Architect Frank Gehry is remembered for an ability that won him worldwide acclaim for designing buildings that appear to defy gravity, with extreme curves and walls so steeply angled they seem to be falling over.
Gehry, who died Friday at 96, was born Frank Owen Goldberg in Toronto in 1929 and changed his name in 1954. Decades after he gained name recognition well beyond architectural circles, he maintained active until his death through his Los Angeles-based firm, Gehry Partners, with one of his last designs, the Forma luxury condominium tower, now under construction in downtown Toronto.
“He was so proud to be part of reimagining the skyline of Toronto,” Mitchell Cohen, chief operating officer of Westdale Properties, told CoStar News on Friday. Westdale is one of the developers of Forma.
Gehry’s 1978 design for his personal residence in Santa Monica, California, hinted at the radical ideas that would later come to be a hallmark of his work. The Gehry residence is a 1950s bungalow wrapped and clad with all manner of additions, such as components of chain link fencing attached to seemingly random parts of the structure.
His design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, helped launch Gehry’s career to even higher global recognition. The building’s reflective silver panels and the severely warped and curved exterior walls and rooflines were a stark contrast to postmodern designs that served as tributes to classical architecture and were in vogue when the Spanish museum opened in 1997.
“He was not only a highly original architect and form-maker of the highest order but also a humanist, creating buildings and urban places that both supported day-to-day life but also elevated the human spirit,” Larry Richards, a professor of architecture at the University of Toronto, told CoStar News on Friday.
Gehry remained in high demand throughout his career. Some of his designs, like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, echoed many features of the Bilbao Guggenheim.
“His designs embodied the messy complexity and tensions that characterize contemporary society,” Don Schmitt, co-founder of the Toronto architecture firm Diamond Schmitt, told CoStar News on Friday.
Solid structure and whimsy
Other work in his portfolio had a decidedly whimsical flair, such as the Binoculars Building in Venice, California, so named for its resemblance to a pair of binoculars. Google is the building’s current occupant; the property has been listed for sale since March.
Gehry transcended the world of architecture, becoming a recognized name around the world in celebrity circles. As such, he was praised in Vanity Fair magazine Friday for taking “inspiration from the works of artists more than from architecture history — producing flamboyant spectacles of extreme complexity that flirted with chaos.”
And in the city where his concert hall became the center of culture, the local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, wrote on Friday that Gehry “brought an alluringly new kind of shape-making to his profession even as he fundamentally changed the reputation and civic landscape of his adopted hometown of Los Angeles.”
Other designs from later in Gehry’s career, like the 8 Spruce residential tower in New York, had a more mainstream design while incorporating his signature flairs such as warped exterior wall panels.
Gehry Partners was chosen as a finalist for the design of the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., along with much larger firms like Perkins & Will and DLR Group. The Navy has not yet chosen the winner.
Not all of his designs made it to completion, however. Gehry designed a basketball arena for the Brooklyn Nets in New York in 2003, surrounded by office and residential towers, but the developer later discarded Gehry’s plan.
Gehry received many plaudits during his career. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1989, one of the field’s top honors. He also was the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture and an American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, and he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2002.