Frank Gehry Replaced Boxy Buildings With Joyful Designs

Frank Gehry, a giant of American architecture who designed buildings in never-before-seen shapes in imaginative attempts to invoke joy—bringing him critical and popular acclaim—has died. He was 96. Gehry's chief of staff said he died Friday at his home in Santa Monica after a brief illness, the New York Times reports. Gehry's signature buildings include the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Architect Philip Johnson decreed Bilbao, as it's generally known, "the greatest building of our time." Johnson said that the first time he saw it, he burst into tears.

The designs were especially arresting to people used to the boxy, glass-and-steel buildings of postwar modernism that Gehry said he found cold and lifeless, per NPR. Gehry and his team adapted aerospace software to help builders produce his exuberant swirls and swoops. The Bilbao museum opened in 1997 and Disney—with silver stainless steel 1/16th of an inch thick—in 2003. The timing of Bilbao's opening contributed to the splash it made. "This building's design and construction have coincided with the waning of a period when American architecture spectacularly lost its way," critic Herbert Muschamp wrote. Gehry said, "I thought it was possible to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building." Of Disney, he said, "You know, a building for music and performance should be joyful." The concert hall's acoustics were equally celebrated.

He produced more modest designs, as well. Gehry first drew international attention by remaking the small, pink, 1920 bungalow he bought in Santa Monica with his wife, Berta Aguilera, in 1977. He tore off large pieces of the facade, putting up glass, corrugated metal, and exposed wood instead. Neighbors didn't appreciate the result, but architecture critics did. His inspiration was "the workaday landscape of Southern California itself," per the Los Angeles Times. And it made a statement that the rough aesthetic could work as well as the finer finishes. "I was trying to use the dumb, normal materials of the neighborhood," Gehry said. Gehry's honors included a National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.