American superstar architect Frank Gehry dies at age 96

NEW YORK – Frank Gehry, whose daring and whimsical creations of leaning towers and sweeping sheets of curved metal such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, made him a superstar in the world of architecture, died on Dec 5. He was 96.

Ms Meaghan Lloyd, his chief of staff, confirmed his death in an e-mail to Reuters, writing that Gehry died “earlier this morning at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness”.

Gehry’s most memorable and riotous creations often looked as if they had recently collapsed in an artistic manner or were in the process of doing so. They were lauded as works of genius or reviled as self-indulgent messes.

His works were so fantastical that sometimes even he was not sure what he had wrought, as was the case with the Bilbao museum.

“You know, I went there just before the opening and looked at it and said, ‘Oh my god, what have I done to these people?’” Gehry told Vanity Fair magazine. “It took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually.”

In 2010, a panel of experts put together by Vanity Fair cited the Bilbao museum as the most important work of architecture since 1980. Eminent American architect Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time” and Gehry “the greatest architect we have”.

Still, Gehry flinched when he was called a “starchitect”.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hailed Gehry’s “unmistakable vision”.

Museum, Facebook campus

In March 2015, Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California, opened a massive expansion designed by Gehry, who was given instructions not to be too bold so that the facility would still fit in with its surroundings.

Gehry also opened La Fondation Louis Vuitton museum in Paris in 2014. His other notable buildings included the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Dancing House in Prague, the Experience Music Project in Seattle and the 8 Spruce residential tower in New York.

His critics accused him of disregarding function in favour of form.

His Disney Centre was lambasted by various critics as “a pile of broken crockery”, “a fortune cookie gone berserk”, “deconstructionist trash” and “an emptied waste basket”.

Gehry tried to shrug off criticism and told the New Yorker in 2007: “You kind of say, ‘At least they’re looking.’”

But he was not always so sanguine. While in Spain in October 2014 to accept an award, Gehry was asked about criticism that his work was too showy.

He raised his middle finger and said: “In this world we are living in, 98 per cent of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh**. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are da** buildings and that’s it.”

Born in Toronto

Gehry was born Frank Owen Goldberg on Feb 28, 1929, in Toronto, the son of Polish Jews. He was already designing buildings and miniature cities out of scraps of wood as a child.

“That’s what I remembered, years later, when I was struggling to find out what I wanted to do in life,” he told the New Yorker magazine in 1977. “It made me think about architecture. It also gave me the idea that an adult could play.”

After graduating from the University of Southern California, Gehry went through a restless period. He worked at a few Los Angeles architecture firms, began studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design but quit without a degree, served a year in the US Army and moved to Paris for a year.

By the time he returned to Los Angeles in 1962, he had changed his last name to Gehry at his wife’s suggestion as a way to avoid anti-Semitism.

1989 Pritzker Prize

His breakthrough project was in 1978 rebuilding his own Santa Monica home – taking a pink traditional Dutch colonial house and turning it into something fantastical with common materials such as chain-link fencing, corrugated aluminium and unfinished plywood.

By the mid-1980s, he was attracting international attention with buildings sheathed in stainless steel or aluminium that seemed to bend and sway, subverting the conventions of architecture.

In 1989, he won the Pritzker Prize, his profession’s most prestigious award. But he really hit the big time with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which was completed in 1997 using computer software that enabled him to build in increasingly eccentric shapes.

Gehry, who was married twice and had four children, also designed furniture, jewellery, watches, a bottle for a vodka distiller and a hat for singer Lady Gaga that looked like a tall, crumpled mass of silver fabric. REUTERS