Architect Frank Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, dies at 96

Frank Gehry, one of the great names in American architecture, died this Friday at the age of 96 in his home in Santa Monica (California) after a brief respiratory illness, as confirmed by his chief of staff to ‘The New York Times’.

One of his greatest works as a designer was the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened in 1997, a bold construction, an emblem of the Basque city, which represents avant-garde architecture based on deconstructivism. In 2014 he was also awarded the Prince of Arts Award in Oviedo.

Frank Owen Gehry was born in 1929 in Toronto (Canada), but adopted American nationality after moving to Los Angeles in 1947 with his parents. He graduated in Architecture in 1954 from the University of Baja California and began working in Victor Gruen’s studio. After military service he studied Urban Planning at Harvard and returned to Gruen’s office. In 1961, with his wife and two daughters, he moved to Paris, where he worked for a year with André Rémondet. In 1962 he established his own studio in Los Angeles, Frank O. Gehry and Associates, from which he has been carrying out projects in America, Europe and Asia for five decades.

It began to stand out in the 1970s for its buildings with sculptural shapes that combine unusual industrial materials with others such as titanium and glass. At that same time, he began to develop his role as a furniture designer with the Easy Edges collection, conceived as a low-cost line, made up of fourteen pieces of cardboard, which would be followed by Experimental Edges, with a more artistic character.

Since the late 1980s, Frank Gehry’s name has been associated with the deconstructivist movement, characterized by fragmentation and the rupture of a linear design process, resulting in buildings with a striking visual appearance. Among the most notable examples of this formal language are the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997) and the Nationale-Nederlanden building, known as the Dancing House, in Prague (1996).

Among his works, it is also worth highlighting the California Aerospace Museum (1984), the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989), the Frederick Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis (1993), the DZ Bank building in Berlin (1998), the Gehry Tower in Hannover (2001), the Stata Center at the Cambridge Institute of Technology (2003), the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003). and Maggie’s Dundee Center in Scotland (2003).

Gehry has also worked on a contemporary art museum in Paris for the Louis Vuitton Foundation; the design of his first playground in New York, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island known as The Battery; and the renovation and recovery of Lisbon’s Mayer Park, which included the restoration of the Capitol Theater. In Spain, in 2006, he inaugurated the wineries of the Herederos del Marqués de Riscal firm in Elciego (Álava) and has designed the Sagrera Tower in Barcelona.

His work has been the subject of numerous monographic studies and in 2006 the film director Sydney Pollack premiered the documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry in Cannes. That same year, Gehry presented his project for the new Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi and in 2008 he designed the Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London’s Hyde Park.

In 2012, Gehry’s first residential building in Asia, the Opus Hong Kong tower, was inaugurated and he is currently working on the design of the Eisenhower Memorial, which is planned to be built in Washington, on the West Campus that Facebook will build in the Californian town of Menlo Park and on the project for a residential tower in Berlin, which will become the tallest skyscraper in the city.

MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED AWARDS AROUND THE WORLD

His designs have received more than one hundred awards around the world, including more than a dozen honorary doctorates and the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize (USA, 1977), the Pritzker Prize (1989), the Wolf of the Arts (Israel, 1992), the Praemium Imperiale (Japan, 1992), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish (1994), the Friedrich Kiesler (Austria ,1998) and the Twenty Five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects (2012).

He also holds the National Medal of Arts of the United States (1998), the Lotos Medal of Merit (USA, 1999), the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (1999) and the Royal Gold Medal for the Promotion of Architecture (2000), awarded by the Queen of England. Gehry has been a member of the jury for the Pritzker Prize and for institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Design and the Royal Academy of Arts.