Boundary-Pushing Architect Frank Gehry Has Died at 96

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.

Architect Frank Gehry poses with miniatures of his designs in Los Angeles in 1989.

Photo: Getty Images

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.