Frank Gehry, the legendary L.A.-based Canadian American architect who designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and campuses used by Google and Facebook, has died at his home in Santa Monica, according to multiple reports. He was 96.
Gehry’s groundbreaking designs mixed geometric and organic forms, combining wood and steel in unusual and often striking ways. His creations don’t just stop passersby in their tracks; His buildings often transform the cities in which they sit.
The architect is most famous to Angelinos as the designer of the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, with its curved steel lines that seem to change with the sun, seemingly transforming from moment to moment like music. It wasn’t just the splashy exterior that captivated visitors, however. As home to the L.A. Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall was designed as one of the most acoustically-sophisticated concert venues in the world with the walls and ceiling finished with Douglas-fir while the floor in oak.
The project was not cheap. Lillian Disney made an initial gift of $50 million in 1987 as a tribute to Walt Disney’s devotion to the arts and to the city. The final cost was somewhere around $274 million. That included a total estimated contribution from the Disney family of $84.5 million with another $25 million from The Walt Disney Company itself.
The building was spoofed in The Simpsons and appeared in Iron Man, Collateral, The Soloist and Furious 7, among many other projects. The Matrix Revolutions held its 2003 world premiere there.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“A living room for the city” is how Gehry described his intention for the project. It certainly became a center of sorts, not just for the L.A. Phil, but also for the revitalization of Downtown. The hall opened in 2003 and helped lift the ’60s era vibe of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and The Music Center into the new century. The Broad was added to the collection in 2015. It also spurred renewed interest in residential living downtown, including Gehry’s own contribution: Grand LA.
The mixed use development, designed by Gehry combines shopping, dining and living. It includes an entertainment plaza, a 39-story residential tower called The Grand Residences and the Conrad Los Angeles Hilton hotel.
“We’re not just building buildings,” Gehry told the Los Angeles Times about the revitalization, “we’re building places.”
If any one of his creations can lay claim to that mantra is is likely the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It is the building that put Gehry on the map.
Famed architect Philip Johnson called it “the greatest building of our time” when it opened in 1997. The museum’s use of organic forms defies the boxy, geometric Mid-century modernism. Its flowing titanium surface evokes, from different vantages, the idea of a flower, or sails or a ship’s prow. The latter two are especially important to Bilbao; The Basque Country city was was a major shipbuilding center during the Industrial Revolution and most of the 20th century. The building plays off that proud history.
The Guggenheim not only revitalized the city architecturally but revitalized it financially as well. Gehry’s building became a destination for cultured tourists. By one estimate ,the museum boosted yearly revenue for the city’s businesses by $500 million.
Given its visual impact, the building has been featured in numerous music videos as well as the opening title sequence for The World Is Not Enough (1999).
The list of Gehry’s buildings include the landmark Binoculars Building in Venice, which is now home to Google’s Silicon Beach campus. The Main Street facing building is most notable for the giant sculpture by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen out front. It was originally built for TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1991.
Google’s Venice Campus is housed in part in the Binoculars Building, designed by Gehry (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Over on the other coast, Gehry’s first full-building design in New York City was the 10-story IAC Building. Finished in 2007, the headquarters for Barry Diller’s internet company consists of a large base of broad, twisted towers, with a second group of similar, but smaller, towers planted on top.
Gehry had originally wanted to use titanium for the exterior, but Diller wanted glass. The result is ground to ceiling windows on each floor that fade from clear to white as the sun hits them, providing shade to the building’s occupants.
The striking building appeared in The Other Guys (2010) and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010).
The Frank Gehry-designed IAC Building on Manhattan’s West Side highway (John Moore/Getty Images)
Gehry also designed The Second Century Project for Warner Bros. It consists of two, LEED certified office buildings on the Burbank Studios, adjacent to the Warner Bros. main lot in the Burbank Media District. The 800,000-square-foot office building complex evokes a pile of ice blocks, stacked one on top of the other. It includes a seven-story building of approximately 355,000 square feet and a nine-story building of approximately 445,000 square feet.
He was behind the design of the new Facebook Campus in Menlo Park, Cupertino after he bonded with founder of the Silicon Valley giant Mark Zuckerberg over plain design. The building, completed in 2018, sits across 22 acres.
Just last month, the California Coastal Commission approved an application for a Gehry-designed, Wolfgang Puck-run venue at the site of Gladstones in Malibu, with conditions.
The development will include a new 17,712 sq. ft. restaurant (that’s down from Gladstones’ 20,000 sq. foot restaurant and dining deck footprint), a 2,094 sq. ft. public deck with seating, two public restrooms, a cafe and a retail shop.
Gehry’s other L.A.-area buildings include the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro and the California Aerospace Museum at the California Museum of Science and Industry. He began groundwork on Paris’ Loius Vuitton Building in 2006, inspired by 19th-century glass garden buildings, which appropriately sits adjacent to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. He also designed the new postmodern Cinémathèque française that moved to 51, rue de Bercy in the 12th arrondissement of Paris in 2005.
Gehry received his profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1989. He got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Obama in 2016. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California from 1949 to 1951 and in 1954, and he went on to study city planning at Harvard from 1956 to 1957.
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