Bold shapes and binoculars: Frank Gehry’s stunning California architecture | Frank Gehry

IIn Frank Gehry’s world, no building was left neglected, exposed, or untouched by unusual materials. The Canadian-American architect, who has died aged 96 at his home in Los Angeles, designed his career around challenging the predictable and introducing unconventional and therefore relatively inexpensive materials.

Gehry collaborated with artists to transform giant binoculars into the gateway to a commercial campus, paying homage to a writer’s lifeguard background by creating a habitable lifeguard tower. And in imagining this, he also transformed American architecture.

Below, take a look at how his work envelops and shapes California’s neighborhoods and urban centers.

Walt Disney Concert Hall

With its waves of stainless steel rolling around a corner of downtown Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall has become an integral part of that downtown. Lillian Disney gifted the hall to the city to commemorate her late husband’s dedication to the arts. Gehry built the music hall inside outHe designed it with a team of acousticians based on how the music would be heard within its walls.

While the hall’s exterior features free-form waves and Gehry’s unusual touches of geometry, the interior is surprisingly symmetrical; a deliberate contrast. “The reason I made Disney Hall symmetrical was because I knew I was a very suspect architect to the public for a building like this,” Gehry told Getty. “Everyone will think I’m going to do something. So I decided to create a comfortable space for them.”

Gehry’s house

Gehry pruned this Dutch colonial bungalow in Santa Monica down to its original wood bones and built intricate layers of glass, exposed plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing around it in 1978. The house is considered one of the earliest works of deconstructionist architecture, with its large, slanted windows allowing the outside world to peer into the house’s internal, seemingly unfinished structure. Gehry continued to add to this residence until 1992.

Binocular Building

Originally commissioned as a commercial office building in Venice for advertising agency Chiat/Day, this bold design has become one of Gehry’s most recognizable works in Los Angeles, thanks to its soaring entrance that looks just like giant binoculars. This 44-foot feature was actually designed and created by his collaborators, artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Gehry designed the 79,000-square-foot campus to feature a tree-like metal canopy façade to the south of the field and a bright white ship-like exterior to the north. Google has occupied the building since 2011, but it is now up for sale for an undisclosed price for the first time in 30 years.

Norton residence

When artists hire artists to design a home, places like the Norton residence on Venice Beach’s famous Ocean Front Walk emerge. Inspired by photographs of his Santa Monica home, Lynn and William Norton, an artist and writer respectively, hired Gehry to bring this eclectic deconstructionist beach house to life in the 1980s. Gehry’s design plays with stucco and concrete boxes of contrasting sizes, heights and shapes, making the chaos appear as a harmonious, colorful whole. At the front of the property is Gehry’s version of the lifeguard tower, a one-room studio standing on a single column, an obvious nod to William Norton’s previous life as a lifeguard.

Loyola Marymount University School of Law

Gehry was selected to redesign Loyola Marymount University’s law school in 1979 because, unlike other architects who submitted plans for a large building, Gehry proposed a collection of smaller buildings designed around a plaza. Robert Benson, member of the committee that selected Gehry’s design in question The committee “argued” with the architect over his odd but signature choice of materials and angles, including metal-clad Roman columns, chain-link fences, or a building’s distinctive angle. As Benson recalls, Gehry won most of the wrangling, and the result was a village-like complex of contemporary buildings, bold shapes, bright yellows and at least one oversized chain-link structure.