Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry (1929-2025) was a Canadian-American architect, born in Toronto. His family moved to Los Angeles in 1947, and he graduated in architecture from the University of Southern California in 1954. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1989 and practiced in Los Angeles until his death in December 2025, at 96.

In 1977-1978 he remodeled his own house in Santa Monica, wrapping a 1920 house in corrugated metal, chain-link fencing and plywood. From the late 1980s his buildings were assemblies of curved and tilted volumes clad in metal. His office adapted CATIA, aircraft-design software from the French company Dassault Systèmes, to model these shapes and produce construction data, and in 2002 he founded Gehry Technologies to develop the tools further. His first European building was the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989).

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain (1997), clad in titanium panels, drew so many visitors that the phrase "Bilbao effect" came into use for cities commissioning a museum building to attract tourism. Other works include the Dancing House in Prague (1996), designed with Vlado Milunić; the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), clad in stainless steel; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014), enclosed in curved glass panels.