Who Was Architect Frank Gehry?

He may not have lived to see his $1 billion-plus vision to upgrade the Los Angeles River come to fruition, but architect Frank Gehry was able to shepherd through a transformational plan that is slated to reimagine one of the West Coast’s most underused natural features.

“He’s done almost everything you can possibly do as an architect,” Bill Witte, head of Related Companies’ California arm, previously told The Real Deal. “But if something successful would emerge from this — and it looks like it might — it’s an incredible legacy.”

Not one to rest on his laurels, Gehry was involved in numerous projects at the time of his death Friday in Santa Monica at the age of 96. A Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Gehry personally designed every project completed by his firm, Gehry Partners.

Though not the building he will be most remembered for — which is likely the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain — Gehry put Los Angeles on the global stage with his innovative Walt Disney Concert Hall. Completed in 2003, the Downtown L.A. cultural destination, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is notably punctuated by stainless steel sail-like forms. A tourist destination, tours are offered at the site almost daily.

Gehry is also responsible for a myriad of other projects like The Grand LA, Related California’s two-tower, mixed-used development across from the Disney Concert Hall; and Panama City’s Biomuseo.

A contemporary icon, Gehry was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947, and changed his name to Gehry from Goldberg for professional purposes as he faced anti-Semitism.

The architect, known for breaking architectural norms and seeing buildings as sculptures, worked for Victor Gruen Associates while finishing his architecture degree at the University of Southern California.

He spent a year in the U.S. army in 1955 before studying urban planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He worked briefly at Pereira and Luckman Associates and then rejoined Victor Gruen Associates. He moved to Paris with his family in 1961 and worked with André Remondet. Gehry opened Frank O Gehry and Associates in Santa Monica in 1962. Gehry Partners, based in Los Angeles, was formed in 2001.

One of his most famous early projects was his personal home at 1002 22nd Street in Santa Monica, in which he lived for four decades. The 1978 home incorporated unconventional materials like chain-link fencing, corrugated metal and plywood. The house became known as Gehry’s earliest Deconstructivist building, though he continued making a number of additions.

Critics saw Gehry’s early, rough-edged work as combative — Mike Davis famously dubbed it “Dirty Harry architecture” — but Gehry viewed it as a pushback against the elitist pursuit of purity that dominated 20th-century design, according to The New York Times. As digital tools emerged, his architecture grew more sculptural. He said “architecture is art.”

“What Gehry was ‘good at’ was making architecture that both inspired thought and brought pleasure, making buildings that were unusual enough so that some confused them with art pieces and others found them merely bizarre,” architecture critic Paul wrote in “Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry,”

Gehry had been working on an 82,000-square-foot flagship store for Louis Vuitton in Beverly Hills, and the conversion of a 1960s building into an exhibition space and events hall in Paris.

In New York City, his first building was for Barry Diller, designing IAC’s headquarters at 555 West 18th Street. Goldberger wrote in his biography of Gehry that Diller was wary that Gehry could keep costs down, but the architect prevailed in convincing him that he could “both be reasonable and produce a building for reasonable cost.”

Goldberger wrote that Gehry faced a similar challenge at Forest City Ratner’s 8 Spruce Street, which had to be economical, but also compelling: “It had to be Frank Gehry, but not too Frank Gehry.”

The building, known as Beekman Tower and New York by Gehry, was the tallest residential tower in North America when it opened in 2011. Its height, at 870 feet, was not all that drew the eye: Ten thousand steel panels make up the building’s undulating facade, meant to evoke the sculptural lines of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

“We helped bring to life what was then the most ambitious residential tower ever built in Lower Manhattan — a building that proved daring architecture and large-scale development could coexist, elevate one another and redefine the skyline,” developer MaryAnne Gilmartin, who was at Forest City Ratner when Gehry designed 8 Spruce Street, said in a statement to TRD.

Of course, sometimes cost can interfere with such ethos. Forest City originally hired Gehry as the master planner of the Brooklyn megadevelopment then known as Atlantic Yards, but ultimately replaced him in 2009, scrapping his designs for the Barclays Center and a gleaming office tower, dubbed “Miss Brooklyn.” At the time, developer Bruce Ratner cited an economic downturn, rising construction costs and litigation against the project. But Gilmartin said Gehry’s work still influenced Brooklyn’s transformation, by reimagining “what large, complex urban redevelopment could be: ambitious, integrated and rooted in creating a multi-generational neighborhood.”