Renowned US architect Frank Gehry has died at age 96 in his home in Santa Monica, California. He succumbed to a respiratory illness, as confirmed by his colleague Meaghan Lloyd. Gehry was famous for iconic structures like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Frank Gehry, one of the most influential modern architects and a proponent of deconstructivism, died on Friday from a brief respiratory illness. His colleague Meaghan Lloyd confirmed this to the »New York Times«, the »Washington Post«, and the news agency dpa. Born in 1929 in Toronto, Canada, to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Gehry's family moved to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, where his father and he worked as truck drivers.
A teacher at a night school, where Gehry completed his diploma, sparked his interest in architecture and supported it. He studied at the University of Southern California and opened his own architectural firm in Los Angeles in 1962. From the 1980s onward, he gained international recognition with projects like the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. In 1989, he received the Pritzker Prize, the field's highest honor, for his »refreshingly original and thoroughly American« work. Other awards include the Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts.
His masterpieces include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the DZ Bank building in Berlin, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Neuer Zollhof in Düsseldorf, and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. Even in old age, Gehry continued working on new designs and taught at Yale University and Columbia University.
Gehry's buildings shaped city skylines worldwide and revolutionized architecture with their unconventional forms.