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Frank O. Gehry, one of the most influential architects of the modern age, has died aged 96. He achieved global fame with his billowing, sculptural designs such as the Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997, a building that was often credited with single-handedly revitalising a dying industrial city, a feat which became known as the ‘Bilbao Effect’.
By that time he had already built a substantial body of work and moved through several, varied stylistic furrows. He began working for Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born progenitor of the shopping mall in the late 1950s and, after setting up on his own in 1962, worked with artists to design studios and homes in a tough, backstreet vernacular based on industrial Los Angeles.
His own house in Santa Monica (1978) made waves with its deceptively anarchic collisions of materials and angles; chain-link fencing, plywood and corrugated steel. It suggested a nostalgia for the everyday materials with which he had once worked at his granddad’s hardware store as a teenager in Toronto.
In the 1990s his work shifted towards more fluid forms, starting with a series of strange, steel fish sculptures (the most famous for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona). He was an early adopter of computers to create complex forms previously unbuildable (despite himself being barely able to work a keyboard).
His office adapted software from Dassault to create the kinds of complex metal curves which characterised the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (Gehry was a huge admirer of classical music and jazz). His shimmering 8 Spruce Street (2011) was the first really good skyscraper to be completed after 9/11 and was one of New York’s best contemporary towers, featuring a public school at its base.
For the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014) he used the same sculptural techniques but this time in glass. His work was in huge demand across the globe as clients chased that Bilbao Effect. He even appeared on TV’s The Simpsons, crumpling a piece of paper to throw away and accidentally finding the perfect form.
His massive Louvre Abu Dhabi is currently nearing completion and looks like it will become the monument to one of the most radical, engaging and inventive architects of the modern era.