Frank Gehry, Architect Behind Iconic Buildings, Dead at 96

The world of architecture lost one of its biggest names this week with the death of Pritzker Prize laureate Frank Gehry. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gehry died on Friday at home at the age of 96. Over the course of his long career, he was responsible for designing some of the world’s most recognizable buildings, including the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Museum of Pop Culture and Prague’s “Dancing House.”

In short, Gehry was one of a handful of architects prominent enough to have name recognition among people who don’t necessarily have an expansive knowledge of the field. In 1989, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, one of the field’s top awards presented to a living architect. The judges’ citation now serves as an excellent summary of Gehry’s distinctive strengths.

“His sometimes controversial, but always arresting body of work, has been variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent, but the jury, in making this award, commends this restless spirit that has made his buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent values,” the judges wrote. “Always open to experimentation, he has as well a sureness and maturity that resists, in the same way that Picasso did, being bound either by critical acceptance or his successes.”

That said, Gehry was also capable of some memorable analyses of the state of his industry. The Guardian reported that, during a 2014 press conference, he grew candid about architecture. “In this world we are living in, 98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure shit,” he said. “There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are damn buildings and that’s it.”

Late in his career, Gehry opted to take a closer look at a different facet of architrcture, leading a seminar at Yale in which he discussed the ways in which architecture and incarceration coverged. “A studio in architecture is to unlock students’ feelings about form and space and time, and how that relates to people,” he told The New Yorker in 2017. “A prison program happens to be more emotional for them. And for me.”

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There is something decidedly impressive about an architect — or anyone, really — shifting gears to approach an ambitious project at the age of 88, as he was at the time. A few years after that, Gehry dismissed talk of retirement in comments made to The New York Times. “What would I do? I enjoy this stuff,” he said. That’s not a bad combination for a fulfilling career — and a fulfilling life.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…