Frank Gehry, the trailblazing postmodern architect known for his gestural work on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Miami’s New World Center, has died at his Santa Monica home following a brief respiratory illness, according to reports. Gehry, who was deemed “the most important architect of our age” by Vanity Fair in 2010, was 96.
Gehry’s formidable reputation in the world of architecture was built over a seven-decade-long career that began with his 1954 graduation from the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. After his Russian-Polish and Jewish family immigrated to the United States from Canada, settling in California in 1947, Gehry grew up spending Saturday mornings at his grandfather’s hardware store, surrounded by corrugated steel and plywood.
Between the formidable residential and institutional projects that would define his architectural career, however, were also a number of fashion and furniture collaborations. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Gehry produced a furniture series out of corrugated cardboard called “Easy Edges”; and in later years he made jewelry, tableware, and a chess set for Tiffany Co.
Yet Gehry’s amiable relationship with the fashion world was perhaps best encapsulated by his dynamic and sculptural building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton (FLV), which he conceived to “evolve according to the time and the light in order to give the impression of something ephemeral and continually changing.” (Proving the tremendous range of his vision and talent, the year before FLV opened in 2014, Gehry debuted an 11-piece handbag capsule for Vuitton at Art Basel Miami.)
Gehry is survived by his wife, Berta Aguilera; his sons, Sam and Alejandro; his daughter, Brina Gehry, from his previous marriage to Anita Snyder, and his sister Doreen Gehry Nelson. (Gehry and Snyder had another daughter, Leslie Gehry Brenner, who died in 2008.)
