Frank Gehry

Ephraim Owen Goldberg was born on 28 February 1929 at Toronto General Hospital to Irving Goldberg, an American-born salesman of Russian-Jewish ancestry, and Sadie Thelma (nee Kaplanski/Caplan), a Polish-Jewish immigrant from Lodz. A creative child, he built scrap-wood cities on the living-room floor with his grandmother Leah Caplan, using leftovers from her husband's hardware store. Those Saturday mornings among chain-link, corrugated metal, and plywood later echoed in the unfinished, everyday materials of his breakthrough California work. The family spent time in Timmins, Ontario, faced antisemitism, and returned to Toronto before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1947. He was raised in a Jewish family with Polish- and Russian-Jewish roots; at his bar mitzvah he used the Hebrew name Ephraim.

In California he drove a delivery truck, studied at Los Angeles City College, tried radio announcing and chemical engineering, then followed a hunch into architecture classes. He graduated from the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1954 (professors included William Pereira), served in the U.S. Army, and briefly studied city planning at Harvard's Graduate School of Design on the GI Bill before leaving, disillusioned by elite projects that clashed with his social ideals. In 1954 he changed his surname from Goldberg to Gehry after his first wife, Anita Snyder, voiced concern about antisemitism in professional life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1951 (losing Canadian citizenship until Prime Minister Jean Chretien restored it in 2002), and later held dual citizenship.

After apprenticeship with Victor Gruen Associates and a Paris stint with Andre Remonde (1961), he opened his own Los Angeles practice in 1962 (Frank Gehry and Associates, later Gehry Partners). Early Southern California work, including Santa Monica Place and the Norton House, mixed funk art sensibility with exposed structure. The 1977-78 remodel of his own Santa Monica bungalow, wrapping the original house in chain-link, plywood, and corrugated metal, made him a critic's darling and a developer's cautionary tale: he later told the mall client who loved the house that he had played it safe commercially because he had to make a living, then resolved to follow his vision.

International stature arrived with the Vitra Design Museum (1989), the Weisman Art Museum (1993), Prague's Dancing House (1996), and, above all, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997). Titanium curves, CATIA aerospace software, and a handshake culture with Basque clients produced a building Philip Johnson called the greatest building of our time. Tourism and investment surged; planners coined the Bilbao effect. Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, designed earlier but finished in 2003 after years of funding and political delay, became his hometown masterpiece and a symbol of civic reinvention. Later landmarks include Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture (2000), Chicago's Jay Pritzker Pavilion (2004), New York's IAC Building (2007) and 8 Spruce Street (2011), Miami Beach's New World Center (2011), Sydney's Dr Chau Chak Wing Building (2014), Panama's Biomuseo (2014), Paris's Fondation Louis Vuitton (2014), Washington's Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and LUMA Arles. Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, long delayed, was announced to open in December 2026 as a posthumous landmark.

Gehry designed Easy Edges cardboard furniture, Bentwood pieces, Tiffany jewelry, hockey trophies, stage sets, and exhibition installations. He taught at USC, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere; released a MasterClass; and spun Gehry Technologies (later acquired by Trimble) to industrialize complex geometry. Major honors included the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989), Praemium Imperiale (1992), National Medal of Arts (1998), AIA Gold Medal (1999), Companion of the Order of Canada (2002), Prince of Asturias Award (2014), French Legion of Honour (Commandeur, 2014), and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016). He co-founded Turnaround Arts: California, gave pro bono designs for Watts social services and YOLA in Inglewood, and served on the New York Stem Cell Foundation leadership council. He hated the label starchitect, flipped off a reporter in Oviedo in 2014 who called his work showy, and later regretted a Simpsons gag that made people think he designed by crumpling paper. He loved ice hockey (an FOG office league; he played into about age 80), sailing on his yacht Foggy with the California Yacht Club, music and concert halls, and the fish motif that recurs in his design.

He married Anita Snyder in 1952 (divorced 1966); their daughters were Leslie (died of cancer in 2008) and Brina. In 1975 he married Berta Isabel Aguilera; their sons are Alejandro and Samuel. He died at home in Santa Monica on 5 December 2025, aged 96, after a brief respiratory illness, confirmed by Gehry Partners chief of staff Meaghan Lloyd. Survivors include Berta, Brina, Alejandro, and Samuel. Tributes came from Guggenheim Bilbao, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, LVMH's Bernard Arnault, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and peers worldwide. The Guardian called him the most recognizable American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright; Vanity Fair had already named him the most important architect of our age.