Frank Gehry: The Artist Architect Passes On

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain was built by Frank Gehry. It was inaugurated in October 1997. Image courtesy: PA / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikipedia.org

Frank Gehry, who made buildings housing works of art, a work of art themselves, has passed on to history.

The Canadian American architect and designer was known for subverting known canons of architecture, and his experiments gave birth to some of the most iconic buildings of contemporary times. It would be difficult to point which of his famous buildings was the most iconic, but the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain which was inaugurated in 1997 catapulted him to a truly iconic status internationally. It’s not a surprise that The New York Times in its obituary of the architect, has called him a ‘Titan of Architecture’.

Frank Gehry (1929-2025). Image courtesy: Wikipedia, copyright held by The City of Toronto

Some of his other equally famous buildings include the Dancing House (Prague, 1996, co-designed with Vlado Milunic), Weatherhead School of Management, Ohio (2002), Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), MARTa Herford museum of contemporary art in Germany (2005), and Fondation Louis Vuitton on Avenue de Mahatma Gandhi in Paris (that opened in October 2014), among several others.

Casa Danzanti or Dancing House, Prague, designed by Gehry. Image courtesy: Dino Quinzani / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Wikipedia

Born in Toronto, Canada, on February 28, 1929, Gehry’s family immigrated to the US in 1947, settling down in California. Gehry tried his hands at several vocations before settling for architecture. As per his own recollections, he drove a truck while studying at college, tried his hand as a radio announcer in vain, tried chemical engineering and eventually remembered building imaginary houses and futuristic cities with his grandmother when he was a child and decided to study architecture. He graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture in 1954. He attained early success as an architect because much before his globally renowned buildings, he had already won the most prestigious prize in architecture, the Pritzker Prize in 1989.

Gehry passed away in Santa Monica, California on December 5, 2025.

Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Image courtesy: Piotr Ilowiecki / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Wikipedia