichés. A broad focus on the dazzling exteriors of his buildings may distract from Gehry’s deeper goals: to create architecture that is not only impressive but also democratic in spirit and evocative of the complexity of human life.

He was born Frank Owen Goldberg on February 28, 1929, in Toronto to Irving and Sadie (Caplan) Goldberg. His father worked a number of jobs, including managing a grocery store and selling pinball and slot machines. Frank and his sister Doreen lived with their parents in a two-family house covered in brick and tar tiles (a material he would use in some of his designs).

As a child, he worked part-time in his maternal grandfather’s hardware store, stocking shelves with tools, screws, and bolts; He said this experience birthed his love for everyday ingredients.

Her grandmother came home from the market once a week with live carp; This was another formative experience that would inspire the depictions of fish that would later appear in his work. “We would put it in the bathtub,” Gehry recalled, “and I would play with this fish for a day until he killed it and made gefilte fish (a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish dish).”

Frank’s world was suddenly shattered in the mid-1940s when his father, a heavy drinker, suffered a heart attack while the two were arguing in the front yard; A memory Gehry said had haunted him for decades. His father never fully recovered. After a doctor warned he might not survive another Toronto winter, the family moved to Los Angeles, renting a cramped $50-a-month apartment in a run-down neighborhood just west of downtown.

As an architect, Gehry was a late bloomer. After a brief stint in the army, he married Anita Snyder, who initially supported him at the University of Southern California, where he studied ceramics. He switched to architecture after a teacher introduced him to Raphael Soriano, a pillar of postwar modernism in Southern California. (He also adopted Gehry as his surname around this time, a somewhat random choice he said was inspired by his desire to avoid antisemitism.)

Gehry worked for several years as a mid-level designer and project manager at Gruen Associates, known for its shopping malls. After opening his own office in 1962, most of his early work was directed at mainstream developers. Rouse Co. in Columbia, Maryland. He designed a sprawling headquarters for and two remarkable stores for Joseph Magnin in California.

‘You go into architecture to make the world a better place. Living, working etc. A better place to be. You’re not going into this as an ego trip.’

Frank Gehry speaking in 2012

But he was outsider in nature and began to look beyond the work of other architects for inspiration. Like many Angelenos, he was attracted by the city’s laid-back, anything-goes atmosphere, where ostentatious mansions, modest bungalows, vacant lots, Googie’s cafes, and colorful billboards were the antithesis of East Coast architectural scholarship.

And he aligned himself with a generation of Los Angeles artists—Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Larry Bell—whose surfboard-inspired aesthetic and raw workspaces offered an alternative to the cold austerity of late modernism and the reactionary tendencies of postmodernism.

“Artists were living in industrial buildings and warehouses,” Gehry said in a 2012 interview with The Guardian. Times. “They were always moving things around; changing rooms, building lofts or storage areas. It was so free and deliberate. I wanted to do it.”

In the late 1960s, Gehry and his wife divorced, and in 1975 he married Berta Aguilera. He is survived by his two sons, architectural designer Sam and artist Alejandro; a daughter, Brina Gehry, from a previous marriage; and sister Doreen Gehry Nelson. Another daughter from her first marriage, Leslie Gehry Brenner, died in 2008.

The Gehrys bought their two-story pink stucco Santa Monica house in 1977. With Aguilera’s prodding, he began to tear the house apart.

The rough and unfinished appearance of the house attracted the attention of architecture critics, although it infuriated neighbors. But there was a beauty of its own in its tormented forms, evoking a world torn apart and gently put back together. And the use of rough, everyday materials was Gehry’s assertion that the working-class aesthetic he grew up with could be as appealing as anything found in the city’s more refined corners.

Decades later, he and Aguilera moved out of the small house that first brought him fame and into a more luxurious space overlooking the Santa Monica Canyon. Designed with his son Sam, the new house consisted of a vast, sometimes awkward composition of angled, heavy wooden posts and beams. However, it retained some of the rough and abrasive qualities of Gehry’s earlier architecture, and its jostling forms reflected a lifelong quest for emotional and creative freedom.

Gehry continued to work.

In 2017, he completed the Pierre Boulez Hall in Berlin, which he designed with chef Daniel Barenboim: a compact, box-like space with a sunken floor and floating elliptical balcony, housed within a stark neo-classical building from the 1950s. And in 2021, the Luma Foundation building in Arles, Southern France, was completed; A twisting tower made of stainless steel bricks, it was inspired in part by the rocky terrain of the nearby Alpilles mountain range.

At the time of his death, Gehry was completing several projects for luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault, including a 7,618-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton in Beverly Hills, California, and the conversion of an abandoned 1960s building in Paris into an exhibition space and event hall down the street from Arnault’s Fondation Louis Vuitton building. He was also putting the finishing touches on the 1,000-seat concert hall at the Colburn School of Music near the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

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“You go into architecture to make the world a better place,” Gehry said in 2012. “It’s a better place to live, work, whatever. You don’t go into this as an ego trip.”

He added: “That comes later with the press and other things. It was pretty innocent at first.”

This article was first published on: New York Times.

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